The Gary Null Blog

On August 5, 2002, President George Bush declared, "We're fighting ... to secure freedom in the homeland." Strikingly, he did not use the word "nation," or "republic," but instead adopted a term, with its Germanic overtones of blood, roots and loyalty going back generations, for a country that is not the ancestral home of most of its citizens.

Soon after, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the massive Department of Homeland Security [5](DHS), an amalgam of 22 agencies and nearly 200,000 employees. The FBI and CIA remained outside the DHS, while the military, in October 2002, established its own Northern Command [6] (NORTHCOM) to defend the "homeland."

In the years since then, the full weight of government has been bent on ensuring "homeland security" - a term rarely heard before the 2001 attacks. Over the decade, the government's powers of surveillance have expanded dramatically. They are directed not just at people suspected of wrongdoing, but at all of us. Our phone calls, our emails and web site visits, our financial records, our travel itineraries, and our digital images captured on powerful surveillance cameras are swelling the mountain of data that is being mined for suspicious patterns and associations.