The DHS scares the shit out of me.

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If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the DHS is the government agency better known as the Department of Homeland Security. This Cabinet-level department of the federal government is charged with the duty of protecting the United States from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters. The latter half of that statement is clearly a joke. I regularly watch the news on television, read it on the Internet, and listen to it on the radio, and I’ve never once heard the DHS even remotely mentioned in relation to any of the devastating natural disasters that has befallen the nation in the last few years from hurricanes to tornadoes to floods. It’s bad enough that the government can’t even take care of it’s own people when a natural disaster strikes, but on to what really scares the shit out of me.

It’s not that we don’t need a government agency to protect our citizens from terrorist attacks domestically (What ever happened to the FBI, CIA, and National Guard?), it’s the way they do it. In order to protect this country, the Bush administration for some reason feels that the absolute best way to do this is to strip us of our rights and use scare tactics to convince the large portion of the nation that is dumb and/or ignorant enough to be scared in to believing that this is the best way of going about homeland security and that the propaganda which consistently spews from the mouths of Bush administration officials is true. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, but it still needs to be said: Warrantless wiretapping, email filtering, and holding someone for questioning for extended amounts of time without charging them all violate basic constitutional rights.

The money that is flooded in to this department is of ridiculous proportions, is not required, and could instead be used for something that actually would benefit the country, such as research and development of alternative fuel sources, planning and construction of a nation-wide high speed rail line, and any number of other programs which would benefit society instead of scare it in to supporting war. Instead of funding peaceful and economically beneficial programs, the money instead goes towards fear tactics and new toys that allow the Department of Homeland Security’s gestapo-eqsue agents to better violate our rights.

What kind of toys, you ask? Wired is reporting of a new LED flashlight which temporarily blinds and incapacitates it’s victims (or, if you use the Bush administration’s term of choice, “Enemy Combantants”). Of course, this evolution in policing technology makes sense. Why stop someone, question them, intelligently profile them, read them their Miranda rights, and arrest them in the traditional legal way, when you can just blind and disorient them allowing you to cuff them and take them in for questioning without an arrest warrant? The president of the company being subsidized by the DHS to create this “flashlight” really summarizes the true purpose behind a weapon like this best: “With this, they don’t need to know English to comply.” As if this thing weren’t scary enough, Wired also points out that “the tool could be scaled up to make a light bazooka that could subdue a crowd”. If the DHS has weapons like this in the works, who knows what else they’ve got up their sleeve or in development to violate your rights, subdue you, and/or get the information out of you that they want.

Not only does this extremely powerful department of the federal government trample the constitution on a daily basis, but the Bush administration has allowed it to grow so immensely since it was first created after 9/11 that it is now the third largest cabinet department in the US with over 200,000 employees, only slightly behind the Department of Defense and The Department of Veteran Affairs. No one agency should be allowed to have the kind of power that the DHS has and that is what scares the shit out of me, but then again, isn’t that what they want?

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