As Big Brother Watches...

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny

As Big Brother (Leviathan) watches... Complements of GWM and the Patriot Act.

WIRED - The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices “within 120 days.” More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.

The memo highlights the friction between today’s reality that electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves housing everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers and effects — juxtaposed against the government’s stated quest for national security.

The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data. {Read More}

Indeed our liberties are being slowly eroded away by Big Brother. And it is high time we begin to realize that rEpublicans are not true friends of liberty. Call me a rational skeptic but GWB did as much to rollback liberty as anyone in the last 80 or so years of our history.

Via: Memorandum