Lynne Kiesling
This TechDirt article pulls together a lot of the various strands that are worrying about the growth of the U.S. police state — extralegal detention, the militarization of local police at the hands of the DHS, surveillance, increased imprisonment despite an all-time low crime rate, punitive immigration policy, the war on x where x is a member of the set {drugs, terror, …}. The only dots they don’t connect here are the invasive, expensive, ineffective policies and practices of the TSA and the indiscriminate use of drone strikes. But even without connecting those dots in, their assessment is
Bad news about the impending police state here in America: it’s already here. From the indefinite detention (without trial) of terrorism suspects both foreign and American to the escalating militarization of our nation’s police forces, there’s little to indicate that any level of government is willing to “walk back” the overreach of law enforcement, much of which stems from the Patriot Act’s anti-terrorism aims.
The persistence of these policies defies both logic and common sense. For how long are we going to put up with these rights-eviscerating, socially corrosive uses of our tax money? After following the Patriot Act, DHS, TSA, digital surveillance, the NDAA, and so on over the past decade, I fail to see either the moral or economic justification for these policies that fall under the Patriot Act umbrella, particularly since the terrorist threat has ebbed. And what’s more disturbing is that support for such authoritarian policy is high and crosses the tribal Team Red-Team Blue political boundaries.
It’s enough to make a dispassionate economist weep for her country’s lost principles.