“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.”—John Lennon
On July 9, soon after Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American woman, moved to Texas from Naperville, Illinois to take a new job as a college outreach officer at her alma mater, Prairie View A&M, she was pulled over by the police for failing to signal while making a lane change. What followed has become all too common and illustrates the ever increasing rise in domestic terrorism in the United States.
An indication of how this is to play out can be discerned from Monday’s judgment of the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which found that Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had spied on a number of human rights groups around the world.
The “public” interest has been made synonymous with economic growth and international competitiveness. Police, surveillance and military budgets are, as Nina Power notes, being increased in order to defend the “public” from vague racist threats like ISIS and “terrorism,” but in fact these weapons will be wielded against those of us committed to causing “economic disruptions” to challenge the order of extractive austerity.
It is important to remember that public order intelligence gathering by the police is carried out with a deliberate purpose: what some criminologists have called ‘strategic advantage’ and ‘strategic incapacitation’.1 Intelligence is used to understand the structures, sustainability and strengths of protest groups, in order to develop ways to undermine them.
The irony is hard to miss. The United States government, which wages war all over the world on the phony pretext of defending “democracy” and “human rights,” increasingly relies on the methods of martial law in response to any indication of social unrest within its borders.
Before this shocking video surfaced, however, most of the local press coverage, per usual, followed the police’s official narrative and amplified a storyline that, in retrospect, was entirely made up.
It is, in short, judicial approval for the mass surveillance of UK political activism.
Terrorism pushes our emotional buttons. And politicians and the media tend to blow the risk of terrorism out of proportion. But as the figures above show, terrorism is a very unlikely cause of death.
Indeed, our spending on anti-terrorism measures is way out of whack
He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed.
The Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), whose existence has never before been disclosed, was formed in April 2010 to target vulnerabilities in cellphones. One of its main missions was to covertly penetrate computer networks of corporations that manufacture SIM cards, as well as those of wireless network providers. The team included operatives from both GCHQ and the NSA.
Around 200 Occupy Democracy supporters were threatened with arrest and five arrests were subsequently made in which large numbers of police targeted and, sometimes violently, picked off peaceful protesters.
