Watch out, you're being watched by Danny Westneat/Seattle Times

[Demeter]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2004300343_danny23.html

... a story told last week by a border agent at a meeting of 200 San Juan Islanders. He was there to explain why the federal government is doing citizenship checks on domestic ferry runs.But near the end, while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of "Dr. Strangelove." It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear "dirty bombs." They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.

"Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour," Giuliano told the crowd. "Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope ."
The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said. "Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier," Giuliano said. "That's the type of technology we have that's going on in the background. You don't see it. If I hadn't told you about it, you'd never know it was there."

About all I can say is: Wow. Wow that the government now has the ability to detect radiation in a cat inside a car going by at 70 miles per hour. And wow at this world we live in, where we feel compelled to sniff, at random, inside the traffic coming out of Bellingham...What else is the government watching? Is it all too much?...From bomb sniffing to bank monitoring of the kind that brought down Eliot Spitzer to phone and Internet data crunching to citizenship checkpoints — all are becoming commonplaces of American life...Giuliano says the point really is to catch terrorists. He says it's true that the odds of catching one here may be "a billion to one. But despite that, we have caught two." (Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, who tried to sneak in at Blaine in 1997 to blow up the New York subway; and Millennium Bomber Ahmed Ressam, nabbed at Port Angeles in 1999.)
"There's your one or two in a billion, looking right at you."

It's a good point. Yet even he, a federal agent for 35 years, is queasy about the snooping's reach. He said he opposes parts of the Patriot Act, namely the section that expands warrantless searches.
"I think we can do this without tossing out our checks and balances," he said.
Said San Juan County Councilman Kevin Ranker: "I think it's fair to say many people up here have been left wondering just what kind of country it is they're living in."

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or [e-mail].

[tom_paine]

1. There's no wondering about what kind of country we live in. None at all.

We live in an Authoritarian Oligarchy roughly 60% of the way along to whatever it's final transformation will be into, Nazi, Soviet, Imperial Roman model, or maybe something wholly new.

We live in a surveillance state and will never ever be free of such again, unless the whole shtstorm collapses, then we will REALLY know what the Bushies' Penultimate and Final Solutions to the Liberal Problem are.

We live in one of the Big Three States of the New Totalitarianism: Amerika, Russia, and China.

China was worse and still is, but we have narrowed the gap and are narrowing more every day. That's for the lives of us Little People. Poltically, America and China are very much alike. Now that China mixes Capitalism with Totalitarianism, they are even more like us that ever as we infuse more and more totalitarianism into our capitalism. Russia has been following the Bushie changes and replicating them in his own country. Why shouldn't he? It's good enough for us.

Putin and Russia get to go a bit farther along than their Bushie Soulmates, because Russians have no history of liberty. Bush is probably envious, but is aiming for the same totalitarian goals as Putin using other methods, and has largely achieved them.

We live in a nation that is Clincally Psychotic and wholly detatched from reality, as the Nazis Germans were. We are subject to perception managment and almost literal mind control using technologies that have advanced tenfold and one-hundredfold from Hitler and Stalin's times.

We live in a nation in which the regulations promulgated by the people who defeated Hitler and Stalin, created by them while watching what Hitler and Stalin could do with a neutralized, parasitized media, have been long ago dismantled. Witness the results: in it's own lunatic way, our media is as bad as anything they had in Soviet Russia. We just have better production values and hot blonde achors.

At this point, we have less than a 2% chance, I think of ever reversing it or restoring the Old Republic of America.

[FreepFryer]

2. Or, by their earlier names, Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. (n/t)