Washington Post: From tracking al-Qaeda to tracking the wayward spouse (Big Brother Inc: Homeland Security creeps into the bedroom - What began as a well-intentioned campaign to harden targets and protect the nation from terrorists (who you calling a terrorist?) has metastasized into a sprawling and diffuse enterprise that has little to do with terrorists and a lot to do with government and employers spying on the citizenry — and citizens spying on each other. Catch many terrorists with this technology? “Not so much,” Cellbusters’ Derek Forde admitted.) - 4.3.2012

“In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows.”

America in 2011 is more advanced than Orwell’s Oceania in that it doesn’t have to rely on expensive helicopters to spy on citizens. That job has now been entrusted to unmanned drones that not only act as surveillance devices, they can also carry tasers that deliver incapaciating electric shocks to “suspected” criminals.

Facecrime is now a reality in 2011 with the aid of behaviometrics – a new omnipresent surveillance technology developed for the US Air Force and destined to be used in law enforcement to “monitor suspicious behavior”. The system revolves around a camera that tracks facial movements biometrically in order to build a psychological profile of the individual under surveillance. The movements of the muscles in your face will alert Big Brother, through the process of “behavior analysis,” to your presence as a suspicious individual who may be engaging in the act of thought crime, or God forbid, planning a public protest.

As part of Homeland Security’s See Something, Say Something program, Americans are being bombarded at every level, from Wal-Mart, to football games, to hotel rooms, with messages encouraging them t to report their fellow citizens for engaging in “suspicious activity,” which as we have documented, includes mundane behavior such as paying with cash, opposing surveillance, using a video camera, talking to police officers, wearing hoodies, driving vans, writing on a piece of paper, and using a cell phone recording application.

Schools are also now training children to be “eco-spies” by reporting on their parents’ bad recycling habits, encouraging kids to “re-educate” them into compliance.

Just as the citizens of Oceania were constantly bombarded with propaganda from the state via telescreens, Americans are now being subjected to the same onslaught in the form of spurious “alerts” from the federal government that are delivered through numerous platforms, including LED screens on the ‘Intellistreets’ lighting network, televisions at Wal-Mart storesthat play Janet Napolitano’s “See Something, Say Something” diatribe, FEMA’s Emergency Alert System that can hijack all conventional boradcast communications, and mandatory government messages that will appear on all new cellphones from the end of next year. And if that isn’t enough, the Washington Post today called for the Internet to also be brought under the auspices of a government takeover switch. Whereas Winston Smith only had to put up with Big Brother lecturing him via telescreens, Americans will be peppered with propaganda from every conceivable direction.

American citizens are not merely “disappearing” without a trial, as happened those who had comitted thoughtcrime in 1984, they are being directly assassinated via Predator drone strikes with no oversight and no legal process whatsoever. As the case of U.S. citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki shows, Americans are now at risk of falling victim to a program of state-sponsored assassination should they be designated “terrorists”. In Orwell’s 1984, miscreants were tortured and brainwashed, but they were not murdered on a whim by government decree before at least being given the opportunity to recant.

Technology is being used to crush human liberty and eviscerate our privacy. Every technological advancement, from Facebook to the IPhone, brings with it a further assault on privacy. The U.S. judicial system is identifying ways to legalize constant surveillance over every American, most recently with the effort to give authorities the power to secretly track Americans through clandestine global positioning systems attached to their vehicles.