[...] Snooping and snitching

Informing on one’s neighbor to the thought police is already pretty much the norm on commercial airliners, where passengers are encouraged to report anyone who dares to attempt normal breathing, even while asleep. (“Look! There’s a secret anti-masker dozing in the seat across the aisle!”)

But the snoop-and-snitch craze seems to be spreading. Now, whole school systems are using commercial software to spy on as many as 23 million U.S. children, monitoring their every keystroke and tracking their internet contacts.

According to a recent press report, while some parents object to this Big Brother-ism, others seem to feel that there’s too little surveillance of their kids, not too much. As for school administrators – many of them see nothing wrong with local bureaucrats doubling as thought police because “I’ve always felt that they [the kids] are already being tracked,” as one school principal phlegmatically put it.

Meanwhile, a recent and typical news story described, without comment, how students and/or parents reported a teacher to the authorities for the crime of being “unvaccinated” – and of having occasionally removed her muzzle while reading aloud to the class.

Sad to say, there was nothing unusual about that.

Hollywood snitches have busied themselves in recent months getting actors fired for expressing the wrong thoughts about such things as mandatory muzzling or manipulated elections. And what’s good for celebrities ought to be good for the rest of us, right?

The trend toward the destruction of privacy – which is the death knell for any democratic system of government – is all the more dangerous because it was gaining ground even before coronavirus hysteria created the perfect culture for its expansion.

“Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home,” wrote Alfred McCoy, the leading U.S. historian of surveillance and its political consequences, as far back as 2009.

McCoy presciently warned that technology used to repress dissent in, say, Iraq:

has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state – with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’”

I think of those words every time I’m urged to install proof-of-“vaccination” software on my cell phone. Am I really supposed to believe that such a potentially powerful surveillance tool won’t be put to more intrusive uses?

It’s worth remembering that President George W. Bush tried to organize ordinary citizens into a massive, informal spy network as part of the “war on terror” nearly 20 years ago, while the federal government was compiling “electronic dossiers” on millions of Americans – a system that only got bigger under Barack Obama.

With Joe Biden, Obama’s Vice President, at the helm now, there can’t be much question about where we’re heading. Anyone who still believes in privacy is going to have to fight for it. (read more)