In the video below, a former decorated undercover FBI agent, Mike German, explains how the national security state, in league with local law enforcement, is secretly targeting Americans for political views and activities perceived as a threat to the political establishment.
German notes that local law enforcement is now used as a weapon against anti-establishment politicians, activists and political organizations – in short, state and local law enforcement is now fully integrated into a larger political secret police apparatus. Efforts by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, military intelligence and other agencies, including the CIA, in league with private sector contractors, have produced a surveillance state culture and foundation that rivals that created by East Germany’s Stasi.
“We’ve moved away from surveillance based on individualized suspicion, the Fourth Amendment standard of probable cause and a warrant has basically evaporated,” German told Reason.tv last year. “And the government can now collect information about people it doesn’t even suspect of wrongdoing.”
For the establishment and its political elite, traditional criminal “wrongdoing” comes in a distant second to political “wrongdoing” perceived as threatening the political status quo. Fusion centers established by the Department of Homeland Security are not designed to respond to bank robbery and illegal drug trafficking, but work proactively to seek out, identify and “neutralize” (as the FBI described in the 1960s under COINTELPRO) political opposition to the state and the corporate and financial interests it serves.
