Our fourth amendment rights were taken and it's time we demand them back.
If monitoring our purchases, emails, phone calls, location and social media use can't detect a guy who buys an assault rifle, two pistols, a shotgun, 6000 rounds of ammunition, a gas mask, and a full suit of ballistic body armor, then what possible good is it?
Then there's whatever was in the smoke bomb he set off, and whatever is in all of those bottles to be triggered by the tripwires in his apartment.
Our super techno-surveillance apparatus isn't worth half a rat's ass if it didn't detect this guy.
Or what? "Sure we're looking for terrorists, but not ones who use firearms or explosives"?
A guy with no history for weapons purchases stocks up to be an 'army of one' over the course of just a few months and that doesn't stand out?
We should have demanded the surveillance programs be dismantled as soon as we heard about them because they are clear, on their face, violations of the 4th amendment. The nation was caught up in fear and uncertainty post 9/11 and we were willing to trade our rights for the promise of future security.
Let us forgive ourselves for that lapse in judgement and today start doing the right thing--demanding our rights back.
Surveillance is sold to the people with security-- "Give up your privacy and we will make you safe".
But the lesson of the whole arc of history and the deaths in Colorado prove that to be a dangerous lie.
The Surveillance State is always about enforcing political norms and protecting the power of the rulers, not keeping the people safe from "bad guys out there".
Over the past few days, we have perfect examples of what the Surveillance State does and does not do. It monitors people who blow the whistle on government and corporate collusion and point out when and how the government oversteps its authority and wastes our money, but it DOES NOT KEEP US SAFE.
I mourn those lost in Aurora. Perhaps their memory can drive us to implement common sense regulation of firearms and amunition and to dismantle the failed and unconstitutional surveillance state.