More and more evidence has emerged in recent years that we are indeed living in a surveillance state, and now a new revelation exposes just how invasive of a presence the government has become in our everyday lives: Newly declassified documents show that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has been spying on American trout for decades.
Wow. This is so scary to think about.
Several newly declassified reports from the Fish & Wildlife Service, released under the Freedom of Information Act, detail a shocking surveillance campaign that has targeted hundreds of millions of American fish since the 1980s. The reports describe a sprawling and frankly sickening government effort to track fish behaviors through an array of Orwellian means, including embedding tiny, imperceptible transponder devices into unsuspecting trout to monitor their movements and, alarmingly, even their mating habits. Yep, that’s right: If you are a fish, there’s a good chance the government is literally spying on your sex life.
But perhaps the most troubling takeaway from the documents is the frequent mention of the phrase “population control” in conjunction with state-sanctioned initiatives, baldly detailing ambitious government efforts to cull trout numbers across multiple generations in a manner that smacks of eugenics. It’s a sickening operation that has apparently been growing larger and larger in scope over the past 40 years, trickling down into dozens of state Fish and Wildlife agencies, where officials have for decades been asked to “keep an eye” on trout in their jurisdictions, tracking their migrations and noting their reactions to their environment. Needless to say, this has created a lasting culture of scrutiny around trout which, tragically enough, will likely take the fish just as many decades to overcome.
Terrifying. This is like something straight out of dystopian fiction.
If these declassified documents reveal anything, it’s that big brother is real, it’s here, and it’s coming for our trout. It’s time we all stand up to the U.S. government and demand more robust privacy protections, because there’s no telling who they’re going to target next.
