Eric Moore: What’s to keep VIPER from secretly watching ... all of us
Recent efforts securing extra counter-gang resources is applauded. However, new powerful police intelligence programs wrapped in super-surveillance and ultra-secrecy minimally requires robust citizen oversight. The creation of “pre-crime programs” controlled by police and implemented by private contractors is anathema to American political culture and the survival of the republic. These military-grade surveillance programs marketed as “solutions to crime” may ultimately collect and monitor the movement and activities of all peoples (including children), effortlessly building “lists” on any group for any reason.
Yesterday’s ISIS is today’s BDS is tomorrow’s tea or Democratic Party donors.
Despite best intentions, adding murky VIPER powers to practices like civil asset forfeiture will inevitably create arbitrary and cruel abuses of power – the very definition of tyranny. Inalienable rights have become a footnote American jurisprudence. The refusal to deploy the same pre-crime technologies to counter potential white-collar criminals and corrupt government employees based in Sacramento simply enforces a vicious class war leveled on poor people in the Central Valley.
After VIPER, everyone exists as an indefinite “person of interest” without due process. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot exist when you are stalked by government.
Who watches the watchmen?
Eric Moore, Merced
This story was originally published June 21, 2016 at 1:09 PM with the headline "Eric Moore: What’s to keep VIPER from secretly watching ... all of us."