Some Illinois Legislative Black Caucus members are saying "I told you so" in the wake of a stunning state Auditor General investigation into misspending, waste, and possibly even fraud in an anti-violence initiative hastily created by Governor Pat Quinn.

Quinn created the program in August of 2010, a few days after meeting with ministers from Chicago's Roseland neighborhood about rising violence. In early September, several Chicago aldermen gave their lists of preferred local groups that could administer the state program. Quinn's administration sent requests for proposal only to those alderman-recommended groups.

By October, just weeks before the November 2010 election, the program had mushroomed to $50 million.

Despite initial claims that a specific formula was used to choose the targeted neighborhoods for violence-reduction programs, no actual documentation exists for how those decisions were made.

Illinois state Senator Kirk Dillard told Chicago radio station WLS last week that Republican county chairs ought to try to get Bill Brady and/or Dan Rutherford out of the governor's race so he could have a clear shot at wealthy front-runner Bruce Rauner. Dillard claims he is building strong momentum with recent endorsements, including the powerful Illinois Education Association (IEA).

But two polls taken last week showed that Dillard isn't even winning the DuPage County state Senate district that he has represented for more than 20 years.

A Capitol Fax/We Ask America poll taken February 20 had Rauner leading in the district with 36 percent; Dillard had 30 percent. Brady polled 10 percent, and Rutherford was at 2 percent. Another 22 percent were undecided. The poll of 614 likely Republican voters had a margin of error of 3.95 percent. Twelve percent of the calling universe was cell phones.

I didn't commission the poll to be a jerk, but because somebody slipped me results of a Strive Strategies tracking poll taken February 18, which had Rauner at 33 percent and Dillard at 26 percent in Dillard's own district. The margins between the two men are almost exactly the same in both polls, so this is pretty solid evidence that Dillard is, indeed, losing his own Senate district, which he has represented since 1993.

What the heck is going on? Well, millions of dollars in campaign ads on Chicago TV by Rauner and pretty much nothing by Dillard is the simplest answer.

"It's a future where you don't forget anything. ... In this new future, you're never lost. ... We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time. ... Your car will drive itself; it's a bug that cars were invented before computers. ... You're never lonely. ... You're never bored. ... You're never out of ideas. ... We can suggest where you go next, who to meet, what to read. ... What's interesting about this future is that it's for the average person, not just the elites." - Google CEO Eric Schmidt on his vision of the future

Time to buckle up your seatbelts, folks. You're in for a bumpy ride.

We're hurtling down a one-way road toward the Police State at mind-boggling speeds, the terrain is getting more treacherous by the minute, and we've passed all the exit ramps. From this point forward, there is no turning back, and the signpost ahead reads "Danger."

Indeed, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we're about to enter a Twilight Zone of sorts, one marked by drones, smart phones, GPS devices, smart TVs, social media, smart meters, surveillance cameras, facial-recognition software, online banking, license-plate readers, and driver-less cars - all part of the interconnected technological spider web that is life in the American police state, and every new gadget pulls us that much deeper into the sticky snare.

In this Brave New World awaiting us, there will be no communication not spied upon, no movement untracked, no thought unheard. In other words, there will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

We're on the losing end of a technological revolution that has already taken hostage our computers, our phones, our finances, our entertainment, our shopping, and our appliances, and now it's focused its sights on our cars. As if the government wasn't already able to track our movements on the nation's highways and byways by way of satellites, GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, government officials are now pushing to require that all new vehicles come installed with black-box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, ostensibly to help prevent crashes.

Late last year, I published a commentary on the questionable policy implementation by the Scott County Board of Supervisors, at the request of staff, to indiscriminately destroy e-mails more than three years old, beginning January 2, 2014 (RCReader.com/y/email1).This new policy was implemented in the wake of Assistant County Administrator Mary Thee issuing a memo to county employees about the increase of public inquiries and litigation requesting e-mail messages.

In the spirit of practicing what I was preaching, namely getting one's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in before the January 2 date (despite the county administrator extolling that her staff has been practicing said deleting for some time), I submitted a FOIA request about a topic this paper has covered more extensively than any local news outlet: the Scott County Emergency Communications Center, a.k.a. SECC911. (See RCReader.com/y/foia1 and RCReader.com/y/foia2.)

Keep in mind that the SECC911 project is important because it was sold to the taxpayers as a cost-saver, only to have its costs more than quadruple the original estimates, ballooning to more than $20 million. And the entity that was created under a 28E, or "emergency services" statute, is made up of un-elected appointees, who possess unlimited, or un-capped, taxing authority. I am still amazed at how few people are familiar, let alone concerned, with this black hole that flies completely under the radar. And, lest we forget, years later we still don't have a consolidated 911 dispatch service.

This request was e-mailed to the Scott County Board of Supervisors as well as Administrator Dee Bruemmer. Below is the text of that request, and the response from Assistant County Attorney Robert Cusack. For those paying close attention, yes, Cusack is the son of William Cusack, one of the supervisors this FOIA request was directed to.