"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." - Aldous Huxley, Ends & Means

If 2014 was the year of militarized police, armored tanks, and stop-and-frisk searches, 2015 may well be the year of technologized police, surveillance blimps, and scan-and-frisk searches.

Just as we witnessed neighborhood cops being transformed into soldier cops, we're about to see them shapeshift once again, this time into robocops, complete with robotic exoskeletons, super-vision contact lenses, computer-linked visors, and mind-reading helmets.

Similarly, just as military equipment created for the battlefield has been deployed on American soil against American citizens, we're about to see military technology employed here at home in a manner sure to annihilate what's left of our privacy and Fourth Amendment rights.

For instance, with the flick of a switch (and often without your even being aware of the interference), police can now shut down your cell phone, scan your body for "suspicious" items as you walk down the street, test the air in your car for alcohol vapors as you drive down the street, identify you at a glance and run a background check on you for outstanding warrants, piggyback on your surveillance devices to listen in on your conversations and "see" what you see on your private cameras, and track your car's movements via a GPS-enabled dart.

That doesn't even begin to scrape the surface of what's coming down the pike, with law enforcement and military agencies boasting technologies so advanced as to render everything up until now mere child's play.

Once these technologies, which used to belong exclusively to the realm of futuristic sci-fi films, have been unleashed on an unsuspecting American public, it will completely change the face of American policing and, in the process, transform the landscape of what we used to call our freedoms.

It doesn't even matter that these technologies can be put to beneficial uses. As we've learned the hard way, once the government gets involved, it's only a matter of time before the harm outweighs the benefits.

Imagine self-guided "smart" bullets that can track their target as it moves, solar-powered airships that provide persistent wide-area surveillance and tracking of ground "targets," a grenade launcher that can deliver 14 flash-bang rounds, invisible tanks that can blend into their surroundings and masquerade as a snow bank or a soccer mom's station wagon, and a guided mortar weapon that can target someone up to 12 miles away.

Or what about "less lethal weapons" such as the speech-jammer gun, which can render a target tongue-tied; sticky foam guns, which shoot foam that hardens on contact, immobilizing the victim; and shock-wave generators, which use the shockwaves from a controlled explosion to knock people over.

Now imagine trying to defend yourself against such devices, which are incapable of distinguishing between an enemy combatant and a civilian. For that matter, imagine attempting to defend yourself or your loved ones against police officers made superhuman thanks to technology that renders them bullet-proof, shatter-proof, all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful.

Does rendering a government agent superhuman make them inhuman, as well - unable to relate to the mass of humanity they are sworn to protect and defend?

Pointing out that the clothes people wear can affect how they act, Salon.com reporter Geordie McRuer notes that "when clothing has symbolic meaning - such as a uniform that is worn only by a certain profession - it prepares the mind for the pursuit of goals that are consistent with the symbolic meaning of the clothing."

McRuer continues: "When we dress our police officers in camouflage before deploying them to a peaceful protest, the result will be police who think more like soldiers. This likely includes heightening their perception of physical threats, and increasing the likelihood that they react to those threats with violence. Simply put, dressing police up like soldiers potentially changes how they see a situation, changing protesters into enemy combatants, rather than what they are: civilians exercising their democratic rights. ...

"When police wear soldiers' clothing, and hold soldiers' weapons, it primes them to think and act like soldiers. Furthermore, clothing that conceals their identity - such as the helmets, gas masks, goggles, body armor, and riot shields that are now standard-issue for officers at peaceful protests - will increase the likelihood that officers react aggressively to the situation. As a result of the fact that they are also dressed like soldiers, they are more likely to interpret the situation as hostile and will more readily identify violence as the best solution."

While robocops are troubling enough, the problem we're facing is so much greater than technology-enhanced domestic soldiers.

We're on the cusp of a major paradigm shift from fascism disguised as a democracy into a technocratic surveillance society in which there are no citizens, only targets. We're all targets now, to be scanned, surveilled, tracked, and treated like blips on a screen.

What's taking place in Maryland right now is a perfect example of this shift. With Congress' approval and generous funding (and without the consensus of area residents), the Army has just launched two massive, billion-dollar surveillance airships into the skies over Baltimore, each three times the size of a Goodyear blimp, ostensibly to defend against cruise-missile attacks. Government officials claim the surveillance blimps, which provide highly detailed radar imaging within a 340-mile radius, are not presently being used to track individuals or carry out surveillance against citizens, but it's only a matter of time before that becomes par for the course.

In New York, police will soon start employing mobile scanners that allow them to scan people on the street to detect any hidden object under their clothes, be it a gun, a knife, or anything else that appears "suspicious." The scanners will also let them carry out enhanced data collection in the field - fingerprints, iris scans, facial mapping - which will build the government's biometric database that much faster. These scanners are a more-mobile version of the low-radiation X-ray vans used to scan the contents of passing cars.

Google Glass, being considered for use by officers, would allow police to access computer databases, as well as run background checks on and record anyone in their line of sight.

One program, funded by $160 million in asset-forfeiture funds, would equip police officers and vehicles with biometric smartphones that can scan individuals' fingerprints and cross-check them against criminal databases. The devices will also contain real-time 911 data; warrant information from federal, state, and city databases; photographs of missing persons, suspects, Crime Stoppers posters, and other persons of interest; and the latest cache of information on terror suspects.

