I've been encouraging people to look at the mechanisms of the January 6 investigation independent of the merits of the case. Today a weird new twist, the US Post Office (!) runs its own intelligence arm which is apparently up in everyone's online business politico.com/news/2021/09/2…
The issue with half of government closely monitoring online "extremism" is that for most of our history, extremism was defined as stuff that today seems pretty laudable. The mass dredging of social media in this investigation is a troubling sign of things to come for all protest.
I see apparently intelligent people throw around words like sedition, insurrection, and even treason in the January 6 context with little care that these terms are defined at the discretion of the state. Shed a tear for the Jan 6 bumblers because the next time it may be you.
The risk to civic and personal liberty from direct government surveillance is negligible compared to the risks from government access to commercially harvested surveillance data stored in perpetuity. That risk exists for as long as the data is kept, and governments change fast!
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