In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their "community caretaking" duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a "precrime" crime prevention agency.
Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.
Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents, and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.
The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.
No comments:
Post a Comment