May 8, 2011

Henry Louis Mencken: First they pass laws [create technology] to use against the sons of bitches. Then they use them against the rest of us. Technology is amoral. Historically every new invention was used for both good and evil. What is to stop criminals e.g. from placing monitoring devices on vehicles to reveal when a person is far enough away for his/her home?

Police have and use a lot of high tech weapons that they do not broadcast to the public. If police use these high tech weapons you can be certain that organized crime is also using them. Now that the US Government is run by the Crime Families National Commission, the FBI and their obedient police agencies target critics of government and not criminals. The recent arrests of ten Russian agents and quick return to Russia by Obama's legal wizard AG indicates the attitude of the elected officials to criminals -- Cover it up. As Noam Chomsky observed the goal is to keep the herd bewildered.

[From article]
"to have your every step monitored as you make your way through life, ostensibly free—well, that is, so to speak, a brave new world.
[. . .]
to be constantly on watch may wear at the psyche in ways difficult to predict. In a boast that could also serve as a warning, Bentham himself described his Panopticon as offering “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
[. . .]
with prison costs rising, and the pernicious effects of incarceration becoming clearer all the time, the problem of selling prisons without walls will presumably grow easier over time.
[. . .]
A serious felon might have every second of his day tracked,
[. . .]
someday routine monitoring by authorities could be used to map convicts not just geographically but emotionally as well.
[. . .]
Erik Luna, a law professor at Washington and Lee University: “There should be a general concern about the extent of the power of the state to follow and track individuals and gather information about their lives.”
[. . .]
once available, surveillance technologies rarely go unused, or un-abused.
[. . .]
Once the legal and technical infrastructures were in place to allow the monitoring of criminals, it would be a relatively simple step to extend that monitoring to any person the government considered, for whatever reason, to be “of interest.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/09/prison-without-walls/8195/1/

Prison Without Walls
By Graeme Wood
September 2010
ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

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