A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (16 page)

CHAPTER 12

The Matrix: Where They Live

"The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

– Morpheus,
The Matrix

T
echnology is developing at such a rapid pace that it is inconceivable that mere human beings can control it. What has prompted such rapidity? The pressure, fear, and uncertainty resulting from the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. War, fear of war and/or terrorist attacks "have always been considered the main incentives," writes media analyst Marshall McLuhan, "to the technological extension of our bodies." Furthermore:

More even than the preparation for war, the aftermath of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accommodate the impact of the invading culture. It is from such intensive hybrid exchange and strife of ideas and forms that the greatest social energies are released, and from which arise the greatest technologies.
²⁷³

Combine America's expanding overseas military empire (where technology is tested for domestic use) with a fear of potential terrorist attacks (or "invasions"), and the resulting proliferation of invasive technologies that are littering the national landscape is explainable. The problem such technologies–what McLuhan calls "extensions of man"–pose is that they are so advanced as to operate autonomously. As a result, we are increasingly caught in an electronic concentration camp.

Cue
The Matrix
. In the 1999 film, computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson is secretly a hacker known as "Neo," who is intrigued by the cryptic references to the "Matrix" that appear on his computer. Eventually, Neo learns that intelligent computer systems which were created in the twenty-first century are acting autonomously and have taken control of all life on earth and now watch and control everyone. These computer systems harvest the bio-electrical energy of humans who are kept docile and distracted by the illusions that the entertainment media provides. And when Neo joins a resistance group led by Morpheus, he finds out that the police are more than willing to crack heads to keep dissidents in line with the status quo.

As this section will reveal, the U.S. government has an arsenal of technology that not only eviscerates the last vestiges of our privacy but controls us as well. No matter what you say, write, or do, there is a good chance that Big Brother–or perhaps more appropriately "Peeping Sam"– knows it. But why no outcry from the major media outlets? Why no alerts from those talking heads on television? Could it be that those who control the corporate media in conjunction with the government want to keep us distracted from the nefarious reality that surrounds us?

This was the essential plot of director John Carpenter's 1988 film
They Live
, where a group of down and out homeless men discover that people have been, in effect, so hypnotized by media distractions that they do not see that alien creatures control them. Caught up in the subliminal messages such as "obey" and "conform" being beamed out on television, billboards, and the like, people are unaware of the elite controlling their lives. And, of course, resistance is met with police aggression.

Carpenter, who also wrote the film's screenplay, was reacting to the commercialization of popular culture and politics. "I began watching TV again," said Carpenter. "I quickly realized that everything we see is designed to sell us something... The only thing they want to do is take our money"
²⁷⁴
Thus, the film echoes the mindless consumption of modern American culture that is engineered through the corporate media.

Again, as we have seen with other novels and films, the realms of fiction have now become our reality. Numb to the onslaught of technology, many continue to consume and smile as those who administer the electronic concentration camp invade every aspect of our lives. Although we live in a matrix administered by our own controllers, there is yet time to educate ourselves and take action. The reason "they live" is because we sleep. Time to wake up.

CHAPTER 13

The Federal "Gestapo"?

"The minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo."
²⁷⁵
-J. EDGAR HOOVER (July 14, 1955]

I
f America is an electronic concentration camp, the FBI and its many agents are our wardens.

Sadly, the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the history of how America–once a nation that abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions–has steadily devolved into a police state where laws are unidirectional and intended as a tool for government to control the people.

J. Edgar Hoover (FBI Gallery)

Established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt, the FBI started out as a small task force assigned to deal with specific domestic crimes, its first being to survey houses of prostitution in anticipation of enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act. Initially quite limited in its abilities to investigate so-called domestic crimes, the FBI has dramatically expanded in size, scope, and authority over the course of the past century.

Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their "data campus," which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI is also, according to
The Washington Post
, "building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff a traffic cop or even a neighbor."
²⁷⁶

The agency's reach is more invasive than ever. This is thanks, no doubt, to its nearly unlimited resources (its budget for fiscal year 2012 was $7.9 billion
²⁷⁷
), the government's vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers. The latter are data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country which constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), meaning everything from Internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls, and emails.

Neutralizing Dissidents

It was during the social and political upheaval of the 1960s, however, that the FBI's transformation into a federal policing and surveillance agency really began, one aimed not so much at the criminal element but at anyone who challenged the status quo– namely, those expressing anti-government sentiments. According to J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's first and most infamous director, the United States was confronted with "a new style in conspiracy– conspiracy that is extremely subtle and devious and hence difficult understand... a conspiracy reflected by questionable moods and attitudes, by unrestrained individualism, by nonconformism in dress and speech, even by obscene language, rather than by formal membership in specific Organizations."
²⁷⁸

Martin Luther King Jr.
(Dick DeMarsico/World Telegram & Sun)

Among those most closely watched by the FBI during that time period was Martin Luther King Jr., a man labeled by the FBI as the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country."
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With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI from 1958 until his death in 1968, all with the aim of "neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader."
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King even received letters written by FBI agents suggesting that either he commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public.
²⁸¹
The FBI file on King is estimated to contain 17,000 pages of materials documenting his day-to-day activities. Incredibly, nearly fifty years later, the FBI maintains a stranglehold on information relating to this "covert" operation. Per a court order, information relating to the FBI wiretaps on King will not be released until 2027.

John Lennon, the ex-Beatle, was another such activist targeted for surveillance by the FBI. Fearing Lennon might incite antiwar protests, the Nixon administration directed the FBI to keep close tabs on the ex-Beatle, resulting in close to 400 pages of files on his activities during the early 1970s. But the government's actions didn't stop with mere surveillance. The agency went so far as to attempt to have Lennon deported on drug charges. As professor Jon Wiener, a historian who sued the federal government to have the files on Lennon made public, observed, "This is really the story of F.B.I. misconduct, of the President using the F.B.I, to get his enemies, to use federal agencies to suppress dissent and to silence critics."
²⁸²

Violating the Law

Unfortunately not even the creation of the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) by President Ford in 1976 could keep the FBI's surveillance activities within the bounds of the law. Whether or not those boundaries were respected in the ensuing years, they all but disappeared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. This was true, especially with the passage of the USA Patriot Act, which gave the FBI and other intelligence agencies carte blanche authority to investigate Americans suspected of being anti-government. While the FBI's powers were being strengthened, President George W Bush dismantled the oversight capabilities of the IOB, which was supposedly entrusted with keeping the FBI in check.

Even Barack Obama, a vocal critic of the Bush policies, failed to restore these checks and balances on the FBI. In fact, the Obama administration went so far as to insist that the FBI may obtain telephone records of international calls made from the United States without any formal legal process or court oversight. This rationale obviously applies to emails and text messages, as well.

Little wonder, then, that FBI abuses keep mounting. A 2011 report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that since 9/11 the FBI has been responsible for at least 40,000 violations of the law. Most of the violations dealt with "internal oversight guidelines," while close to one-third were "abuse of National Security Letters," and almost one-fifth were "violations of the Constitution, FISA, and other legal authorities."
²⁸³

Created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, National Security Letters (NSL) allow the FBI to bypass the Fourth Amendment's requirement of a court-sanctioned search warrant by allowing an agent to demand information merely on his say-so. The NSLs were originally intended as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. However, they have since been used for clandestine scrutiny of American citizens, U.S. residents, and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.