This ubiquitous world-wide surveillance of anyone and everyone should serve as a wake up call for what the future may hold. Rapid deployment of the new technologies uncovered in the FOIA records brings us closer to an extensive and inescapable surveillance state, where we blindly place our hands on electronic devices that capture our digital prints, stare into iris scanning devices that record the details of our eyes, and have pictures taken of different angles of our faces so that the FBI and other federal agencies can store and use such information.

Much pundit ink has been spilled pondering why the OccupyWallStreet protest has grown so rapidly and resonated so widely. But the answer is really not difficult to apprehend. Our political system is fundamentally broken by corruption and oligarchical control. Many people know this. They have rationally concluded that voting fixes none of these systemic problems precisely because the problems are systemic. And going out into the street to protest and demand an end to this corruption is the only perceived means of redress.

Unnamed sources and materials discovered in Tripoli, where the regime’s spies monitored telecommunications, show Amesys, a unit of the French company Bull SA, assisted in the spying. Sources and materials also indicate Chinese company ZTE Corp provided equipment to Gaddafi.

Provisions slated to expire include: the “roving wiretap provision,” which permits government to obtain intelligence surveillance orders without identifying the person or the facility being tapped (Section 206 of the Act); the “Lone Wolf” provision, which permits intelligence agencies to survey non-US persons not affiliated with a foreign organization (Section 6001 of the Act); and Section 215, which grants government authorization to obtain “any tangible thing” relevant to a terrorism investigation, even if there is no evidence the “thing” pertains to the terrorist or terrorist activity under investigation.

This compelling book traces the history of the assault on democracy and the rise of a police state that reached its zenith in the George W. Bush administration. From the war on communism, to the war on labor, to the war terrorism, our government has used surveillance, preventive detention, torture, and a climate of fear to consolidate its power and neutralize dissent. Under the guise of nurturing democracy at home and abroad, the U.S. government has actually undermined it.

AT&T and the government have become so closely entwined in their joint program spying on Americans that the government cannot be said to be an independent reviewer of AT&T’s business.

The Washington Post informs us Sunday that the Air Force will soon be deploying new drone surveillance technology that the military claims will enable movements across an entire town to be monitored “in real time.” Of course, there are significant questions about just how this technology will be of value.

Father and son, Charles Fried (former solicitor general of the United States under Ronald Reagan, legal scholar at Harvard University and author of Modern Liberty) and Gregory Fried (chair of the Philosophy Department at Suffolk University and author of Heidegger’s Polemos) have undertaken the daunting task of examining the limitations and excesses of modern day Presidential power to gather intelligence by torture and surveillance. In order to reach their ultimate conclusions as to the interplay of law, morality, civil community and political leadership, the Frieds review sources and thought from Aristotle to Machiavelli to the Bible, including principles from epieikeia to “dirty hands” to religious and secular precepts relating to human dignity. They have deliberately kept the conversation, “as wide as possible” in recognition that “ours is a nation founded in philosophy.”

It seems the Administration has declared today “Power Grab Monday.”

It doesn’t seem like much has changed since Bush was criminalizing political speech.