Today in building The Stories of the Restoration, I offer a bit of faux academic writing about law enforcement in the Restored United States. The fictional writer responsible for it vehemently disagrees with socio-political concepts accepted by most of my other characters. Who's right? Good question.An excerpt from " National Insecurity: The Hidden Power of the Civilian Security Bureau"It's useful to consider the Civilian Security Bureau as a tree – an organic, living organization of local roots and branches with a federal trunk supporting and feeding all of them. It evolved organically in response to conflicting needs, and over time those pressures have left it irreparably twisted.At its inception, the CSB saw no hope of effectively absorbing the myriad public and private police operations which had evolved during Revision. It chose instead to establish control by dangling the big carrot of access to weaponry, federal identification rolls and data from financial and personal-activity monitoring systems in front of organizations long starved by a lack of enforcement technologies.Departments were invited to join the Bureau as independent chapters with their own procedures and policies intact. The CSB provided technical support and dispatched trained analysts and investigators to member jurisdictions on request. In return, the local chapters agreed to abide by certain additional policies, deliver data to the Bureau's centralized administrative hub, participate in training programs and encourage transfers into and promotion from the centralized services.This quietly brilliant strategy resulted in a nationally-directed policing force with maximized local clout. The CSB Central Administration has slowly grown to be a dominant feature on the national landscape. Centralized efficiency paired with a distributed power structure has created a bureaucratic monster.Our ancestors were willing to barter away privacy and personal freedoms in the name of security, but the world we live in would horrify them. They faced hard choices, and we live with the consequences. We think nothing of carrying multiple forms of identification, we accept drug and genetic testing -- even brainwashing – as reasonable terms of employment and citizenship. Roadblocks and wellness checks are accepted without question as 'normal' where once they would have raised outrage.The CSB's power stretches over every aspect of our lives, and corruption is rife at the local level. Worse, we can only guess at the rot at the core. Promotion to administration roles is dependent on acceptance of psychiatric conditioning, and the centralized power structure is notoriously opaque to public scrutiny. What really happens behind closed doors? What abuses are inflicted on agents who sign away their rights in return for legal authority? What we don't know can hurt us.Convictions based on drug-assisted interrogations have rocketed in the last decade. Every citizen has the right to refuse pharmaceutical invasion of our most private minds, but exercising that right leads to conviction on suspicion. There was no public outcry when the legally-sanctioned lobotomy known as 'rehabilitation' was adopted for many major federal offenses. Hundreds of local jurisdictions have begun to practice it indiscriminately for even the most minor crimes, but the innocent are too docile to protest a horror visited only on the guilty. For now.

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That's today's installment. If you're wondering, yes I DO want to know what you think of these little niblets. I crave affirmation like a fish wants water.