ASSAULT ON CONSTITUTION - Orwell's 1984 Here and Now

Cry, my fellow Americans. In the name of safety we have finally lost any right to privacy. Orwell's 1984 (book) vision of a nation that constantly spies on its citizens has become reality. It is here, it is now.

"American Spy Satellites To Snoop On U.S." by Keach Hagey, CBS Evening News

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Department of Homeland Security has approved a measure to allow federal civilian agencies and law enforcement to turn American spy satellites on their own citizens for the first time.

Until now, the highly sensitive satellites were aimed mostly at other countries, usually ones we didn't really trust. Occasionally, geologists and NASA scientists got to use them to make things like topographical maps. Letting domestic security folks use them to spy is, the Journal says, "uncharted territory."

Officials have been mulling the plan for a couple years, but often bumped up against questions about whether this kind of snooping would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars military for engaging in law-enforcement activity within the U.S., since the satellites are built for and owned by the Defense Department.

The decision was made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnel, and OKed in May by DHS chief Michael Chertoff.

Access to the satellite will be controlled by a new Homeland Security branch, the National Applications Office. As Charles Allen, the DHS's chief intelligence officer who will head up the new program, summed up cryptically, "It is an idea whose time has come."

Naturally, privacy groups are freaking out. Sentences like this one probably don't help. "The full capabilities of these systems are unknown outside the intelligence community, because they are among the most closely held secrets in government."

One privacy advocate complained that it was this secrecy that was the real problem.

"You are talking about enormous power," said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group advocating privacy rights in the digital age. "Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous."

We all should be freaked out. About phone conversations overseas are being spied on (don't believe the only suspected terrorists malarkey, you can't know this until after you spy on the phone call); we have cameras watching street corners, now we have spy satellites watching us from above. From now on, be careful what you do in the open, in your own backyard or school or business or at the beach. Big Brother is watching.