The Department of Homeland Security has released a trio of chilling PSA video clips in which ordinary everyday activities are characterized as signs of potential terrorism, with the public being indoctrinated to assume the role of domestic spies reporting on their friends and neighbors as America sinks deeper into a decaying police state.

Following the January 1st implementation of the stasi-style "See Something, Say Something" campaign, in which Americans were urged to report "suspicious activity" by means of Orwellian telescreens placed at Wal-Mart checkouts which played a looped message from Janet Napolitano, the DHS announced that the program was set to be expanded to include 9,000 federal buildings, as well as sports stadiums, businesses and communities in general.

We now know how that expansion will manifest itself - with Americans at every level of society being trained that activities such as using cash, not having a credit card, taking pictures or video footage, asking questions, and wearing certain items of clothing are all suspicious and should be reported, while being coerced into living in constant fear of terror, when in reality they are more likely to die from peanut allergies, lightning strikes, or accident-causing deer than terrorist attacks.

DHS will no longer be limited to the airport in the form of the TSA, but will become a ubiquitous entity policing everyone through a network of citizen spies and infrastructure security technology. The agency will also assume the mantle of regulating Americans' every behavior and activity. DHS signs are already in place all over the country telling people where they can and can't park their cars.

As we have documented, every historical example of such informant programs illustrates that they never lead to a more secure society, but instead breed suspicion, distrust, fear and resentment amongst the population. The only "benefit" that such programs have ever achieved is allowing the state to more easily identify and persecute political dissidents while discouraging the wider population from engaging in any criticism against the government.

Big Sis Launches DHS Takeover of Hotels, Malls, Sports Stadiums

meanwhile .....

Riding the commuter trains of my area is a study in how people react to being mildly uncomfortable for any length of time. Being designed to seat people of a body type far slimmer than what my line usually encounters makes riding to work with a seatmate's bulging oversized body squeezing you into the wall, arm rest or the bulging girth seated on your other side almost a given. Lucky for me, I learned how to properly fold and read The New York Times even when hemmed into a packed subway car so handling the task while immobilized between two people who could stand to lose a few stone each is not beyond my ability.

So that's how I was able to read Justices Look Again At How Police May Search Homes on a recent ride home. Apparently, the brave warriors who fight our War on Drugs have found getting search warrants too much of a hassle, and lawyers for the Obama administration and the state of Kentucky are before the Supreme Court arguing they must be able to forcibly enter any home should they simply "smell something funny" and "hear strange noises" from the other side of a door. I'd gasp in horror at their brazenness, but I can barely breathe due to the 300 pounds of American on each side of me. Every time the mountain to my left turns a page of the magazine she's reading I feel a rib crack.

I'm getting squeezed, too, from the other side, and I keep a wary eye on the man. He's balancing a slice of pizza, a can of diet cola and the sports page on top of his stomach. I worry about his ability to juggle it all, but at least I have my iPod on so I don't need to hear him slurp and chew for the next hour, though I can still hear a young girl, ten rows up, talk into her cell phone. So I turn up the volume and thank God for His blessings, like having the ability to drown out the world about you. It's the little things that count. I go back to reading.

The reporter tells me that some police officers down in Kentucky were wandering the hallways of an apartment building (searching for a suspect who had sold drugs to one of their informants) and broke down an apartment door from which they claim to have smelled marijuana and heard noises that "made them fear evidence was being destroyed." So without any warrant at all they kicked in a door and arrested a completely different man than the one they were searching for as the poor sap they grabbed, by chance, had marijuana and cocaine in his apartment. No surprise, the Kentucky Supreme Court suppressed the evidence. Even less of a surprise, federal and Kentucky political authorities went apoplectic with that decision.

They argue that we're in a war, a War on Drugs, and necessity and speed make search warrants too cumbersome for that war to be won. Police on the scene must, they say, have discretion to enter our homes as determined by them, on the spot. This ruse has been tried (and denied) before, back in 1948, when the Supreme Court found "the smell of drugs could provide probable cause for a warrant...but it did not entitle the police to enter without one." The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution is blunt on the matter - no home may be entered but with a warrant, specifically pointing to what is to be searched and seized. We also have ample historical evidence and sad knowledge of humanity's flawed state; both argue irrefutably for the use of search warrants to restrain abuse of power.

The power to conduct warrant-less searches that the Obama administration and the state of Kentucky are demanding is simply too dangerous to ever be granted, whatever the excuse. Couple such a power with your average American police department's drug enforcement unit, most of whom enjoy pimping out as if they're off fighting in Afghanistan rather than placid, domesticated America, and you'll never get it back.

Who Needs Search Warrants? Just Follow Your Nose!