‘There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.’ – Professor Robert Gellately
If you see something suspicious, says the Department of Homeland Security, say something about it to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using a convenient app on your smart phone.(If you’re a whistleblower wanting to snitch on government wrongdoing, however, forget about it – the government doesn’t take kindly to having its dirty deeds publicized and, God forbid, being made to account for them.)For more than a decade now, the DHS has plastered its ‘See Something, Say Something’ campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Now colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas are lining up for grants to participate in the program. This DHS slogan is nothing more than the government’s way of indoctrinating ‘we the people’ into the mindset that we’re an extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens. This is what is commonly referred to as community policing. Yet while community policing and federal programs such as ‘See Something, Say Something’ are sold to the public as patriotic attempts to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security. The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own policing.
This post was published at Ron Paul Institute on September 22, 201.
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