The Shape of Oppression

Around here, I’ve seen very little harassment from the government.
As noted previously on this blog, I was under some kind of bumbling surveillance at one point around the turn of the millennium. It included tapping my phone, some ham-fisted questioning about me in the one-dog town where I went to church, and some other forms of pressure. Oddly, this was what set me free from the blinders of supporting my government without much thought. I had nothing to do with the guy they were after. They were watching me for all the wrong things, and could have discovered their mistake with a lot less destruction in my life, not to mention with a lot less expense to the government. All the information was already in their hands, but they couldn’t be bothered to read it.
That day, when my Christian ministry was destroyed by their sloppy investigation, I became a dissident.
Since then, the harassment has been of a more technical nature. That is, instead of some conscious human decision to mess with me, it was automated. As one who has kept a broadband connection to the Internet whenever physically possible, I have spent some time learning the technology involved in keeping it working. More than once, immediately upon visiting certain kinds of webpages, that connection was broken.
So far, it’s been the kind of thing where I poke and prod the equipment, and reset this or that, and it all came back. This is not the same kind of issues we all have with random service disruption. The issue I’m describing has been fairly consistent with an automated surveillance. When I visit something which would provide a new and dangerous skill (breaking out of flex cuffs, shimming padlocks, etc.) or certain revelations of leaked government secrets, the connection promptly went sour for everyone in the house, but none of my neighbors. It didn’t matter if it was cable or DSL. Way back when I was using dialup, and it was hard to be sure, since the connection was already pretty shaky, but it happened there, too.
Without knowing where the breakpoint is, I can’t determine how closely it targets me or if it targets others based on choosing the same page. It’s been the same regardless of what I use for a router, what operating system I run on the router or the computers involved, and it has followed me across a half-dozen widely scattered addresses. I can’t predict when some page I visit will trigger this, but I recognize it for what it is because it is absolutely not random.
Two things: (1) I’d love to know if others have run into this particular thing. Then, even if only a few can confirm it, (2) I would suggest this is just the first symptom of things to come for all of us, particularly Americans.