In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell, the Thought Police (Thinkpol) are the secret police of the superstate, who discover and punish thoughtcrime, personal and political thoughts unapproved by the regime. The Thinkpol use criminal psychology and omnipresent surveillance via informers, telescreens, cameras, and microphones, to monitor the citizens and arrest all those who have committed thoughtcrime in challenge to the status quo authority.
And right on cue, the modern-day version of the Thinkpol emerges, brought to you by another of the Alphabet Gestapo, our comrades at the Department of Homeland Security:
MDM is a term developed by the DHS Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to replace the old-fashioned phrase “foreign influence.” Now let us caveat that the U.S. government does indeed have a responsibility to monitor and to identify foreign influence operations. This was the remit of the Reagan-era Active Measures Working Group, which worked tirelessly to identify Soviet lies being spread to undermine the United States’ global standing in the world, and then countered them with the truth.
But under the latest iteration, DHS is no longer concerned solely with enemy lies spread abroad, but increasingly with information spread by “domestic threat actors” (read: American citizens). And no longer are they merely concerned with disinformation, false material spread to manipulate an opponent, but with misinformation, which DHS considers information that is false but not intended to cause harm, and “mal-information,” which means information which is true but the government considers harmful anyway.
I added the emphasis, because that’s an extremely interesting concept. A couple of interesting questions arise from this.
- Who defines what is “harmful”, and by what parameters?
- What are the penalties for disseminating this so-called “mal-information”?
- Should the DHS be abolished?
- Has anyone in Congress done anything to stop this? and
- Has the time come for us to begin the mass hangings?
I need to get over to the range. Excuse me.
Collecting information about me is a crime.
It is MY information, not yours.
How is this even questionable?
I disliked the DHS back when it was founded under George the W. Even then it had the distinct flavor of fascism and oppression. Note to all potential R’s looking for my vote – any political, military, or security organization you start will be eventually co-opted by the left and used against us. Drain the freaking swamp. Abolish the DHS, FBI, ATF, etc. Don’t just decimate, abolish. Defund. And declare unconstitutional. And don’t pull a Trump and just EO that stuff. Get it done so it’s permanent and the next bastard in office can’t just reverse everything on his first day before his nap and diaper change.
What’s needed is to recognize that General Police Powers were NOT among those powers granted by the States to the feds when the superior States created the inferior federal government by ratifying the Constitution. All those policing orgs are unconstitutional, therefore. SCOTUS, Congress, etc. will never abolish them – no one gives up power voluntarily. But Governors can tell them to GET OUT of their States and criminalize any interaction with them. As with all other fed overreach (marriage, bathrooms, abortion, etc.), it’s up to governors to control the feds by telling them to sod off when they exceed their authorized powers. And, no, SCOTUS doesn’t get to decide what’s authorized. They, too are part of the “Limited government” created by the Constitution. When SCOTUS takes a case outside their limits – say, abortion, marriage, bathrooms, etc. – Governors need just to ignore them.
scipio, the only thing the Feds have to do to yank a state governor into line is to withhold Fed Dollarz from his state. This makes him unpopular to the state’s powerful, and they arrange his removal.
Effective. The POTUS retains clean hands then.
Thought I’d help out with some answers, in reverse order:
Has the time come for us to begin the mass hangings? – Yesss!
Has anyone in Congress done anything to stop this? – Not a serious question.
Should the DHS be abolished? – Substitute erased for abolished. While the ‘crats are still hanging, raze all their office buildings, their homes and their informants’ homes, and salt the ground upon which they were built.
Who defines what is “harmful”, and by what parameters? – Nobody, they have all been hanged.
What are the penalties for disseminating this so-called “mal-information”? – What penalties? What is mal-information?
OK – in order
1) You will NEVER know the true names or parameters in the answer to
that question.
2) There ARE NO penalties.
3) Yes, with prejudice.
4) No, for the same reason NO ONE has gone after the IRS – becoming a
victim of said ‘Institution’.
5) If you don’t know my answer to that by now, you never will !
Answering (and carrying through on) “Yes” to #3 and #5 will go a long way to making
#1, #2, & #4 self-correcting.
• Who defines what is “harmful”, and by what parameters? The rulers
• What are the penalties for disseminating this so-called “mal-information”? Whatever they want at the time; purely subjective
• Should the DHS be abolished? Of course
• Has anyone in Congress done anything to stop this? No – they are enabling it and
• Has the time come for us to begin the mass hangings? Oh, yeah. Past time
Given that the over-arching question is: “Should the DHS be abolished?”
The department should never have been created. There is no constitutional authority for it to exist. (As opposed to, say, the Navy, where there is.)
The choice of name is something worse than tone-deaf.
I guess, to stay on-topic, the answer is, “Yes!”
M
Hanging s are too quick. A fortnight in the pillory and/or the stocks is far better – and make sure to feed ’em n’ give ’em plenty of fluids.
“over to the range”? Ma nish ta noh–?
You can find me there daily!
I was in the USCG-Aux when they formed DHS, and transferred the Coasties from DoT to DNS. They militarized a service organization (service to the public) to just another bunch of snoops – thugs with smiles.
Yes, this spying is UnConstitutional!
Yes, DNS needs to be disbanded.
Put the Coasties, and the Border Patrol/etc back into Treasury where the “revenue agents” belong.