Government Uses Private Sector to Expand Surveillance State

The government comes for civil liberties by partnering with large corporations and a private surveillance company to monitor the general public.

July 15, 2024

By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP

Anyone who has even an small appreciation for liberty winces at the mere mention of his name because he would take the progressivism and amplify it by orders of magnitude.

It was under Wilson that the non-interventionism of the United States would be dismantled, never to return to it again.

It was under Wilson that the Federal Reserve Bank was introduced.

And it was under Wilson that any dissent toward those two policies would be quashed by way of the Espionage Act of 1917 and later the Sedition Act of 1918.

These laws would later be repealed, but were begotten by Wilson’s paranoia and obsession with power. In his own words to congress, in December 1915 while the US was still at peace:

“I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.”

There are some naturalized citizens who speak out against me, is what he ultimately was saying. But the rhetoric of patriotism and national security is of course laced through it.

Enter the Espionage Act. But then there were natural-born Americans who also were against the US entering the Great War. What to do about them? Enter the Sedition Act. This tightened the vice even more by criminalizing criminalize “disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive” speech about the United States or its symbols.

These are different from what John Adams passed as the Alien and Sedition Act one hundred twenty years prior which led to the same perils as Wilson’s efforts.

For a man who insisted he wanted to make the world safe for democracy, he did a bang up job violating all the rights and freedoms that would endear societies toward that goal.

Observed Harvard Law Professor Zechariah Chafee: “One by one the right of freedom of speech, the right of assembly, the right to petition, the right to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right against arbitrary arrest, the right to a fair trial … the principle that guilt is personal, the principle that punishment should bear some proportion to the offense, had been sacrificed and ignored.”

This ultimately had neighbors pitted against neighbors. It resulted in thousands of arrests, over a thousand convictions, and nearly seventy-five news publications shutting down:

Press censorship operated on a huge scale in the United States. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were forced to shut down. There was a nationwide vigilante group with 250,000 members that was chartered by the Justice Department that went around making citizen’s arrests, roughing people up in a very violent way. And during that period, there were roughly a thousand Americans sent to prison for a year or more, and a far larger number for shorter periods of time solely for things that they wrote or said.

China has something similar today. And while Americans might look down their noses at China’s stifling of free speech and persecution of dissenters, the US isn’t too far off.

The Wilson era instituted an agency knowns as the CPI or Committee on Public Information. It was a propaganda machine that cranked out support for the president and the war effort, and likewise encouraged the media to push that message:

The CPI issued a set of voluntary “guidelines” for U.S. newspapers, to help those patriotic editors who wanted to support the war effort (with the implication that those editors who did not follow the guidelines were less patriotic than those who did).

While the agency was short-lived, the job didn’t go away. This is still happening today, right? Federal agents approach Social Media platforms, and issue a “voluntary set of guidelines” asking that they censor or suppress “misinformation” or “disinformation” about the vaccines and lockdowns?

This went to the Supreme Court recently and was rejected by the high court due to insufficient evidence.

We’d written about the government partnering with genealogy services, facial recognition services, and the cooperation of many private industries to push their agendas while circumventing the legal requirement to pass laws imposing on the general public.

Similar to how congress has avoided formally declaring war since World War 2, yet they somehow manage to still put us in Overseas Contingency Operations, Humanitarian Interventions, and Emergency Police Actions… all of which bear an uncanny resemblance to wars. We even softened the wartime activities with a series of euphemisms.

The private sector is once again being pitted against itself, while law makers and law enforcement circumvent their rules for transparency. Four major corporations are participating in this large scale surveillance scheme: Simon Malls, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Federal Express, and Kaiser Permanente.

Both of these major corporations partner with a surveillance company called Flock Safety, which has been commissioned to build an AI car surveillance network. Their network currently is in 4,000 cities across 40 states with approximately 40,000 cameras in operation. These cameras track license plates, make, model, color and even such features as dents and bumper stickers.

Lisa Femia, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because private entities aren’t subject to the same transparency laws as police, this sort of arrangement could “[leave] the public in the dark, while at the same time expanding a sort of mass surveillance network.”

To be clear, this isn’t just a one-way street either. Police are also sharing their feeds with FedEx.

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was “profoundly disconcerting” that FedEx was exchanging data with law enforcement as part of Flock’s “mass surveillance” system. “It raises questions about why a private company…would have privileged access to data that normally is only available to law enforcement,” he said.

It’s not that there are large corporations or rich people that’s unto itself troubling. Those features are not inherently good or bad. It’s the collaboration between the state and these corporations as a work-around to implement policies that would not otherwise not pass constitutional muster legislatively.

Politicians take no political risk with their constituents, while these corporations curry favor with politicians. This is not only the epitome of cronyism, but it is likewise the epitome of fascism. As you can see, nothing good comes from this, no matter how much people bluster about safety and security.