Don’t Snoop: The Government Hates Competition
by Becky Akers
Recently by Becky Akers: The 'Show Me' States
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The State owns among its characteristics a hypocrisy as stunning, fatal, and over-the-top as its double standards. And both are on horrific display in New Jersey this week.
We first survey the trial of Dharun Ravi, formerly a freshman at Rutgers University. This week Our Rulers continued savaging him, as they have for the past 18 months, because his roommate committed suicide. Yes, in defiance of all justice and common sense, the socialist State now holds us responsible for others’ decisions.
Nor need the "evidence" implicating us in their choices be any stronger than a politician’s promise, as Dharun’s persecution proves.
It seems that 19 evenings into their first semester on campus, Dharun’s roommate kicked him out of their quarters because he had a "guest" – a sin so common at college it’s earned its own shorthand, "sexiling."
Ergo, Dharun headed down the hall to Molly Wei’s room; the two had known each other since "middle school," as the State dubs its indoctrination of kids 12 and 13 years old. There he borrowed Molly’s computer to check on his belongings via the webcam he’d activated in his own room before leaving. He told Molly he was suspicious because the "guest" was "an older man and did not appear to be a Rutgers student." Further, his "disheveled appearance made him look ‘shady,’ ‘scruffy’ and ‘creepy.’" Dharun didn’t want his iPad and computer to disappear.
But theft was not what the two saw on Molly’s screen. Rather, they watched the roommate and his paramour kissing. "We were both just kind of really shocked, like, I can't believe we just saw what we did," Molly told her inquisitors in court this week. They have suborned her by promising to drop their bogus "counts of invasion of privacy" against her if she’ll rat out her friend. "It shouldn't have happened and we saw something that we didn't expect to see and it just felt weird."
Neither Molly nor Dharun kept the filming or its streaming on the internet a secret: within hours, many students, including the roommate, Tyler Clementi, knew about his unwitting stardom in Dharun’s webcast.
Call me a prude, but had I learned my roommate filmed me in libre, let alone flagrante, I would sure as heck have found someplace else for my next rendezvous – and I’d have besieged the housing office for a change in dorms. Not Tyler. He brazenly pulled the same stunt in the same location two days later, with the same results: another webcast.
And the day after that, Tyler killed himself. He left a laconic note on Facebook: "Jumping off the gw [George Washington] bridge sorry."
Never mind that Tyler didn’t mention Dharun, Molly, or the webcasts. Never mind that "gay, lesbian and bisexual students are … four times more likely to attempt suicide [than others], according to a 2007 Massachusetts youth risk survey." Never mind that Tyler’s amazingly active extra-curricular life could have furnished him with any number of reasons for his lethal leap, including blackmail or depression: Our Rulers arrested both Dharun and Molly within days of the death. "For what?" you incredulously ask. For "invasion of privacy." To Dharun’s rap sheet, cops added "witness tampering for the messages he sent to Wei [asking what she’d told cops], bias intimidation, and hindering arrest."
And while the trumped-up charges and kangaroo court are a joke, the penalties aren’t: 20-year-old Dharun faces the possibility of ten years in prison. Meanwhile, the State has already flayed Molly. Not only have its minions forced her to betray Dharun, they have enslaved her for 300 hours of "community service" and tried to enroll her in "a program on cyberbullying or dealing with people with ‘alternative lifestyles.’"
Not that she needs it: both she and Dharun are proud products of a century of Progressivism. Neither seems to see anything the least bit immoral in Tyler’s behavior, despite the prosecutor’s back-flips to portray the opposite. In fact, much of the proceeding so far has consisted of friends testifying to Dharun’s tolerance. Behold the pathetic pass to which American injustice has descended: a student who reacted self-defensively at best and at worst pulled the sort of prank roommates always have (even if technology and the modern contempt for decency have raised the stakes on such shenanigans) has committed a murderously malicious "crime." And the victim’s strongest defense is friends who swear that his opinions are appropriately PC.
It’s already beyond nauseating. Unbelievably, it gets worse. While the State’s phalanx of thugs beat up on college kids for supposedly invading the privacy of one guy a couple of times, a secret "report" the Associated Press "obtained" revealed how another troop of Leviathan’s sociopaths invaded the privacy of entire communities for a decade.
The New York Police Department has been spying on all Muslims, not just ones suspected of criminality, "across the Northeast following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." They apparently stepped up their unconstitutional surveillance in 2007, when "the NYPD's secretive Demographics Unit fanned out across Newark, photographing every mosque and eavesdropping in Muslim businesses."
