In regards to, for instance, the Soviet Union’s KGB, East Germany’s Stasi, and Iran’s SAVAK, there isn’t any doubt that each of these domestic spying operations were invasive, unjust, intimidating, and quite destructive to those individuals that suffered unduly from these operations, leading to actions such as their banishment, imprisonment, violence, joblessness, compromise of such, or even death. Each of these domestic spying operations were quite good at gathering up information and then using that information as a form of control upon dissident elements of the population, as well as a way to keep those that were prone to unorthodox views, to effectively silence them and thereby better control or manipulate such. Further to the point, these agencies effectively were a law unto themselves, and pretty much were provided by the government that actuated them with carte blanche to take care of business in any way that they saw as being most effective.
Within the United States, there are several domestic agencies, that perform functions, so explained to the American public, as being necessary for their nation as well as for the people’s safety and security, of which, the biggest and the most prominent names of these departments, are the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Security Agency. We currently live in an era in which so much of what we say and do, is recorded through digital media, of our cell phone communications, our internet activity, and basically everything that is initiated by us and thereby subsequently recorded through the digital world that we are an integral part of.
It would be one thing if all this activity so being recorded, logged, and associated with a given individual, was prudently monitored in a way that always the individual rights that are ours by the law of this land, was kept foremost in mind. Rather, in actuality, this government, through subterfuge, through its witting actions, and through its outright lies, feels that it has the prevailing right to collect whatever that it so desires to collect for whatever purposes that it so desires to use such information for, and does so in a manner in which this is never voluntarily publicly disclosed to the public, but is done and kept secret, instead.
There are plenty of people that are fine with all this, for they are the type of people that are quite willing to give up some degree of freedom and privacy for their own personal safety. Further, there are those that believe we live in the most dangerous of times, and therefore they have the faith that what their government so does on their behalf, is going to always be essentially those actions that will protect them successfully from enemies, be they foreign or domestic.
While the surveillance by this government of its own people, at this stage, appears to be one primarily, but not exclusively, of collecting, collating, and of studying such information; recognize this well, that always it is the party that has all of the information, that holds over that party that has little or none of it; for everyone has an Achilles’ heel, and those then that know where that weakness lies, most definitely know how to exploit it, and sooner or later, should it serve their purposes, that respective agency so actuated by this government most definitely will.