The Growing Police State: Watch Your Words Edition

Excuse me while I sputter in outrage for a moment.  While I do, go read this.

Okay, thanks, I'm back.

So for those too lazy to click over, the Daily Mail (tangential question: why am I reading about this in a UK paper, not a US paper?) that DHS is monitoring your blog and Facebook page for a variety of words to look for signs of terrorism.  That sounds legitimate, right?  We want our intelligence services stopping attacks before they start, rather than waiting until 3,000+ of our friends, family, and neighbors have been killed.  Then we get to this little gem:

"The words are included in the department's 2011 'Analyst's Desktop Binder' used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify 'media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities.'"

Yes, being critical of your government now makes you a terrorism suspect.  This goes along the same lines as the domestic terror document released by Janet Napolitano back at the beginning of this administration which made 'Prepers' and former soldiers into terrorism suspects.  Something is deeply, deeply wrong with our country when we decide that words like "pork," "cloud," "team," and "Mexico," are words that should key an analyst's attention.  They're even looking for words like "Chemical," "Burn," "Mitigation" (really?!), "Facility."

So the sentence, "My Chemical Company got really burned on our last facility inspection.  We're working on mitigation steps to fix the issues now," would trigger some analyst to look at the rest of your post.

It's getting to be old, but I'll repeat it anyway: I don't want to live in a country the motto of which is, "The innocent have nothing to hide."  That's not the country the Founders fought for, it's not the country our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents to the nth generation fought and died for.  It is not a country of Liberty.