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sarah palin
'I Want Them To Be Worried We're Watching... To Never Know When We're Overhead.'
That's what Police Chief Richard Biehl of Dayton, Ohio told the Washington Post while referring to the people of his city as he supported new aerial surveillance technology that would allow his officers to "track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time."
Focused on the work of Persistent Surveillance Systems--a Dayton-based company that is already providing aerial surveillance for large events, like political rallies and sporting events--the Post's reporting reveals that even as "Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed."
For its part, Persistent Surveillance bills itself as a "full-service, wide area surveillance provider" that sells its capabilities to law enforcement agencies, border patrol, and others private firms. According to the company's website, their signature "Hawkeye II" surveillance system "is similar to a live version of Google-Earth--only with a TiVo-like capability" and provides:
Wide-Area Surveillance Sensors and Services that enable continuous, second-by-second video monitoring of a city-sized area. Because of the very high-resolution nature of PSS's sensors (up to 200 megapixels), vehicle and pedestrian activity can be tracked over a 16 square-mile area. If an event-of-interest happens within this area (a murder, for example), users can rewind the event to identify the perpetrator's place-of-origin, meeting locations, accomplices, driving routes, and final destination.
Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said. They've been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in demonstrations for police. They've also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician.
Predictably, those in favor of the hovering surveillance technology, like Police Chief Biehl and the company's president Ryan McNutt, say the whole purpose of the 'unblinking eye-in-the-sky' is to solve crimes or prevent them from happening. And as McNutt explained, he envisions his companies technology not just attached to small planes, as they are now, but to ones with longer and wider ranges as well. He also thinks fixed surveillance units could "protect" large areas, boasting to the Post that "a single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument [...] could deter crime all around the [Natioanal] Mall."
But privacy advocates contend this is just another creepy development in the evolution of the 'Big Brother' society that George Orwell warned about and the National Security Agency has helped turn into a global enterprise.
"There are an infinite number of surveillance technologies that would help solve crimes . . . but there are reasons that we don't do those things, or shouldn't be doing those things," said Joel Pruce, a University of Dayton postdoctoral fellow in human rights who opposed the use of the surveillance aircraft in Ohio supported by Biehl.
And Jay Stanley, a privacy expert with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Post: "If you turn your country into a totalitarian surveillance state, there's always some wrongdoing you can prevent. The balance struck in our Constitution tilts toward liberty, and I think we should keep that value."
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On the Sabotage of Democracy
So we should be clear on this, Obamacare, as it's known, is deeply flawed. Big subsidies to the health insurance industry. A bonanza for lobbyists. No public option. And as The New York Times reported this week, "Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law." Largely because states controlled by Republicans refuse to expand Medicaid.
As far as our bought and paid for legislative process goes, Obama's initiative made it through the sausage factory. Yet even after both the House and Senate approved it, the president signed it, and the Supreme Court upheld it, the Republicans keep insisting on calling the law a "bill," thumbing their noses and refusing to accept that it is enacted legislation.
Now they're fighting to prevent it from being implemented. Here was their order of the day on Thursday from the popular right wing blog RedState.com:
"Congressmen, this is about shutting down Obamacare. Democrats keep talking about our refusal to compromise. They don't realize our compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it. This is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until the President defunds Obamacare. And if he does not defund Obamacare, we leave the whole thing shut down."
Once upon a time when I was a young man working on Capitol Hill, it was commonplace that when a bill became law, everybody was unhappy with it. But you didn't bring down the government just because it wasn't perfect. You argue and fight and vote and then, due process having been at least raggedly served, on to the next fight.
That was a long time ago. Long before the Tea Party minority, armed with huge sums of secret money from rich donors, sucked the last bit of soul from the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln. They became delusional. Then rabid. Like this:
SENATOR STEVE KING: If Obamacare is ever implemented and enforced, we will never recover from it. It is an unconstitutional takings of God-given American liberty.
BILL MOYERS: That's false, of course. Just like those right-wing talking points that keep grinding through the propaganda mills of Fox News:
AINSLEY EARHARDT on Fox and Friends: Thanks to Obamacare, doctors will be forced to ask patients about their sex life, even if it has nothing to do with the medical treatment that they are seeking at the time.
BILL MOYERS: Not true.
MICHELLE MALKIN on Fox and Friends: That healthcare plan puts a discount on the lives of elderly people and would result in the redistribution of health away from the elderly and the infirm to other special favored interests and patients.
BILL MOYERS: Again, not true. Nor is this, from the multi-millionaire fabulist Rush Limbaugh:
RUSH LIMBAUGH from the Rush Limbaugh Show: What we now have is the biggest tax increase in the history of the world. Obamacare is just a massive tax increase, that all it is.
BILL MOYERS: That's just a tiny sample of the lies and misinformation perpetrated by the right with the song and dance compliance of its richly paid mouthpieces. Sarah Palin set the bar for truth at about ankle height with those fictitious "death panels" that she still insists will decide our rendezvous with the Grim Reaper.
SARAH PALIN on Cashin' In: Of course there are death panels in there, but the important thing to remember is that's just one aspect of this atrocious, unaffordable, cumbersome, burdensome, evil policy of Obama's and that is Obamacare.
BILL MOYERS: Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees. They demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline. They demand the watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled, and the big, bad regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on. The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its obligations and responsibilities.
When the president refused to buckle to their extortion, they threw their tantrum. Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a half ago, who would destroy the Union before giving up their slaves, so would these people burn the place down, sink the ship of state, and sow economic chaos to get their way. This says it all, they even shuttered the Statue of Liberty.
Watching all this from London, the noted commentator Martin Wolf, of the capitalist friendly Financial Times, says "America flirts with self-destruction."
This man is the biggest flirt of all, Newt Gingrich. It was Newt Gingrich who twenty years ago spearheaded the right-wing's virulent crusade against the norms of democratic government. As Speaker of the House he twice brought about shutdowns of the federal government once, believe it or not, because he felt snubbed after riding on Air Force One with President Clinton and had to leave by the backdoor.
It was also Newt Gingrich, speaker Gingrich, who was caught lying to congressional investigators looking into charges of his ethical wrongdoing. His colleagues voted overwhelmingly, 395 to 28, to reprimand him. Pressure from his own party then prompted him to resign.
Yet even after his flame out, even after his recent bizarre race for the presidency bankrolled with money from admiring oligarchs, even after new allegations about his secret fundraising for right-wing candidates, Gingrich remains the darling of a fawning amnesic media.
NEWT GINGRICH on Crossfire: I'm Newt Gingrich on the right.
BILL MOYERS: On CNN.com the other day he issued a call to arms to his fellow bomb-throwers, "...don't cave on shutdown."
At least let's name this for what it is, sabotage of the democratic process. Secession by another means. And let's be clear about where such reckless ambition leads. As surely as night must follow day, the alternative to democracy is worse.
Republicans Sabotaging, Not Governing. This Is Who They Are Now.
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