The Obama Administration: All Your Privacy And All Your Stuff Belong To Us

by Michael Snyder
The American Dream
Mar. 19, 2012

Did you know that the federal government claims that it can take away your constitutional rights any time that it wants to? Over the past several decades, there have been an endless parade of laws and executive orders that have been slowly and methodically carving up our rights under the U.S. Constitution. Most Americans are not even aware of the "creeping totalitarianism" that is happening. Most Americans just trust the "authorities" when they tell us that certain things "must be done" in order to keep us all safe. But even if we gave up all of our privacy, even if we gave up all of our liberties and our freedoms, and even if we gave the government all of our stuff they still would not be able to keep us safe. It is inevitable that evil people are going to do evil things, and if you are counting on the Obama administration to keep you safe then you are being delusional. Obama is not going to save us from anything. But Obama will gladly take away our rights and our freedoms if the American people allow him to. The Obama administration seems to have an endless lust for more power. Sadly, if we do give away our rights it will have some very serious consequences. If we freely give away all of the rights that we have been given under the U.S. Constitution it will be incredibly difficult to ever get them back. Giving up liberty for security never works, and if we want to be worthy of being called Americans then we need to start standing up for the republic that our forefathers worked so hard to build.

An executive order that Barack Obama signed the other day is making headlines all over the nation. The title of the executive order is "National Defense Resources Preparedness" and it is actually an update of a series of previous executive orders.

The original "National Defense Resources Preparedness" executive order (EO 8248) was issued back in 1939. This latest version is very similar to EO 12919 that was signed by Bill Clinton in June 1994. However, several very important changes have been made in this new version.

For example, in Section 201(b) the words "under both emergency and non-emergency conditions" have been added.

So now the federal government can take control of all food, all energy, all health resources, all transportation resources and "all other materials, services, and facilities" in the country even if the United States is not experiencing emergency conditions.

Not that the Obama administration really needed to put that in there. After all, the U.S. government has been operating under a constant state of national emergency since September 14, 2001.

So the Obama administration did not really need to include a new excuse for taking control of everything. The existing "state of emergency" would probably work just fine.

If Barack Obama woke up one day and decided to exercise the powers in this executive order, he would be able to do pretty much anything that he wanted. This executive order would essentially allow Obama to declare a state of martial law in the United States even during a time when no emergency was happening.

Just check out what Section 201 of the executive order allows the federal government to take control of....

Sec. 201. Priorities and Allocations Authorities. (a) The authority of the President conferred by section 101 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071, to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense, is delegated to the following agency heads:

(1) the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer;

(2) the Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy;

(3) the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;

(4) the Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation;

(5) the Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and

(6) the Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.

So should we be worried?

Bush and Clinton did not exercise these powers.

Perhaps Obama will not either.

Yes, perhaps he will not.

But they are there.

And someday they will be used.

The Obama administration also continues to make shocking claims regarding our privacy.

According to the 4th Amendment, our homes are not supposed to be searched unless there is probably cause....

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But according to CIA director David Petraeus, the American people are willingly bugging their own homes by choosing to use modern gadgets, and the CIA plans to use these technologies to spy on you. Petraeus recently said the following about the "transformational" impact these new technologies will have on the ability of the CIA to spy on the American people...

"Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters -- all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing"

The kind of chips that Petraeus was referring to will soon be in nearly all new appliances. As a recent Daily Mail article noted, we will soon see an "Internet of things" emerge where virtually every electronic device is connected to the Internet....

This week, one of the world's biggest chip companies, ARM, has unveiled a new processor built to work inside 'connected' white goods.

The ARM chips are smaller, lower-powered and far cheaper than previous processors - and designed to add the internet to almost every kind of electrical appliance.

It's a concept described as the 'internet of things'.

Futurists think that one day 'connected' devices will tell the internet where they are and what they are doing at all times - and will be mapped by computers as precisely as Google Maps charts the physical landscape now.

But we are not going to have to wait for the future for the federal government to use the Internet to spy on us all.

As I have written about previously, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. military and the Federal Reserve are all using Facebook and Twitter to monitor the American people.

If you post this article to Facebook and Twitter, multiple agencies of the federal government will have a record of it.

In fact, the truth is that every single phone call, every single email, every single Facebook post and pretty much every other kind of electronic communication that you can imagine is monitored by intelligence agencies. Don't ever assume that anything you say on your phone or on the Internet is private.

And now, even your ISP will be spying on you to make sure that you are not downloading any copyrighted material.

Yes, that is right.

A clandestine deal coordinated by the Obama administration will go into effect on July 12th. The following is from a recent Raw Story article....

If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider (ISP) has been watching, and they're coming for you.

Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12.

That's the date when the nation's largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users' bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.

Word of the start date has been largely kept secret since ISPs announced their plans last June. The deal was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and coordinated by the Obama Administration.

So be careful what you are doing on the Internet.

Your ISP will be watching it all.

Even local police departments are "pushing the envelope" when it comes to surveillance technology. For example, the NYPD is working on technology that will be able to see a gun inside your clothes from a distance of 80 feet away....

The reason that the NYPD is so interested terahertz waves is that they pass through nonconductive materials like clothes, but can't penetrate metal -- like, say, the steel in a semi-automatic pistol. That means if you scan someone, you can look for spots where a person's natural terahertz radiation is blocked, most likely by a metal object.

The benefits for police officers are obvious. They can essentially sit back in a specially-equipped van and scan anyone they suspect of carrying a gun from a safe distance. Right now it only works from three or four feet away, but department spokesman Paul J. Browne told the New York Times that the NYPD -- in coordination with the Department of Defense -- hopes to increase its range to 25 meters, or 82 feet.

Unfortunately, there are dozens of other new technologies like this. For 14 more examples of how the government is watching us, just check out this article.

Most Americans assume that these technologies will only be used against "terrorists", but that simply is not the case.

For example, a man living in Burnsville, Minnesota was recently subjected to "electronic home monitoring" for not having the proper siding on his home....

A Burnsville man on his way to work was arrested and thrown in jail without bond, and then subjected to electronic home monitoring.

But it wasn't for drugs or a DWI or some other major crime.

Burnsville city leaders say Mitch Faber's dealings with the law all stem from his failure to properly put up siding on his house.

Yep, siding.

Sadly, the truth is that the United States is rapidly being turned into a high-tech Big Brother prison grid dominated by control freak bureaucrats who do not care about our liberties and freedoms.

This is not the way that America is supposed to work.

We are supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Has that dream been lost forever, or will we get it back someday?