Who’s Afraid of Big Brother?

There’s a huge debate underway in America about government infringement of our civil liberties, domestic spying, and the “shredding of the Constitution,” all in the name of security. There are politicians and bloggers calling for charges of treason against The New York Times for exposing state “secrets,” blonde, trophy wife CIA agents are being “outed” (does anyone really believe she was a covert operative anywhere?), and peace activist tree-huggers are looking over their shoulders, lest covert operatives swoop in and rendition them to shadowy, torturous allies in Eastern Europe. The recent arrests in Great Britain, of over twenty suspected terrorists, many of whom were apprehended by utilizing the same controversial phone wire-tapping and financial transaction-snooping that have civil libertarians wringing their hands has only made this topic more complex. Are Americans’ freedoms really in danger? Is Big Brother for real?

For all of those Americans who are afraid that the Global War on Terrorism has pushed our country into a neo-Orwellian age, you all need to take a step back while taking a collective deep breath.

For one thing, quit looking over your shoulder. If you were a real threat, and I mean a real threat, and the government was really after you, you’d be gone! Dead. End-of-story. Say bye-bye to that iPod and your laptop. The people who need to know who the bad guys are already do, and you aren’t one of them. And trust me, the bad guys aren’t sitting where you are, checking their e-mails and reading my blog. They’re assembling a suitcase nuke right now in a rented apartment with no furniture in some God-forsaken neighborhood somewhere—now that you should worry about.

Secondly, do you actually think that anyone from The New York Times or any other paper, blogger, anchorman, or petty congressman serving on a red-tape committee has any real secrets to “leak” to the enemy? I’m talking hard-core, double secret probation, triple XXX, top, top secret stuff. Not “oh, look, we’re following the bank money” fluff—everyone knows that! I’m talking about the D-Day-landing’s-gonna-be-at-Normandy-type stuff. Of course not. Anything you read and see in the media, I guarantee you George W. Bush and his people wanted you (and the enemy) to see, hear, read, etc., no matter what it is. Get real. There’s a war on. This is life-and-death stuff we’re talking about.

And wake up! CIA Agent Valerie Plame wasn’t deep undercover in Osama bin Laden’s headquarters either. She wouldn’t have been able to get her oil changed at a Jiffy Lube in East LA without being noticed. In fact, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to her. I’m sure she already has an agent. And don’t put it past Playboy to offer her a cool mil for a photo shoot. It’s all smoke and mirrors, people! The real spooks doing the real spy stuff are slitting the throats of our enemies as we speak. They’re not getting “outed” by Robert Novak.

How do I know this stuff, you might ask? I’m an agent of “Big Brother”! As a police officer I stop paranoid people all the time who think their rights are being infringed upon by a corrupt government out of control. You’d be surprised how many folks don’t carry one stitch of identification on them.

“You have nothing with your name on it? Not even a Blockbuster card?” I ask. “Don’t you know there’s a war on? Patriot Act II and all that? Two, three…”

I don’t even know what Patriot Act we’re on anymore. They question me as to why I want to know their name, date of birth, home address—like I’m gonna steal their identity or something. I dunno, ‘cause it’s the law! Hey, I’m just trying to get an iced tall mocha at Starbucks, okay? Hurry up and gimme your info!

I mean, if the aforementioned interchange between a governmental stormtrooper, pig, cop, whatever you want to call it, hasn’t convinced you that Big Brother really isn’t watching you, I don’t know what will.

Seriously, though, if you are a true American, and by that, I mean that you have no “dual” nationalistic loyalties, and you believe in what the United States stands for; if you truly want us to vanquish our enemies in the Global War on Terrorism; if you do not wish ill will upon our country, or our troops overseas, no matter how you feel about President Bush; if you do not support or aid, either directly or indirectly, any anti-American causes, beliefs, organizations, not limited to, but including terror organizations, whether foreign or domestic, socialist, communist, or fascist-sympathetic or aligned groups that seek some anti-democratic, anti-capitalist “utopian” world order, and international organizations that seek to undermine our government or laws; if you do not engage in criminal activity that seeks to undermine the fabric of our American society, then you have absolutely NOTHING to fear from the U.S. government or its agents, in any of its manifestations, whether federal, state, county, or local. Got it? No one’s gonna get you, or spy on you, or infringe on your civil rights.

It boggles the mind that in the fifth year of a war against a determined, sadistic enemy, which shows no mercy, abides by none of the so-called “rules of war” that Westerners try to cling to, murders innocent women and children without remorse, literally saws the heads off civilian non-combatants, publicly declares their intention to wipe Israel from the map and bring death to America, that there are people here in the U.S. more afraid of bureaucratic stuffed shirts sifting through their Verizon bill and eavesdropping on their boring phone conversations.

What is the real issue here? The civil rights and anti-war activists have beaten the drums of our slowly-eroding freedoms for nearly half a decade now. I don’t know anybody—and I know hundreds of people—who have had their “freedoms” infringed upon by the Federal government’s war effort. I can’t think of any ordinary Americans who have been oppressed because of what’s happened at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Secret agents aren’t arresting Mr. Brady and George Jefferson as they head home from a hard day at the office. Soccer moms aren’t getting dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night by Delta Force troops dropped out of “black helicopters,” and Big Brother isn’t infiltrating PTA meetings and Eagle Scout Courts of Honor.

The only people who need to fear, say, the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, are those individuals and groups, many of them already here on U.S. soil, who mean to do us real harm. The majority of Americans, thankfully, won’t know for a long time how close many of them came to death; how their lives were spared from a dirty bomb detonation, or a terror attack upon a shopping mall, because the U.S. “war machine”—including the military, NSA, CIA, FBI, state, county, and local law enforcement—used all the tools they had at their disposal, including phone records, to identify, detect, intercept, apprehend, and in some cases eliminate, terrorists and terror cells as they devised or were about to execute their evil plans. As a member of our police forces, I can tell you that these clandestine “battles” occur every day in cities throughout the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

Protesting governmental policy, whether national or local, is a vital and cherished right of Americans everywhere. We need to use it wisely and pick and choose our battles. Not all domestic spying is bad. This isn’t the 1960s anymore. The “enemy” isn’t college hippies, Chicanos, and Jewish and African-American civil rights activists. The enemy is a brutal international cabal of radical Islamic murderers—Islamists—who will stop at nothing to kill you, your whole family, your neighbors across the street, all of your children’s classmates at school, your friendly neighborhood cop you see at Starbucks every day, our servicemen and women around the globe, and every other Christian, Jew, Hindu, etc., and even Muslims who aid the West, in their thirst for a global Islamic caliphate.

As cops we tell people all the time that the only ones who need to fear the police are the criminals. Law-abiding, truly innocent people are friends of the police. Ergo, only evil-doers need to fear domestic spy programs, wire-tapping, rendition, Guantanamo, the CIA recruiting on college campuses, Ann Coulter, Girl Scouts selling cookies. The government has better things to do than spy on “Joe Sixpack.” If, after reading this, you’re still unconvinced and mistrust the Federal government and want to really do a number on them, just let them peek at your Verizon bill. Have you ever tried to decipher that thing? Let the NSA listen in on your phone conversations, too—you’d kill them!

“Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Where you at?”