Policing the Dystopia

[humble3d]

Policing the Dystopia

 

 

For 15 years, Americans have been living in a constant state of “wartime”

without any of the obvious signs of war. There is no draft. The public has in no way been mobilized.

The fighting has all taken place in battle zones thousands of miles from the United States.

Despite a rising homegrown fear of Islamic terrorism, an American
in the continental U.S. faces greater danger from a toddler
wielding a loaded gun.

 

And yet, in ways often hard to chart, America’s endless wars

 

– Barack Obama is now slated to preside over the longest war presidency in our history – have quietly come home.

 

You can see them reflected in the strengthening powers and prominence of the national security
state, in those Pentagon spy drones now flying
patrols over “the homeland,” and, among other things, in the militarization of police departments nationwide.

 

Perhaps nowhere in these years, in fact, have America’s wars come home
more fiercely or embedded themselves more deeply than in those police forces.

 

It’s not just the multiplying

SWAT
teams – the police equivalent of Special Operations forces, often filled

with ex-special ops types and other veterans from this country’s Iraqi

and Afghan battlefields – or the weaponry
fed by the Pentagon to police departments, also from the battlefields of the

Greater Middle East, including mine-resistant
ambush-protected vehicles, automatic and semi-automatic rifles, and even
grenade launchers.

It’s also, as Jay Stanley and TomDispatch
regular Matthew Harwood, both of the American Civil Liberties Union, suggest
today, intrusive new forms of technology, developed by or in conjunction with
the Pentagon for battlefield use, that are coming to your neighborhood. So welcome
to the war zone, America.

Power Loves the Dark
Police Nationwide Are Secretly Exploiting Intrusive Technologies With
the Feds’ Complicity

Can’t you see the writing on the touchscreen? A techno-utopia is upon
us. We’ve gone from smartphones at the turn of the twenty-first century
to smart fridges and smart cars.

The revolutionary changes to our everyday life
will no doubt keep barreling along. By 2018, so predicts
Gartner, an information
technology research and advisory company, more than three million employees
will work for “robo-bosses” and soon enough we – or at least
the wealthiest among us – will be shopping in fully automated supermarkets
and sleeping in robotic hotels.

 

With all this techno-triumphalism permeating our digitally saturated world,
it’s hardly surprising that law enforcement would look to technology –
“smart policing,” anyone? – to help reestablish public trust
after the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,…

 

http://rinf.com/alt-news/newswire/policing-the-dystopia/