Honey, is that a drone hovering over the house?

In a recent interview on Russia Today (RT.com) with Liz Wahl, the raspy-voiced Alex Jones spilled the beans on a new draconian-plus effort of the U.S. Congress to cede the running of this country to the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. It seems there’s a bill already approved saying Congress OKs 30,000 flying drones spying on Americans across U.S. Cities.

The drones, it turns out, already have a $63 billion budget, which was in an FAA reauthorization bill last week that our favorite peace-president is slated to sign into law. This signing will make it much easier for the USG to toss flocks of unmanned spy drones into the skies of America. The low profile legislation also authorizes the Federal Aviation Administration to develop regulations for both the test and licensing of drones by 2015. If the law takes full effect, as many as 30,000 drones could be hovering over the U.S. by 2020. Feel safer now? I doubt it.

The drones, which have become infamous in Afghanistan and nearby Pakistan for killing civilians, oops, not necessarily the bad guys the U.S. was after, i.e., Taliban insurgents, but have also been used by government agencies like the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a division of the of the Department of Insecurity, for a few years. This was only in an observation/surveillance mode. But the Department of Insecurity also used drones in disaster relief ops, and advocates say they can be used to fight fires and locate missing hikers, and anyone else on the run, I’d add.

But mostly drones won their dubious reputation being flown by remote control from Langley, Virginia, the home of the CIA, and other bases. Probably, some nice enough fellows, sat down in comfortable chairs, in cozy rooms, with screens as bomb sights for targets. The joysticks were in their hands as they fired half-a-world-away to Pakistan, often bombing wedding parties and funerals, as purported insurgents slipped away or were never there in the first place due to bogus intelligence.

This is perhaps why advocates for privacy (you remember that, just the two of you or the family together) do not condone you or any American not knowing you’re under surveillance. These voyeurs include either government agencies or commercial entities taking a look-see. Steven Aftergood, head of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, spilled the beans to the Washington Times. Thank god, someone spoke up.

Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the watchdog group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, is particularly “concerned about the implications for surveillance by government agencies.” Well, if you think of government as in Orwell’s 1984, it’s part of the package of police state oppression. If you further survey what’s going today in terms of infringement on Internet privacy, NSA phone spying, commercial phone companies spying for them, and everything short of agents disguised as indigents picking through your garbage, as Bob Dylan experienced years back, with one indigent being a writer or would-be writer on Dylan’s definitive lifestyle, including food packages, newspapers, used tissues, et al.

Now, we’re not all celebrities to warrant that kind of concern, though many of us have made one government list or another simply by being alive. But still it’s the USG’s enormous nose sniffing for something at all times: passwords, life data, shoe size, previous affiliations, relatives, friends, name it.

It’s no wonder the Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the FAA to determine how many certificates the agency has already issued to police, government agencies, and a gaggle of private research institutions to allow them to fly their drones in U.S. airspace. It’s not enough that in New York City you can hear or see a helicopter flying overhead practically every time of the day, whether it’s for media news or police surveillance. As I write on this Saturday, there’s one in the background overhead. Now picture if this were a drone how you or I would feel. Not good.

Especially since, despite the lawsuit, the FAA says it handed out 313 certificates in 2011 and by the year’s end 295 were still active. “But the FAA refuses to disclose which agencies have the certificates and what their purposes are,” the Times said. On what grounds does it refuse: national security, that old chestnut? I feel that particularly since Occupy Wall Street debuted that New York City is under constant surveillance by choppers and other info-gathering devices on the streets.

Jones echoes Orwell’s and Huxley’s views of a dystopian U.S.

Alex Jones, who has always seemed to be a step ahead of the crowd on the aims of our elites, claimed that this use of drones was unconstitutional, even though it was being used by companies like Google whose audience went from one state to 14 states in no time.

The notion, too, that Jones proposed, is the USG’s desire to force people out of vehicles and mechanize them for robot control. Given that we already have 70,000 drones via the military, this would seem to be the next step to nowhere. That is, using robots to fight our wars, as Jones states. I wonder if we can teach them to do windows, the better to spot the drones. This robotizing of America, according to Jones, will be sponsored by a “technocratic elite” which will, as now, be making major money on all of their devices, and will act almost independently of the USG, as a kind of entrepreneur of the future.

Jones’ prediction that we will use robots to fight wars (enter the Terminator), and drive cars is backed up by the fact, he says, that insurance companies are already doing the actuarials on robots driving cars, to force people out of the driver’s seat, so to speak. So perhaps we have gone back to 1984, published in 1949, in which the manipulation of language let alone mind control is eerily familiar.

George Orwell popularized the adjective Orwellian, which refers to official deception, secret surveillance, and manipulation. . . .”

Wiki writes that ”Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, used the setting and characters from his science fiction novel to express widely held opinions, particularly the fear of losing individual identity in the fast-paced world of the future. An early trip to the United States gave Brave New World much of its character. Not only was Huxley outraged by the culture of youth, commercial cheeriness, sexual promiscuity and the inward-looking nature of many Americans,^[8] he had also found a book by Henry Ford on the boat to America. There was a fear of Americanization in Europe. Thus seeing America firsthand, and from reading the ideas and plans of one of its foremost citizens, Huxley was spurred to write Brave New World with America in mind.

So, one way or the other, the names, dates and places may change, but we’ve been here before with American or British thinkers who saw and continue to see down the road to where we’re going and can possibly end up. Now the question becomes, “Honey, what are we going to do about that drone hovering over the house?” Unless we ask that question, and do something about it, this may be simply the beginning of the end of human society as we know it.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.