‘We are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and harassed”
by John & Nisha Whitehead at off-guardian via thefreeonline at https://wp.me/pIJl9-FWJ Tgram.. https://t.me/thefreeonline/2180
Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the US American police state.
Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.
The Rise Of The Immortal Dictator: What Will AI Mean For Freedom
The Washington Post on how law enforcement agencies across the nation are using “artificial intelligence tools in a way they were never intended to be used: as a shortcut to finding and arresting suspects without other evidence.”
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.
Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.
Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.
AI surveillance is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable by doing what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
The ramifications of any government wielding such unregulated, unaccountable power are chilling, as AI surveillance provides the ultimate means of repression and control for tyrants and benevolent dictators alike.
Indeed, China’s social credit system, where citizens are assigned scores based on their behavior and compliance, offers a glimpse into this dystopian future.
This is not a battle against technology itself, but against its misuse. It’s a fight to retain our humanity, our dignity, and our freedom in the face of unprecedented technological power. It’s a struggle to ensure that AI serves us, not the other way around.
Faced with this looming threat, the time to act is now, before the lines between citizen and subject, between freedom and control, become irrevocably blurred.
The future of freedom depends on it.
So demand transparency. Demand accountability.
Demand an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from the encroaching surveillance state.
We need safeguards in place to ensure the right to data ownership and control (the right to know what data is being collected about them, how it’s being used, who has access to it, and the right to be “forgotten”); the right to algorithmic transparency (to understand how algorithms that affect them make decisions, particularly in areas like loan applications, job hiring, and criminal justice) and due process accountability; the right to privacy and data security, including restrictions on government and corporate use of AI-powered surveillance technologies, particularly facial recognition and predictive policing; the right to digital self-determination (freedom from automated discrimination based on algorithmic profiling) and the ability to manage and control one’s online identity and reputation; and effective mechanisms to seek redress for harms caused by AI systems.
AI deployed without any safeguards in place to protect against overreach and abuse, especially within government agencies, has the potential to become what Elon Musk described as an “immortal dictator,” one that lives forever and from which there is no escape.
Whatever you choose to call it—the police state, the Deep State, the surveillance state—this “immortal dictator” will be the future face of the government unless we rein it in now.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, next year could be too late.
The Free 