Akkam’s Razor

Nothing is really unbelievable anymore, is it?  And why is a glossy entertainment magazine - in this case, RADAR magazine -  delivering reporting that was formerly the domain of the Fourth Estate?

“There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.“

They’ve been working on predictive large-scale behavioral modeling whole-world simulators, with the idea being that  every person, industry, and organization existing in a Matrix-style world that they could then submit to famines, natural disaster, economic disruptions, pandemics, and terrorist attacks.  I suspect this is a part of “Main Core”.

So many of the parts that would allow this monstrosity to roar into action have become enabled, short of Skynet becomes aware.  We’ve seen internment camps.  The definition for national emergency has been broadened.  We’ve seen precedents established and reinforced for the seizing of public and private land.  A web of databases has been exposed, from no-fly lists, domestic and international communications, descriptive statistics, financial records, domestic and international travel, and various commercial and private entities.  For more discussion on the alphabet soup of programs, see this Metafilter post on the Pentagon’s CIFA, ICEWS, HCSB, the Human Terrain System, the likely ‘collaboration’ between Telcos and the NSA in snooping rooms, TIA - which was defunded but then resumed as ADVISE, TANGRAM, and the expansion of already existing domestic NSA programs.  Such a program would even round up our law-and-order and anti-tax conservatives.   As always, we ultimately come down to no more than a number, as evident by this Colin Powell slip-up.

So, if some activist you know should suddenly stop coming to work, church, or school in case of a ‘national emergency’ - now you’ll know why.