J.D. Tuccille on the Surveillance State That's Already Here
For weeks, headlines have trumpeted revelations about the National Security Agency's tracking of Internet traffic and phone communications and the secretive rubber-stamp court intended to provide us some illusion that our privacy and civil liberties are being respected, but which approves virtually every domestic spy scheme it reviews. It's almost… almost like we live in a surveillance state, we stammer as we blink at the brave new world revealed around us. But there's no "almost" about it, says J.D. Tuccille, managing editor of Reason 24/7. From the CIA spying through local cops, to FBI snooping through driver's license databases, to police departments tracking your movements with license-plate scanners, the NSA is only one part of the growing, unfinished, but very real surveillance state that the United States has become.