* National Security {Spy} Agency

The U.S. has used 9/11 as the raison d’être to instigate endless war and sweeping police powers. Twelve years after the pivotal event, the death toll from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and military actions in dozens of other countries is in the hundreds of thousands, the financial cost in the trillions of dollars.

Because of the revelations of Edward Snowden, Mark Klein, and other whistleblowers, we know the pervasive depth and breadth of the U.S. government’s surveillance of its citizens and elected officials and the citizens and officials of other countries.

The U.S. government has vacuumed up phone calls, emails, snail mail, internet searches– all forms of communication, often in collaboration with U.S. corporations. Now we learn this potentially lethal force is literally invading our homes, attaching spyware to our personal computers.

Remember, the firebombing of the Reichstag, the German parlaiment, on February 27, 1933, blamed on a communist, led to totalitarianism in Germany. It is time to confront the questions we ask about the German people during the Third Reich: How did the citizenry let this happen? What can we do to deter it? What will we do to stop it?

This Action Agenda on surveillance (and its ugly twin, wars of aggression) is intended to jumpstart your ideas and activism toward stemming the rising tide of fascism in the U.S.

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