Nor did these little forays across the Hudson satisfy their itch to invade the serfs’ privacy: "Police have built databases showing where Muslims live, where they buy groceries, what Internet cafes they use and where they watch sports. Dozens of mosques and student groups have been infiltrated, and police have built detailed profiles of local ethnic groups, from Moroccans to Egyptians to Albanians." I daresay Muslims and Moroccans aren’t the only "ethnic groups" Our Rulers harass, even if they’re the only ones the NYPD mentions in the 60-page report; indeed, "numerous restaurants are also profiled in the report, including a branch of Dunkin' Donuts" – though even Christians and Jews occasionally patronize such confectionaries. And of course, the Orwellian PATRIOT Act extends the State’s noxious nosiness to all Americans.
Meanwhile, "the NYPD's intelligence unit also operates far outside its jurisdiction and has worked to keep tabs on Muslims across the Northeast. The department has cataloged Muslim communities in Long Island, conducted undercover operations in New Brunswick, N.J., and has turned often innocuous Internet postings by Muslim student groups into police files." The AP drily adds, "…residents [outside New York City] had no reason to suspect the NYPD was watching them. And the department is not accountable to their votes or tax dollars."
Nor have these Keystone Kops shied from duplicating the very crime that may imprison Dharun for ten years: they ludicrously and voraciously spied on kids at "more than a dozen universities throughout the north-eastern United States." They even "sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip with some college students." With priceless irony, they also established "a safe house in an apartment not far from [Rutgers – yep, Dharun’s alma mater]. The operation was blown when the building superintendent stumbled upon the safe house and, thinking it was some sort of a terrorist cell," – oh, how right he was! – "called the police emerency [sic] dispatcher."
Recall Leviathan’s prissy, hyperbolic outrage at Dharun and Molly’s "spying," though their subject not only heard about it almost immediately but almost seemed to invite a recurrence. And contrast the vengeance the State has wreaked on these two with its defense of the NYPD’s "violation of … Muslim students [who] want to have their own lives, their own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has," according to "Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse."
No matter: "New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he didn't see any reason to second-guess the NYPD's methods … [New York City’s mommy-sorry, mayor Michael] Bloomberg already has given strong public support for the police department's efforts." Indeed, he decreed them "’legal,’ ‘appropriate’ and ‘constitutional…’" I may be going out on a limb here, but I doubt either of these tyrants will recommend even a day in prison or a minute of "community servitude" for the perps.
None of whom are even remotely contrite, by the way. Unlike Molly and Dharun, who are mature enough not to lie when caught red-handed, they deny they’ve done anything wrong. "Paul Browne, the [NYPD’s] deputy commissioner for public information, said: ‘There's been a suggestion that what we are doing doesn't comport with legal requirements, and that's not the case. Everything we're doing is done constitutionally.’" The criminals’ leader blames taxpayers, incredibly enough: we’re picky ingrates who don’t appreciate the NYPD’s heroics. "’Not everybody is going to be happy with everything the police department does, that's the nature of our business,’ [NYC’s] Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said." We ingrates are also forgetful: "[P]eople have short memories as to what happened here in 2001," he scolded – no fault of Our Rulers since they exploit every opportunity to remind us. Nor does Kelly see any "need to apologize for keeping tabs on some Muslims if that's what it takes to protect the city."
Unfortunately for Rapacious Ray, his report turned up not a single instance of any criminality. Seems that "keeping tabs on some [sic for ‘all "within a 250-mile radius" of the city’] Muslims" isn’t "what it takes to protect the city."
New Jersey’s politicians are scrambling to distance themselves from the NYPD’s snoops. They knew nothing about it, they bluster, though the NYPD contends it not only informed them of its activities, but "a Newark liaison officer accompanied NYPD personnel when they were in Newark." In any event, their alleged fury pales beside the State’s against Dharun and Molly – and is yet another exercise in cynical hypocrisy: "Sen. Robert Menendez, D-New Jersey … called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and CIA Director David Petraeus to conduct a separate investigation [of the NYPD], saying he was ‘deeply concerned’ over the allegations." Expect that "investigation" to go nowhere, and fast: "Millions of dollars in White House money [sic for ‘our taxes’] has helped pay for New York Police Department programs that put entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance."
David Cohen is "a former CIA officer who went on to become the NYPD's deputy commissioner for intelligence." One of those responsible for designing this unconscionably unconstitutional surveillance, he summarized its philosophy: "Take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as you can and see what we get."
Amerikans who shrug at government’s spying, who pretend it preys only on Muslims solely to protect us, better learn to swim.
March 2, 2012
Becky Akers [send her mail] writes primarily about the American Revolution.
Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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