New York Governor Announces Surveillance Program

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May 19, 2022
Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York from United States of America, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, after announcing a new executive order that will monitor New Yorkers in their communities and online, radical New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) looked into the camera and stated ominously, “We’re watching you now; we know what you’re up to. And we’ll be coming after you.”

President Joe Biden’s halting of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Disinformation Governance Board — commonly referred to as Biden’s Ministry of Truth — gave many in the nation a sense that the censorship regime was relenting. But Hochul is now imposing on New York, via executive order, a repackaged Minitrue with the same initial mission of “monitoring” as was claimed by its currently paused federal predecessor. 

The announcement was the result of the horrific killings in Buffalo that left 10 innocent people dead. But the governor’s executive order is only adding bad policy and government overreach to a tragedy.

 

Glancing back and forth from her pre-written speech, Hochul stated, “Today, I’m signing an executive order to establish a unit within the Office of Counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, focusing exclusively on domestic terrorism.” She justified the creation of this unit by claiming that, “The truth is, the most serious threat we face as a nation is from within. It’s not from the Russians; it’s not from people elsewhere. It’s White supremacism; it’s White nationalism. And it’s time we confronted it head-on.”

And when Democrats talk about White supremacy, they’re not talking about the Buffalo killer and the ideology he professed. The goal is to lump him in with the “ultra-MAGA crowd.” They’re talking about conservatives; they’re talking about political commentators like Tucker Carlson and Black politicians like Kathy Barnette; they’re talking about pro-lifers, religious communities and anybody who stands in the way of their control over the country. They’re talking about you.

The governor’s order creates a unit under DHS that will prescribe practices for “law enforcement, mental health professionals and school officials to monitor New Yorkers of all ages to “connect the dots,” with the “dots” being data points in the lives of New Yorkers being observed and logged by a surveillance state. 

As if spying on New Yorkers in their neighborhoods wasn’t enough, Hochul went on to announce a separate unit aimed at surveilling them online, declaring that, “This executive order will also establish a dedicated domestic terrorism unit within our New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC), focusing on monitoring social media.” Commenting further on the monitoring of social media platforms, she added, “We are going to ramp up these efforts intensely with our intelligence center.”

The governor also called for stricter gun control in the state, as she insisted that hate speech had been “weaponized,” explaining, “That’s the intersection of two crisis right now that are unfolding in our country: the mainstreaming of hate speech, of racism, nationalism, White supremacy, and the easy access to military-style weapons and magazines.” Hochul neglected to mention that the killer drove all the way to Buffalo because he knew that the gun laws would prevent legal gunowners from properly defending themselves. But solving the problem is not the real purpose of this power grab.

The governor explained her monitoring scheme further:

We’re going to launch a threat assessment management program. And this is going to have multidisciplinary teams in our counties across the state, and they’ll identify, assess and be prepared to deal with the threats … These stakeholders need to be communicating and sharing information so, guess what, they can start to connect the dots. And that’s what we did after 9/11. And that’s what we’re going to do now: start connecting the dots. Who heard what? Who saw something? And you get the law enforcement, and the mental health professionals, and, in some cases, school professionals, actually communicating about what they’re seeing, and we have a much better opportunity to be in the prevention business, instead of the cleanup business.

The demagogic governor is using the recent mass shooting in Buffalo to justify oppressive policies that she plans to enact against the people of New York. Echoing moves by the European Union, calls from Democratic leaders and the host of other bad-faith actors seeking to monitor and disrupt communication between citizens, Hochul called for social media platforms to “be held accountable for favoring engagement over public safety.” These threats by government officials are solely to intimidate social media companies into becoming proxy censors for the regime.

Hochul is using the suffering in her state’s communities to fearmonger and grandstand to achieve her political ends. This kind of opportunism from the left can be predicted like clockwork. But the New York governor’s executive order is a direct threat to millions of New Yorkers, who will be targeted by their government, in their localities and online. And, given the spying abuses we’ve seen in the past from intelligence agencies, we can be certain that Hochul’s secret internet police and network of community spies will become more of a threat, as the units entrench themselves into the state’s bureaucracy.

While New York residents suffer unacceptable rates of violent crime and a growingly tenuous economic situation, their governor is busy taking advantage of the recent tragic shooting in her state to push an oppressive political agenda. White supremacy doesn’t even belong on a list of New Yorkers’ top 100 threats. To say it is the most serious threat faced by the public, based on an outlier event, is transparently dishonest. But Hochul is following the Biden administration and the rest of the Democratic Party in using the grossly exaggerated fear of white supremacists as justification for their anti-American agenda.

According to police records, in New York City, alone, 11 murders were committed this year in the days between May 8 and May 15 — and this was not a particularly violent week in the city. Major crimes of all sorts are on the rise, as mismanagement continues to degrade the Big Apple. And that’s just one city in a state with several high-crime areas.

But the unacceptable crime rate that continues to pile on new casualties almost daily has not inspired action by the political opportunist running the state. Instead, ignoring recent mass killings by Black nationalists and a Chinese terrorist, the governor has latched on to an incident that fits the worldview she is trying to impress upon her supporters, and, using the left’s favorite strawman — White supremacy — to advance a system of controls over her population.

The fact that Hochul has serious issues to attend to in her state does not negate the terrible crime committed. But for Hochul to point to “White supremacism” as the most “serious threat” we face as a nation is absurd and unjustifiable demagoguery aimed at scaring the public into accepting her surveillance program without objection.

 

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