"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty." - James Madison
"Here [in New Mexico], we are moving more toward a national police force. Homeland Security is involved with a lot of little things around town. Somebody in Washington needs to call a timeout." - Dan Klein, retired Albuquerque Police Department sergeant
If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude, and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS's governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be inept and bungling, it is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to building what the Founders feared most - a standing army on American soil.
The third largest federal agency behind the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, the DHS - with its 240,000 full-time workers, $61-billion budget, and sub-agencies that include the Coast Guard, Customs & Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Federal Emergency Management Agency - has been aptly dubbed a "runaway train."
In the 12 years since it was established to "prevent terrorist attacks within the United States," the DHS has grown from a post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to a leviathan with tentacles in every aspect of American life. With good reason, a bipartisan bill to provide greater oversight of and accountability for the DHS's purchasing process has been making its way through Congress.
A better plan would be to abolish the DHS altogether. In making the case for shutting down the de facto national police agency, analyst Charles Kenny offers the following six reasons: The agency lacks leadership; terrorism is far less of a threat than it is made out to be; the FBI has actually stopped more alleged terrorist attacks than DHS; the agency wastes exorbitant amounts of money with little to show for it; "an overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification"; and the agency is just plain bloated.
To Kenny's list, I will add the following: The menace of a national police force (a.k.a. a standing army) vested with so much power cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored. Indeed, as the following list shows, just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police-state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to police agencies in the form of grants.
Militarizing police and SWAT teams. The DHS routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, including tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons, and combat uniforms. This rise in military-equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, "paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams." The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war - and the citizenry are the enemy combatants.
Spying on activists, dissidents, and veterans. In 2009, DHS released three infamous reports on right-wing and left-wing "extremism," and another titled "Operation Vigilant Eagle," outlining a surveillance program targeting veterans. The reports collectively and broadly define extremists as individuals and groups "that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely." In 2013, it was revealed that DHS, the FBI, state and local law-enforcement agencies, and the private sector were working together to conduct nationwide surveillance on protesters' First Amendment activities.
Stockpiling ammunition. DHS, along with other government agencies, has been stockpiling an alarming amount of ammunition in recent years, which only adds to the discomfort of those already leery of the government. As of 2013, DHS had 260 million rounds of ammo in stock, which averages between 1,300 to 1,600 rounds per officer. The U.S. Army, in contrast, has roughly 350 rounds per soldier. DHS has since requisitioned more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammo - "enough," concludes Forbes magazine, "to sustain a hot war for 20-plus years."
Distributing license-plate readers. DHS has already distributed more than $50 million in grants to enable local police agencies to acquire license-plate readers, which rely on mobile cameras to photograph and identify cars, match them against a national database, and track their movements. Relying on private contractors to maintain a license-plate database allows the DHS and its affiliates to access millions of records without much in the way of oversight.
Contracting to build detention camps. In 2006, DHS awarded a $385-million contract to a Halliburton subsidiary to build detention centers on American soil. Although the government and Halliburton were not forthcoming about where or when these domestic detention centers would be built, they rationalized the need for them in case of "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs" in the event of other emergencies such as "natural disasters." Viewed in conjunction with the National Defense Authorization Act provision allowing the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens, it would seem the building blocks are already in place for such an eventuality.
Tracking cell phones with Stingray devices. Distributed to local police agencies as a result of grants from the DHS, these Stingray devices enable police to track individuals' cell phones - and their owners - without a court warrant or court order. The amount of information conveyed by these devices about one's activities, whereabouts, and interactions is considerable. As one attorney explained: "Because we carry our cell phones with us virtually everywhere we go, Stingrays can paint a precise picture of where we are and who we spend time with, including our location in a lover's house, in a psychologist's office, or at a political protest."
Carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities. Each year, DHS funds military-style training drills in cities across the country. These Urban Shield exercises, elaborately staged with their own set of professionally trained Crisis Actors playing the parts of shooters, bystanders, and victims, fool law-enforcement officials, students, teachers, bystanders, and the media into thinking it's a real crisis.
Using the TSA as an advance guard. The TSA now searches a variety of government and private databases, including things such as car registrations and employment information, to track travelers before they ever get near an airport. Other information collected includes "tax identification number, past travel itineraries, property records, physical characteristics, and law-enforcement or intelligence information."
Conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners. Under the direction of the TSA, American travelers have been subjected to all manner of searches ranging from whole-body scanners and enhanced pat-downs at airports to bag searches in train stations. In response to public outrage over what amounted to a virtual strip search, the TSA has begun replacing the scanners with equally costly yet less detailed models. The old scanners will be used by prisons for now.
Carrying out soft target checkpoints. VIPR task forces, composed of federal air marshals, surface-transportation security inspectors, transportation-security officers, behavior-detection officers, and explosive-detection canine teams have laid the groundwork for the government's effort to secure so-called "soft" targets such as malls, stadiums, and bridges. Some security experts predict that checkpoints and screening stations will eventually be established at all soft targets, such as department stores, restaurants, and schools. DHS's Operation Shield, a program that seeks to check up on security protocols around the country with unannounced visits, conducted a surprise security exercise at the Social Security Administration building in Leesburg, Flordia, when they subjected people who went to pick up their checks to random ID checks by federal agents armed with semi-automatic weapons.
Directing government workers to spy on Americans. Terrorism Liaison Officers are firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees who have received training to spy on and report back to government entities on the day-to-day activities of their fellow citizens. These individuals are authorized to report "suspicious activity," which can include such innocuous activities as taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs, and buying items in bulk.
Conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers. Data-collecting agencies spread throughout the country (aided by the National Security Agency), fusions centers - of which there are at least 78 scattered around the U.S. - constantly monitor our communications, collecting and cataloging everything from our Internet activity and Web searches to text messages, phone calls, and e-mails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police. Despite a budget estimated to be somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion, these fusion centers have proved to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless, or inappropriate intelligence while spending millions of dollars on "flat-screen televisions, sport-utility vehicles, hidden cameras, and other gadgets."
Carrying out Constitution-free border-control searches. On orders from the DHS, the government's efforts along the border have become little more than an exercise in police-state power, ranging from aggressive checkpoints to the widespread use of drone technology, often used against American citizens traveling within the country. Border-patrol operations occur within 100 miles of an international crossing, putting some 200 million Americans within the bounds of aggressive border-patrol searches and seizures, as well as increasingly expansive drone surveillance. With 71 checkpoints found along the southwest border of the United States alone, suspicion-less searches and seizures on the border are rampant. Border-patrol agents also search without a warrant the personal electronic devices of people crossing the border.
Funding city-wide surveillance cameras. As Charlie Savage reports for the Boston Globe, the DHS has funneled "millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video-camera networks, accelerating the rise of a 'surveillance society' in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost." These camera systems, installed on city streets, in parks, and in transit systems, create a vast surveillance network that can target millions of innocent individuals when used in conjunction with sophisticated computer systems that boast intelligent video analytics, digital biometric identification, military-pedigree software for analyzing and predicting crime, and facial-recognition software,.
Utilizing drones and other spybots. The DHS has been at the forefront of funding and deploying surveillance robots and drones for land, sea, and air, including robots that resemble fish and tunnel-bots that can travel underground. Despite repeated concerns over the danger surveillance drones used domestically pose to Americans' privacy rights, the DHS has continued to expand its fleet of Predator drones, which come equipped with video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. DHS also loans its drones to local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies for a variety of tasks, although the agency refuses to divulge any details about how, why, and in what capacity these drones are being used by police. Incredibly, the DHS has also been handing out millions of dollars in grants to local police agencies to "accelerate the adoption" of drones in their localities.
It's not difficult to see why the DHS has been described as a "wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast." If it is a beast, however, it is a beast that is accelerating our nation's transformation into a police state through its establishment of a standing army.
This, too, is nothing new. Historically, as I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the establishment of a national police force has served as a fundamental and final building block for every totalitarian regime that has ever wreaked havoc on humanity, from Hitler's all-too-real Nazi Germany to George Orwell's fictional Oceania. Whether fictional or historical, however, the calling cards of these national police agencies remain the same: brutality, inhumanity, corruption, intolerance, rigidity, and bureaucracy - in other words, evil.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of the Rutherford Institute (Rutherford.org) and editor of GadflyOnline.com. His latest book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, is available online at Amazon.com. He can be reached at johnw@rutherford.org.
