Remember when we all were outraged at the rise of The Surveillance State in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001? OK, the outrage was not widespread as a political issue, and it was something of a morning glory that didn’t last past the 2004 election, at least in the general populace. Then, it popped again in the context of Edward Snowden and the revelations about the NSA. Old soapboxes were dusted off and put to use again. However, those revelations are now all tangled up with Snowden’s flight into the arms of Vladimir Putin, and WikiLeaks' gleeful embrace of the job of fencing stolen information on behalf of the Russian ratfckers, so the outrage cooled once again.

But we are still a people under surveillance, and that surveillance is largely covert, and it involves local and federal law enforcement, and it is now a fact of everyday life, whether we know it or not. For example, from CityLab:

The lawsuit was based on the existence of a “City Hall Escort List” created by Memphis police, at Mayor Jim Strickland’s request, and mostly filled with names of Black Lives Matter activists to be flagged by police if ever on City Hall grounds. However, after deposing key police officials and collecting hundreds of pages of documented evidence, ACLU lawyers learned that this was just a fraction of what was going on.

Do tell.

The “City Hall Escort List” not only flagged the names of certain Black Lives Matter-affiliated activists, but it also included “associates in fact”—people connected to those activists via social media, prior arrests, or “often seen at unlawful assemblies with” them.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

Police prepared “joint intelligence briefs,” or JIBs, that initially were about protests against police violence in Memphis, but quickly became a dossier of any kind of anti-police violence activity happening across the nation, namely “any of the organizations that arose out of Ferguson” or that were part of the Black Lives Matter network, even it had nothing to do with Memphis. These intel briefings weren’t just shared within the police department; they were also shared with Shelby County sheriff and government officials, the county school district, the Tennessee Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Military, the Memphis Light, Gas, & Water municipal utility company, the Tennessee Valley Authority (a regional electricity utility company), and, curiously, the private companies FedEx and Autozone.

The police used “social media collator” software, such as Geofeedia and NC4, to easily search and monitor open-source data and other social media “chatter” concerning protest activities. Police also set up a dummy social media account under the name “Bob Smith” to access information and correspond with people whose social media profiles were private and not accessible to the public. Undercover and plain-clothed officers used this intel to monitor African American-hosted events and activities even if they weren’t protests—like flash mob dance rallies. Among the events the police monitored in stealth mode: several black church meetings; a memorial service for Darrius Stewart, a teenager who was shot and killed by a Memphis police officer in 2015; a black-owned food truck festival; and a gathering at a local park where an organization gave out free book bags and school supplies to students.

Monica Morgan Getty Images

Of course, it’s not like Memphis has a history of this sort of thing, and it’s not like this sort of thing ever has had world-historical ramifications.

These operations are questionable enough on their own, but police surveillance of protesters has been forbidden in Memphis since a 1978 consent decree, after the police department was accused of carrying out similar spying functions on civil rights activists dating back to 1968, when Martin Luther King was in the city advocating on behalf of sanitation workers.

That’s the local piece, and you have to be a sap to believe that there isn’t something similar going on all over the country in various police departments and county sheriff’s offices. (You will note the item above about how widely the Joint Intelligence Briefs were shared.) As far as the national government is concerned, The Boston Globe broke a story over the weekend concerning a new tactic adopted by everyone’s favorite new agency: the Transportation Safety Administration.

The previously undisclosed program, called “Quiet Skies,” specifically targets travelers who “are not under investigation by any agency and are not in the Terrorist Screening Data Base,” according to a Transportation Security Administration bulletin in March. The internal bulletin describes the program’s goal as thwarting threats to commercial aircraft “posed by unknown or partially known terrorists,” and gives the agency broad discretion over which air travelers to focus on and how closely they are tracked.

But some air marshals, in interviews and internal communications shared with the Globe, say the program has them tasked with shadowing travelers who appear to pose no real threat — a businesswoman who happened to have traveled through a Mideast hot spot, in one case; a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, in another; a fellow federal law enforcement officer, in a third. It is a time-consuming and costly assignment, they say, which saps their ability to do more vital law enforcement work.

This, of course, is pure bureaucratic inertia with a very sharp edge. This is a vast agency, already invested with considerable power, doing something simply because it can do it. It’s also about the profits of the security industry that has sprung up to service that power, a vital part of which involves various theoreticians and think-tank buckaroos and their Very Big And Important Ideas.

Portland Press Herald Getty Images

I highly recommend reading the “behavior checklist” that is central to this program, which the Globe helpfully obtained and published. For example, under the heading, SUBJECT WAS ABNORMALLY AWARE OF SURROUNDINGS, we find:

Reversing or changing directions and/or stopping while in transit through the airport.

First of all, in places like airports, aren’t we all supposed to be “abnormally aware” of our surroundings—“if you see something, say something” and all that? Now, it seems, the ol’ TSA gets us coming and going. Second of all, this particular metric is simply going to kill Cinnabon and other impulse-buy emporia all over the country.

And under, SUBJECT EXHIBITED BEHAVIORAL INDICATORS, we find:

Excessive perspiration, facial flushing, rapid eye blinking, strong body odor.

In whole or in part, this literally describes every person I saw in the concourse the last time I was in O’Hare.

And under, SUBJECT’S APPEARANCE WAS DIFFERENT FROM INFORMATION PROVIDED, we find:

Lost weight, gained weight, graying, balding.

I resemble these remarks.

Also, too, “information provided” by whom, exactly? And for what purpose? Did I linger too long over my lunch order at Panda Express and get tagged by an undercover TSA agent working across the way at Sbarro’s?

And under, SUBJECT SLEPT DURING FLIGHT, we find:

Subject slept during most of the flight. Subject slept briefly.

Oh, come the fck on.

And, finally, under GENERAL OBSERVATION, we find:

Used lavatory?

The next time you fly, carry this checklist with you and play a game. Try to determine how many of the people around you would be detained or surveilled under these criteria. And, if somebody on your flight wakes up suddenly and runs for the head, take action immediately.

My god, what a strange place America is.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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