‘Smart’ Despotism to be Our Inevitable Future?

Alec Scheer, Contributor
Activist Post

It is 2020. Flying cars are zipping past tall metallic sky scrapers. A dismal grey, caused by the pollution, is cast upon the cityscape.

Flashing screens can be seen nearly every block. Apartments, stores, street vendors, commuters, and the tall skyscrapers are dangerously compacted into a small mega-city – truly a chilling Hunger Games-esque scenario.

The city commissioner appears on the screens every hour, disrupting the constant advertisements and videos, to repeat the same well-known fact that the commissioner’s cabinet is keeping close watch over them.

A multitude of cameras can be seen while walking through the city. However, the surveillance state is much worse than the over-abundance of easy-to-see cameras.

There are hidden cameras and microphones throughout the city. There are X-ray devices which can see if you are carrying any substance or weapon the city deems a threat to the “public safety.”

There are retina eye scanning cameras perched in high and undetectable places that have the ability to scan your retina to assess your identity and registered background data, which is a feed from the Commissioner’s monitoring echelon.

The city is also filled with pre-crime detecting software, which is installed in numerous locations throughout the city. It allows the commissioner’s police force to determine who is going to commit a crime, when, where, and how. This enables the commissioner’s officers to stop the crime before it happens.

Undercover police agents walk the streets analyzing the gestures and visible emotions of the city’s citizens, while uprisings are quickly thwarted by police with riot shields, X-ray scanning glasses, high-powered riot weapons, advanced stealth armor, riot helmets, and sound dispersing technology.

The brief and isolated scenario I have just provided to you does not sound too enjoyable, does it? What if I told you this extremely frightening and futuristic despotic dystopia is already here, in some respects?

At the turn of the century our inherent rights to privacy and private property, which were enumerated in the United States Constitution, experienced a smashing blow with the passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001.

The years preceding 2001, all the way up to now, 2013, were met with an ever-growing police state. A mind-blowing surveillance state has become a partner in despotism with the other government manufactured issue: The police state.

In that same year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established. The DHS has become – and was at its establishment – an utterly corrupt government institution hell-bent on pushing the establishment’s authoritarian direct and non-direct authoritarian goals.

A DHS subsidiary, the Transportation Security Administration, is also another great contributor to the increasing surveillance state. It has made it difficult, in its early days, for people to travel without harassment.

Their practices have been allowed to perpetuate so long that they have made it difficult for travelers to get to their respective destinations without being molested or radiated by their x-ray back scatters.

Furthermore, there have been numerous innovations in technology over the past ten years.

This innovation has led to the creation street lights that have hidden cameras and speakers, which are being used in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The Department of Energy subsidized IntelliStreets, the manufacturer of the street lights, to produce these “spy lights” for this pilot program.

The next big issue on my mind is the Trap Wire mechanism.

According to Russia Today:

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

On a side note, which is a key component to the police state, was the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The NDAA allows for the indefinite detention of any American citizen on the pretense of being a suspected terrorist. Of course, that is a simplistic definition of the NDAA, if you would like to read in-depth analyses click here.

President Barack Obama has now renewed the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

FISA was signed into law in the 1970s; however, it included American’s with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. It allows the monitoring of communications between American citizens and foreigners, that is, if the government deems it reasonable. This can all be done in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Why? Because, as people, we are apathetic.

A few more things I would like to bring forth to you are new innovations, which are bringing my scenario to the surface as a more and more inevitable future.

The construction of The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (CITE) has commenced. What is CITE? CITE is the billion dollar ghost town that is supposed to be the prototype for “smart cities.”

The company who is responsible for the construction of this ghost city is Pegasus Holdings.

What will CITE be comprised of?

It is going to be a city designed to test self-driving cars, smart traffic systems, and many more fascinating technologies that are sadly being used to infringe on our rights by the government.

Ultimately, what I mean is that all of these wonderful technologies are being used to further the political agenda of “homeland security”, which is turning out to be a mere operation to further the surveillance operation within this nation.

I also must point out that, in the case of IntelliStreets and CITE, they cannot be considered entrepreneurial feats because they are government subsidized projects. In essence, entrepreneurship can only be considered such when it is done through the free market.

The last example I would like to bring forth to you is a recent article published by the Daily Mail titled, “Minority Report has arrived: Maryland and Pennsylvania using computers to predict future crimes.”

The article finds:

When police in Minority Report predicted who would commit crimes and stopped them before they did it, it was considered so futuristic, the film was set in 2054.

Now, however, law enforcers in two American states are using crime-prediction software to predict which freed prisoners are most likely to commit murder, and supervising them accordingly.

Instead of relying on parole officers to decide how much supervision inmates will need on the outside by looking at their records, the new system uses a computer algorithm to decide for them.

The Minority Report-style software is already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict future murderers, and will be extended to Washington D.C. soon.

The regimes of the 20th century would have loved to see the advancement of technology that we are witnessing. They would have, like our government is doing, utilized these advancements for the betterment of their agendas.

We are going down the path of modern despotism. It is growing worse by the day. How much further down this read do we really want to go?

The scenario I created at the beginning of this article is becoming ever more apparent. If we do not become outspoken opponents to the despots of our time, we will live in the society illustrated; the society of modern authoritarianism built upon the destructive ideology of socialism. I say socialism.

With that said, I hope one day we will see freedom as affluent in this country as it was when it was founded. If not, the futuristic surveillance city may just become OUR reality.

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Alec Scheer is the founder of We Are 1776, a news organization dedicated to facts and documents, advocating the philosophies of Voluntaryism, free markets, and freedom. Their goal is to post high caliber articles, videos, podcasts, and many other forms of content. Please visit his Facebook Page for the latest in activist solutions.

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