South Pomfret resident Bill Arkin isn’t shocked by recent revelations about the worldwide and domestic spying operations of U.S. intelligence agencies.
That’s because he and colleague Dana Priest reported extensively on privacy invasions by U.S. espionage agencies in an investigative series, “Top Secret America,” published in the Washington Post more than three years ago.
Arkin and Priest showed how the national-security state had expanded exponentially in the years following the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. They reported, for example, that more than 3000 government organizations and private companies are engaged in “homeland security” activities in 10,000 locations around the United States, six of them in Vermont.
Arkin will update and analyze his findings as they relate to Vermonters and millions of other Americans at a conference on Wednesday in Montpelier. He’s the featured speaker at the free, day-long event in the Pavilion Auditorium sponsored by the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Arkin’s talk will focus on “the big national picture and how Vermont fits into it,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday. He’ll also be touting his newly published book, American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution.
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“Rules for protecting privacy” is a competely superfluous symbolic fix. The technology will still be there; the technology will still be used. The NSA is the least of our problems in 2013 — private data contractors are out of control, and not coincidentally, highly profitable!
It’s sad that a City like Burlington enthusiastically participates in this, with several camera rigged cars reporting on the movements of all of us.
Better all of us than just some of us.
Arkin describes the emerging police state in his own terms,
which seem quite real. So why does he “bristle” at the term
when he clearly sees the reality?
The emerging American police state may not fit any
handy Hollywood stereotype, but it manifestations
are widespread and easily available to anyone who
takes the trouble to look — starting with Arkin’s own work.
It’s not just the NSA or the 15 other federal spy agencies,
it’s not just the fusion centers and the state and local spy units,
it’s not just the increasing militarization of police forces across the country,
it’s also in the tolerance for Burlington Police attacking peaceful demonstrators
or California police shooting a child with a toy gun,
it’s police round-ups of dissidents at political events in Boston and
Minneapolis and Washington, and it’s more and more federal,
state, and local laws designed to stifle protest, or just free speech.
[and there’s more, much much more, can you say Patriot Act?
or Homeland Security? or NDAA? or….]