Is Authoritarianism on the Rise in the US?

Surrounded by members of Congress and Cabinet members, then-President George W. Bush signs The USA PATRIOT Act of 2005. The Act had come under criticism from some in Congress for the potential to infringe on civil liberties but was pushed by the Bush administration as essential for fighting terrorism. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Commentary

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans were gifted with the USA PATRIOT Act by the political class. USA PATRIOT is an acronym that stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”

However, the sweeping implementation of those “tools” has been corrupted from its original purpose to target Americans arbitrarily determined as “terrorists” by federal agencies.

Is the trajectory of the USA PATRIOT Act’s implementation paralleling the implementation of China’s national security law?

China’s national security law provides the legal framework for the state to surveil and monitor every aspect of the behavior and day-to-day activities of average Chinese citizens to root out and prosecute “subversives,” as defined by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That’s the tricky part, as those definitions are arbitrary and applied outside a civilized rule of law. Nevertheless, that arbitrarily applied legal framework has underpinned the rollout of China’s social credit system that enables the state to reward or punish the behavior of people and businesses as arbitrarily deemed appropriate by CCP bureaucrats.

Let us examine the issue.

The USA PATRIOT Act

The 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, as expanded in its 2003 reauthorization, greatly expanded the search and surveillance powers of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, especially regarding the legality of those agencies monitoring the telephone and electronic records (email and social media) of private American citizens.

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For the first time, routine private communications could be scrutinized without the knowledge of that surveillance in the interest of “national security” during the announced “war on terrorism” that came to U.S. shores and expanded worldwide.

As the foreign terrorist threat receded during the 20 years of that war, the mechanisms that enabled surveillance of U.S. citizens were retooled to focus on other domestic terrorist threats as arbitrarily defined by the past and present administrations. The list of those designated terrorists includes white supremacists and white nationalists, as noted in a March 2021 ODNI threat assessment. Some elected Democrats also consider America First (J6) protestors and other political opponents of the Democratic Party and administrative state to be domestic terrorists.

As a result of these and other activities, the phrase “weaponization of government agencies” has been oft-repeated to describe politically motivated activities of federal agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Department of Justice (DOJ) targeted against “dissenters.”

Political speech is being criminalized in real time in violation of the First Amendment. The FBI and DHS maintain an extensive network of informants and “confidential human sources” to arbitrarily monitor all sorts of groups nationwide. DHS established a Disinformation Governance Board “to address the disinformation threat streams that can undermine the security of our homeland,” as reported by CNN. Social media companies have been reportedly coerced by the FBI and the Biden White House to restrict political speech and topics deemed to be undesirable by Democrat administrations.

The purpose of the federal government’s monitoring and curtailing political speech and dissent is perfectly defined by the Rutherford Institute: “The government is not protecting us from ‘dangerous’ disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from ’dangerous’ ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.”

The trend in Washington is toward suppression of political speech by conflating that speech with domestic terrorism, as well as using the extensive capabilities of the U.S. surveillance state to continuously monitor Americans in order to minimize and suppress whatever the powers that be define as dissent, which in their minds is one degree of separation from domestic terrorism.

China’s National Security Law

Initially passed in 1997, the latest version of China’s national security law was passed by the Standing Committee of China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, in June 2020. It contains 66 articles that cover four areas of criminal activity: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign or external forces, with emphasis on the arbitrarily defined crime of “endangering Chinese national security.” The 2020 national security law, as written, applies to anyone anywhere in the world and is expansively extraterritorial in its scope.

Protesters chant slogans during a rally against a new national security law in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020. (Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)

According to Article 38, the law can apply even to offenses committed “outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region.” Article 38 provides the legal cover for the various secret Chinese police stations uncovered recently in the United States and other countries that have been harassing overseas Chinese and others who oppose the CCP and “endangering Chinese national security.”

The actions of those secret police stations are one degree of separation away from targeting non-Chinese nationals who oppose the Beijing regime and thereby (according to the CCP) are “endangering Chinese national security.” This may be the intended long-term legal scope of China’s national security law—the legal basis to challenge any threats to the CCP anywhere in the world.

The evolution of the national security law since 1997 has paralleled the piecemeal implementation of the CCP’s social credit monitoring and control system that incorporates advanced technologies, such as facial recognition, artificial intelligence, smart cameras for surveillance, big-data processing, and the “Internet of Things” to digitally monitor CCP-prescribed compliance with China’s civil code and the national security law. These technologies are being integrated to support automated monitoring and assignment of social credit scores of every individual and business in the country, as well as the ability to detect citizens engaged in behavior that “endangers Chinese national security.”

The ultimate goal of the national security law and the companion social credit system is to instill “trustworthiness” in Chinese citizens (and ultimately others), resulting in obedient and self-disciplined behavior that does not challenge the CCP’s illegitimate rule. In short, an authoritarian communist’s dream!

Concluding Thoughts

The Chinese communists are ahead in the race to fully implement a surveillance state and social credit monitoring system that will help cement the CCP’s political control of China in perpetuity. Each new version of the Chinese civil code, the counterespionage law, and the national security law tighten the noose on Chinese citizens.

The authoritarians in the U.S. political class are paralleling China’s trajectory in implementing measures to monitor and control American citizens in the context of eradicating perceived domestic terrorist threats. The USA PATRIOT Act isn’t quite as stringent as China’s national security law—yet—but its deviation from the original intent for political reasons is strikingly similar to what the CCP is pursuing in the way of monitoring and controlling Chinese citizens.

The continued weaponization of the U.S. government is an ongoing threat to the civil liberties of all Americans and must be reversed. Unlike the unfortunate Chinese, who are at the whim of the CCP without any legal protections or basic civil rights, Americans can cite the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights in their efforts to roll back the encroachments of the surveillance state on their civil liberties.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.