***. “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” [ Abraham Lincoln; 1837 ]
“ICE Is. Watching. You” [Tressie McMillan Cotton; New York Times; 2/6/26]
This post presents excerpts from. ICE Is Watching You”:
6]. “Many of us have come to believe that our data is something outside ourselves, when, in fact, data is our self.”
7] “Imagine what our country would look like if a federal agency compiled everything it could find about you on the open market and then paired it with your most sensitive personal data and the full weight of the federal surveillance apparatus. The result would be a system that could not only track you but also pretty accurately predict your choices, behaviors and vulnerabilities.” [NOTE: does this sound like “1984” ????? ]
10] “Emily Tucker, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, suggested the agency could be constructing a surveillance system that, in my estimation, would make “Minority Report” look like child’s play. Homeland Security, she said, “is increasingly emphasizing interoperability in its contracting.” That is a strong sign that the agency wants to connect a range of databases……”They are seeking data about every aspect of the lives of everyone,” she said.” [NOTE: “1984” ??? ]
15] “A militarized federal police force that acts out of loyalty on the whim of a political leader who relishes retribution and adulation is the tip of the iceberg….This kind of weaponry could effectively nullify our Fourth Amendment right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure. it could also more easily enable the government to trample on your free speech. And it could do all of this without meaningful transparency or oversight.”
***. “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it.”
[. George Orwell: “1984” ]
1] “In the latest stop in Donald Trump’s war on liberal democracy, federal agents in Minneapolis have shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti…”
2] “The gun and the phone are both weapons – one a tool for violence and the other a tool of control.”
3] “That phone represents a greater power, one that could outlast Trumpism. ICE knows that it cannot shoot us all. But the Department of Homeland Security is close to being able to track us all.”
4]. “The federal government, whether Democratic-or-Republican-controlled, has repeatedly failed to institute meaningful, urgently needed regulation of or legislation about data privacy that matches the scale of our risk.”
***. “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of the opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” [ Harry Truman; 33rd U.S. President ]
5] “Democratic administrations…thought Silicon Valley chief executives were the good guys. So they enabled their sci-fi aspirations….Then many chiefs turned heel, helping the Trump administration aggressively scale up a data dragnet that will eat our civil liberties for lunch, if we let it.”
8]. “In a citizen video from Maine that has been widely shared online, an ICE agent told a legal observer that he was taking a picture of her license plate to add her to a “nice little database” that will label her a “domestic terrorist.”
[ YOU know nothing about an ICE agent, BUT, he knows EVERYTHING about YOU ]
9} “..on Jan. 30, the Times reported that ICE was exploring ways to integrate advertising technologies and the data associated with them into its operations, specifically asking potential vendors the extent to which data could be collected on “people, businesses, devices, locations, transactions, public records.”
11] “If combined with the facial recognition and social media monitoring commonly deployed byt the Department of Homeland Security, those reams of data would turbocharge ICE’s terror campaign in the short term and destroy American civil liberties in the long term.”
*** [ ‘BIG BROTHER. IS. WATCHING. YOU” – “1984 ]
12]. “…Senator Ron Wyden….told me that the federal government is “weaponizing private data” against citizens and noncitizens. Of particular concern…was….what this administration cannot buy, it will simply take.”
13] “The Trump administration has been taking advantage of state-level data that has been aggregated by a third party nonprofit data clearinghouse called Niets….there are far too few restrictions on who can use that data and how they can use it.”
14] “You only need to know this: Whatever is happening with your data, it is important enough to the most egregiously lawless administration in American history that it be collected and consolidated.”
16] ‘.. it all starts with the American people understanding that our freedoms are now bound up in who controls our data.”
*** “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
George Orwell; “1984” – Or, is it Donald Trump; 2025-20XX ??? ]
With Justice For All 