A repost from 2023 by request.
In roughly the past fifty years, the term “continuity of government” has been used with increased frequency describing how the United States of America, a constitutional republican system of government, contains internal mechanisms to protect the executive branch in the event of crisis, attack or disruption of leadership by adversaries.
The term ‘continuity of government‘ became much more common in the aftermath of 9-11-01 and the thunder shock of an al-Qaeda inspired terrorist attack in New York and Washington DC.
Within the very brief discussion period that led up to the 10-26-01 Patriot Act [pdf here], literally a structural reform of the entire domestic terrorist apparatus that created the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA), a bill only debated for a few weeks, the baseline was the enhanced ‘continuity of government‘ in the event of an emergency.
As we have exhaustively outlined on these pages, the outcome of the Patriot Act was to create a system where every American was now viewed by our federal government through the prism of the citizen being a potential terrorist threat.
The federal government aligned all of our institutions and national security systems accordingly.
DHS was created to monitor American behavior, the TSA was created to scan American travelers, and the FBI was enhanced with resources to conduct surveillance despite our Fourth Amendment protections within our Constitution. Instead of the U.S. Govt protecting U.S. citizens from foreign threats, the Patriot Act changed the mission of government to protect itself from potential citizen threats.
In essence, We the People became the suspects, and all of the constitutional viewpoints within the FBI and Dept of Justice were modified to create monitoring systems.
The legislative branch was considered part of a this newly protected elite class of Americans, and the judicial branch deferred all scrutiny to the executive as long as they claimed, ‘national security.’ The secret FISA court system would grant the agents surveillance power over U.S. citizens.
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