August 12, 2011 1:08 pm "Organizers planning to disrupt BART service on August 11, 2011 stated they would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART Police. A civil disturbance during commute times at busy downtown San Francisco stations could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators. BART temporarily interrupted service at select BART stations as one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform."
"Autocratic governments often limit phone and Internet access in tense times. But the Internet has never faced anything like what happened in Egypt on Friday, when the government of a country with 80 million people and a modernizing economy cut off nearly all access to the network and shut down cellphone service."
Exactly how free are we in the USA? If the Bill of Rights can be set aside by the State anytime they give a plausible reason like public safety in the face of protests, where will it end? They could make the same case for suspending the 2nd Amendment or actively seizing private owned firearms. Not that they would of course since that's too obvious and abrupt:
"The boiling frog story is a widespread anecdote describing a frog slowly being boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability of people to react to significant changes that occur gradually."
"In the National Socialist state, there is no longer property with which the individual can do with whatever he wishes. There is no unlimited right of property, only a right that has been earned to administer it for the good of the whole. Property is a loan. One may certainly use it, but only to advance the interests of the whole. A farmer has a field. It belongs to him. And it should belong to him, for his ancestor tilled it, his fathers toiled on it. It belongs to him as long as he tills it so that food for other citizens grows on it. But the field must be taken from him if he leaves it fallow because he is too lazy or unambitious to till it."
�Faith and Action.�
Helmut Stellrecht, Glauben und Handeln. Ein Bekenntnis der jungen Nation (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Franz Eher Nachf., 1943)
If the State can seize cellphone towers at will and force ISPs to keep records they wouldn't otherwise, where are we heading if not a facist autocracy? Or is it to late, and we're already there?
When governments start changing their fundamental natures (say a republic to an autocracy) they have to do it gradually or the people will protest. So as though testing the waters, they deactivate rights one at a time to check public reaction. Bit by bit, the water gets warmer until we're all dead little frogs.
Prior to the BART event, a new law was passed requiring Internet Service Providers to keep records on user activities like what sites we visit, what we view and download, etc. all in the name of protecting children. So-called Internet Child Safety laws and regulations are a tough thing to oppose legally since doing so immediately puts you on the side of pedophiles and pornographers. But once again the State is suspending fundamental rights (like privacy) one at a time.
Stories like these are like something out of "1984" or what we read about happened in Germany before World War 2. Suspension of legal rights, State being given more and more power, propaganda to divert attention from the State to unseen, outside forces meaning us harm, where will it end?
US details 20,000 troops to continental US to 'bolster domestic security'
What's next? Check points and 'papers?' Whatever happened to that National ID thing anyway?
"Congress, in a First, Removes an Animal From the Endangered Species List"
"A rider to the Congressional budget measure agreed to last weekend dictates that wolves in Montana and Idaho be taken off the endangered species list and managed instead by state wildlife agencies, which is in direct opposition to a federal judge�s recent decision forbidding the Interior Department to take such an action."
