In Our Future: Background Checks for Laptop Purchases?

On the morning of December 15th, 2011, the Drudge Report ran a headline story about how Iran reportedly hijacked a U.S. drone while it was still over Afghan territory and forced it to land in Iran where they captured it. The article Drudge linked to disclosed that the U.S. military has diagnosed a major current flaw in their surveillance drones. It concerns the GPS signals which are apparently very weak.

The article went on to recite statements made by a certain Professor Andrew Dempster at a GPS vulnerability conference in Australia. Dempster commented that: "GPS signals are weak and can be easily outpunched [overridden] by poorly controlled signals from television towers, devices such as laptops and MP3 players, or even mobile satellite services." He later added "This is not only a significant hazard for military, industrial, and civilian transport and communication systems, but criminals have worked out how they can jam GPS."

American citizens should become alarmed at this finding, especially as anti-freedom acts such as the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) and the poorly named Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) come closer to becoming law.

In NDAA, American citizens can be detained by the military indefinitely without trial just because someone in an authority position 'suspects' them of anti-American sympathies or planned activities. It frighteningly conjures up images of martial law being enacted in the United States in the very near future and American citizens being sent to prisons such as Guantanamo indefinitely.

In SOPA, extremely broad legal language in the regulations allows the government to kill any website or domain name on the internet because of a mere complaint of some copyright infringement (or something of that nature) by a well-connected business or individual. It is basically internet censorship on a large scale.

The reason Americans should be becoming alarmed at the finding about the GPS signals is this. If NDAA and SOPA become law, and the federal government determines that criminals and terrorists can use laptops, MP3 players and other such things to disrupt U.S. military technology, then how long will it be before it becomes necessary to go through something like a six month federal government background check in order to buy a laptop computer, MP3 player or some other electronic device? What if you go through this background check, and because of some speeding ticket or minor zoning violation, the federal bureaucracy decides to disqualify you from buying some electronic device, even though you have no intention of using it to interfere with U.S. Government technology? My Fellow Americans, is this freedom?! Is this where we are headed?!

Just twenty years ago this would have been thought unthinkable, but it may be closer then we think. Unless the over-regulation and dangerous powers of the federal government are curbed soon, we could be seeing many of our everyday actions and desires becoming dangerous 'actions against the state.' The federal government then could use these actions as justification to conduct random background checks on us or to send us to waste our lives away in some prison away from the free land our Founding Fathers gave us. This makes our fight for freedom today even more important.

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