Surviving Capitalism (Not) : It’s very easy to get onto the terrorist database, and impossible to get off it

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

It’s very easy to get onto the terrorist database, and impossible to get off it

Click here to access article by Mary O’hara from Vice via Climate Connections (better format).

Lauren Regan, executive director of Oregon’s Civil Liberties Defense Center, offered some observations on this subject:

“In the last several years, you see young, very young activists who are 19 years old and doing their first protest, those people now have an FBI number.” ....

“One of the biggest impacts on civil liberties is the chilling effect on normal people,” she added. “Putting everyday people on these watchlists, the effect of that is ‘be afraid of being branded a terrorist if you go to a single protest.’” Regan believes this is the point of the operation: “The volume of the information they’re collecting, most of that information isn’t useful to the feds, but the paranoia that the collection instills is useful.”