Stand-off lasers can detect alcohol vapors in a moving car: "If alcohol vapors are detected in the car, a message with a photo of the car including its license plate is sent to a police officer waiting down the road. Then, the police officer stops the car and checks for signs of alcohol using conventional tests."

Ekin Patrol cameras, described as "the first truly intelligent patrol unit in the world," can not only detect the speed of passing cars but can generate tickets instantaneously; recognize and store the license plates of stopped, moving, or parked vehicles; measure traffic density and violation data; and engage in facial recognition of drivers and passengers.

Collectively, all of these gizmos, gadgets, and surveillance devices render us not just suspects in a surveillance state but also inmates in an electronic concentration camp. As journalist Lynn Stuart Parramore notes: "The Information Age ... has turned out rather differently than many expected. Instead of information made available for us, the key feature seems to be information collected about us. Rather of granting us anonymity and privacy with which to explore a world of facts and data, our own data is relentlessly and continually collected and monitored. The wondrous things that were supposed to make our lives easier - mobile devices, Gmail, Skype, GPS, and Facebook - have become tools to track us, for whatever purposes the trackers decide. We have been happily shopping for the bars to our own prisons, one product at a time."

Unfortunately, eager for progress and ill-suited to consider the moral and spiritual ramifications of our planned obsolescence, we have yet to truly fathom what it means to live in an environment in which we are always on red alert, always under observation, and always having our actions measured, judged, and found wanting under some law or other intrusive government regulation.

There are those who are not at all worried about this impending future, certain that they have nothing to hide. Rest assured, soon we will all have nowhere to hide from the prying eyes of a government bound and determined to know everything about us - where we go, what we do, what we say, what we read, what we keep in our pockets, how much money we have on us, how we spend that money, who we know, what we eat and drink, and where we are at any given moment. The government is also prepared to use that information against us, whenever it becomes convenient and profitable to do so.

Making the case that we're being transformed as citizens, neighbors, and human beings, Parramore identifies six factors arising from a society in which surveillance becomes the norm: a shift in power dynamics, in which the "watcher" becomes all-seeing and all-powerful; an incentive to turn citizens into outlaws by criminalizing otherwise lawful activities; diminished citizenship; an environment of suspicion and paranoia; a divided society composed of the watchers and the watched; and "a society of edgy, unhappy beings whose sense of themselves is chronically diminished."

As Parramore rightly concludes, this is "not exactly a recipe for Utopia."

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute (Rutherford.org). His award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State is available online at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

A solid majority of Illinoisans wants newly inaugurated Governor Bruce Rauner to find common ground with the Democratic legislative majority rather than be confrontational, a new poll finds. However, most aren't confident that the state's leaders can avoid gridlock, and a majority believes Democrats will be to blame.

In a January 15 We Ask America poll, 1,026 registered voters were asked: "Do you think Republican Governor Bruce Rauner should try to solve the state's problems by working to find common ground with the Democrat-controlled legislature, or should he take a more confrontational approach with the Democrats in trying to solve this state's many problems?"

Sixty-seven percent said they want Rauner to find common ground, while 22 percent said he should take a more confrontational approach. Another 6 percent said he should do both, and 5 percent were unsure.

Eighty-four percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents wanted him to find common ground, while 76 percent of African Americans and 67 percent of whites said the same.

Every demographic favored the common-ground approach, although only a 49-percent plurality of Republicans did so, as opposed to 36 percent who wanted a more confrontational approach from the GOP governor.

So here we are, welcoming 2015, on the heels of another biennial national, state, and county election season. And whether one considers government spending at the national, state, or local level, we have an ever-increasing lack of fiscal sobriety. This is due mostly to a dangerously inactive populace, and it will not leave this country unscathed. Sadly, these are tired words of mine.

With few exceptions, Americans re-elected bad actors and maintained the status quo in Congress and in state and county governments. This is mostly thanks to a brilliant two-party political system that so expertly marginalizes third-party alternatives. State ballot-access laws, corrupt courts, little to no scrutiny of election equipment and technology, and big special-interest money prevent third-party or independent candidates from gaining significant ground.

And independent or third-party candidates' ability to gain valuable mainstream-media exposure has only declined over the decades of media-ownership concentration. In 2009, Mother Jones published a graph showing 25 years of media mergers "from GE to NBC and Google to YouTube" resulting in only eight major holding companies that control the vast majority of what is today called news, plus the entertainment and print and digital publishing platforms that generate the content that dominates American media ownership (RCReader.com/y/motherjones). Columbia Journalism Review publishes a useful online directory of "what major media companies own" (CJR.org/resources), and that list has 72 companies. This is roughly one controlling company for every 4 million Americans. When one is trying to control the messaging about the benefits of the two-party system, the lion's share of campaign funds raised during elections goes to these relatively few media outlets. It is the bread and butter of corporate media, gladly disseminating the gamut of propaganda necessary to maintain the control grid.

As you likely already know, Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka passed away last week.

Topinka had a stroke the morning of December 9, but that's not what killed her. In fact, by the afternoon, she announced she was going to walk to the restroom. Her chief of staff, Nancy Kimme, told her not to try because she was paralyzed on her left side. In mocking defiance, Topinka started kicking her no-longer-paralyzed leg.

By early evening, medical staff told Topinka that she'd be out of the hospital in a few days and would then need three weeks of rehabilitation. The indestructible Topinka appeared to have won again, just like she did after she fell and broke her hip and badly injured her back after giving a speech in 2012. The accident slowed her down, but it never stopped her, never silenced her, never broke her spirit, never stopped her from running for re-election.