Lily: It sounds like you are describing a Customs and Immigration inspection established in the contingent border corridor regions of Canada but especially Mexico, as well as scattered around the coasts -- and of which we are heqaring more and more as it has expanded to include stationary and even roving Highway Inspection stations, coordinated with Highway Patrol DWUI 'safety' stops.
But what I find esp. bizarre is the non-uniform casual civilian-dress and lack of accurate disclosure of just WHO these 'agents' were and which agency(s) they represented. Then too, the apparant logistics of what, some 24 or so agents to inspect a 12-car train -- Where were they stationed, how are these numbers of agents coordinated, what are their duties when they aren't inspecting the infrequent-but-routine trains? I'd guess the inspection took about 15 minutes or-so, eh? So they have to arrive all-together, do their questioning-inspection thing, and then, go back to their full-time duty of what?
This and their indistinguishable 'service' makes me wonder if they may belong to several different agencies on intermittant part-time detachment as Customs & Immigration duty officers?
I wonder if they were multi-function Homeland Security/Immigration officers, or even part of an expanded National Security presence around ultra-sensitive sites like Livermore Labs?
I'm real curious that they had sufficient impression of authority that they didn't have to declare who they were to compel strangers to answer their nosy questions -- perhaps even playing-up the intimidation factor of their very undercover anonymous Special Police Powers 'goon squad' shtick.
Makes me think how successfully the public has been conditioned to
Submit -- Reveal -- Comply -- Obey -- Cooperate
on demand to Big Brother authority.
"Papers Please" (or rather simply a cold barked demand, "Show your papers") may not be too far off.
That kind of Big Brother Authority role apparently appeals to some people -- who necessarily must have very naive, unimaginative & malleable brains as well as some deficit of personality/character to willingly serve a corrupted Police State bureaucracy. I'd guess the CIA/FBI/NSA/ONI et al. have perfected screening & recruitment to target that segment of the population who are most susceptable to their social & cultural Psyop modification programs.
Even 50 years of propaganda & subtle psyop conditioning doesn't make fascism stink any less or their agents come across as nice people -- at least to those who haven't abandoned or renounced their uncommon common sense and regard for the values & ideals of old skool liberal tradition that was the foundation for our democratic society.
Take for example how the proto-fascists have socially-engineered a new meaning for 'liberal' that is totally at-odds with what it originally stood for -- a clever semi-invisible way for them to surgically expunge or at the very least hamstring a dynamic social concept/idea that is contrary to fascism's ideology of social homogenesis under stratified corporate Command-and-Control centralization. I don't think most of the lemmings who have participated in demonizing 'liberal' even grasp the unwitting tools they've been loyal servants to.
You can't defend yourself from an attack you aren't aware of.
Like invading your privacy, violating your personal space and degrading you in order to 'protect you' against the evil terrible faceless hordes of 'Them'.
How maliciously twisted is that?
