The US Federal Bureau of Investigation reached new low asking Americans to scan their own family members for signs of homegrown violent extremism and snitch on them, turning its surveillance powers on regular Americans.
The agency’s latest call provoked rage online and didn’t sit well with some pundits and commenters who drew parallels with the real-life surveillance and repression of East Germany’s Stasi and the totalitarian dystopia of George Orwell’s ‘1984’.
According to a tweet from the FBI on Sunday, the family members and friends are often in best position to witness signs of mobilization to violence, advising Americans to visit its website to learn how to spot suspicious behaviors and report them to the FBI in order to help prevent homegrown violent extremism.
It also provided link taking the visitors to a 2019 document enlisting mobilization indicators that may suggest an individual is preparing to engage in terrorism. Although the indicators suggest that its focus was on radical Islamic terrorism, FBI has recently turned its surveillance powers on white, conservative America.
This is especially evident following the pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill in January, after which FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed in his Congress testimony that the problem of domestic terrorism that has been metastasizing in the US for years, is not going away anytime soon.
Frank Figliuzzi , who served as assistant director for FBI Counterintelligence under Obama, went step ahead last month, calling for high-level Republicans to be arrested to really tackle terrorism, this time domestically.
During his first Congress speech in April, President Joe Biden has linked the Capitol mob to white supremacism, which he called the most lethal terrorist threat to our homeland today.
To tackle this, recent reports have claimed that, in addition to their own powers, the DHS, FBI, and National Security Council also want to hire third-party ‘researchers’ to spy on Americans.
It is still unclear who these ‘researchers’ and firms could be but some of the biggest names in the area are Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League, so-called anti-hate group, and ‘fact checkers’ like Bellingcat, all of which have been accused of pro-liberal, pro-Democrat bias, and have been extensively criticized.
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