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Again images of a cavalier and dismissive police officer with his knee on the neck of a handcuffed man that later died have brought people to the streets in protest of police brutality. This is not the first time police have overstepped their mandate. For years many officers have used a heavier hand than is necessary to enforce laws. While such heavy-handed treatment is most likely to be used on minorities and the young, it is often evident on anyone having the nerve to question the authority of someone wearing a badge. The reality is that police violence goes beyond black and white. Those granted the job of protecting and serving need to understand that “Do it because I said so” doesn’t work. The bulk of the article below indicates little has changed over the last several years.

A news story on my local news channel in 2014 reported how a man faced charges stemming from Halloween party. It told how prosecutors charged a white 20-year-old man after police say he threatened them when they broke up a party on our local college campus on Halloween. According to court documents, police responded to a call about a loud party and while speaking with party-goers, officers noticed a half-empty vodka bottle on the floor. Police said when they went into the apartment, a very white fella was loud and refused to cooperate. After putting him in handcuffs and leading him out of the building via an elevator, he reportedly threatened the officer by saying he would beat and kill him. A struggle ensued and the officer used a Taser to subdue the man who was charged with resisting law enforcement, criminal mischief, and disorderly conduct.

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Former Supreme Court Justice: ‘This is what a police state is like’

April 4, 2020

Former Supreme Court Justice: ‘This is what a police state is like’

The former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption, QC, has denounced the police response to the coronavirus, saying the country is suffering ‘collective hysteria’. This is an edited transcript of his interview with BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme earlier today. Derbyshire police have shamed our policing traditions

BBC interviewer Jonny Dymond ‘A hysterical slide into a police state. A shameful police force intruding with scant regard to common sense or tradition. An irrational overreaction driven by fear.’ These are not the accusations of wild-eyed campaigners, they come from the lips of one our most eminent jurists Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court. I spoke to him just before we came on air.

Lord Sumption The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Draconian Lockdown Powers: It’s a Slippery Slope from Handwashing to House Arrest

April 2, 2020

Draconian Lockdown Powers: It’s a Slippery Slope from Handwashing to House Arrest

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”—Viktor Frankl

We still have choices.

Just because we’re fighting an unseen enemy in the form of a virus doesn’t mean we have to relinquish every shred of our humanity, our common sense, or our freedoms to a nanny state that thinks it can do a better job of keeping us safe.

Whatever we give up willingly now—whether it’s basic human decency, the ability to manage our private affairs, the right to have a say in how the government navigates this crisis, or the few rights still left to us that haven’t been disemboweled in recent years by a power-hungry police state—we won’t get back so easily once this crisis is past.

The government never cedes power willingly.

Neither should we.

Every day brings a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that are eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

This is where we run the risk of this whole fly-by-night operation going completely off the rails.

It’s one thing to attempt an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of this virus because we can’t afford to risk overwhelming the hospitals and exposing the most vulnerable in the nation to unavoidable loss of life scenarios. However, there’s a fine line between strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You’re Under Arrest: How the Police State Muzzles Our Right to Speak Truth to Power

June 8, 2019

You’re Under Arrest: How the Police State Muzzles Our Right to Speak Truth to Power

“History shows that governments sometimes seek to regulate our lives finely, acutely, thoroughly, and exhaustively. In our own time and place, criminal laws have grown so exuberantly and come to cover so much previously innocent conduct that almost anyone can be arrested for something. If the state could use these laws not for their intended purposes but to silence those who voice unpopular ideas, little would be left of our First Amendment liberties, and little would separate us from the tyrannies of the past or the malignant fiefdoms of our own age. The freedom to speak without risking arrest is ‘one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation.’”—Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissenting, Nieves v. Bartlett (2019)

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

What the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.

For those who refuse to meekly accept the heavy-handed tyranny of the police state, the danger is all too real.

We live in an age in which “we the people” are at the mercy of militarized, weaponized, immunized cops who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

As such, those who seek to exercise their First Amendment rights during encounters with the police are increasingly finding that there is no such thing as freedom of speech.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

After Assange’s Arrest, Ecuador’s Creep Towards Authoritarianism Becomes a Sprint

April 15, 2019

After Assange’s Arrest, Ecuador’s Creep Towards Authoritarianism Becomes a Sprint

The recent violation of Assange’s rights as both political asylee and citizen of Ecuador sends a chilling message to Ecuadorians who are being increasingly targeted for their political views both within Ecuador and abroad.

QUITO, ECUADOR — Last week, Ecuador’s government gravely undermined not only its own national sovereignty but international refugee and asylum laws by allowing U.K. police into its London embassy to arrest then-Ecuadorian citizen, Ecuadorian asylee, and journalist Julian Assange.

As has been observed by many analysts, the shocking yet somewhat anticipated decision has shown that Ecuador’s government — led by Lenín Moreno — is willing to play fast and loose with its domestic laws, as well as international law, if it stands to benefit Moreno and his increasingly unpopular administration, whose approval rating now hovers at around 30 percent.

In the hours that followed Assange’s disturbing arrest, which saw him dragged from the embassy by British police, Ecuador’s government has wasted no time in taking actions that are not only highly troubling but show Moreno’s willingness to embrace fascist tactics in his desperate bid to silence dissent.

Indeed, a key factor in Moreno’s decision to revoke Assange’s asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship, was alleged to be Moreno’s rage at WikiLeaks — the organization Assange founded but no longer runs — for simply retweeting and spreading information regarding the burgeoning INA Papers corruption scandal, which centers around an offshore bank account in Panama linked to Moreno and his family. Notably, the firestorm of media coverage around Assange’s violent removal from the embassy has distracted from the media coverage of the scandal.

The witch hunt begins

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Are we sleepwalking into an AI police state?

March 28, 2019

Are we sleepwalking into an AI police state?

Predictive analytics enabling law enforcement to identify “high-risk” areas has highlighted ethical and legal quandaries

Science fiction has long speculated on the danger of a dystopian future and machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI). But with the advent of big data, we no longer need to speculate: the future has arrived. By the end of March, West Midlands Police is due to finish a prototype for the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), an AI system designed to predict the risk of where crime will be committed and by whom. NDAS could eventually be rolled out by every police force in the UK.

Ultimately, we need to be able to choose as a society how we use these technologies and what kind of society we really want to be

Fourteen police forces around the UK have used or planned to use such tools. But a report published in February by human rights group Liberty warns that far from being objective, police crime-mapping software reinforces pre-existing biases about who commits crime.

Current mapping tools use past crime data to identify so-called high-risk areas, leading to more intensive patrolling. Yet these areas are often already subject to disproportionate over-policing. By relying on data from police practices, according to Liberty’s advocacy director Corey Stoughton, these tools might simply “entrench discrimination against black and minority-ethnic people”.

Police mapping tools turning citizens into suspects

Ben Hayes, a data protection and ethics adviser to the European Union, United Nations and other international organisations, warns that the increased use of such mapping tools is increasingly turning ordinary citizens into suspects.

“People can be categorised as vulnerable, at risk, threatening, deserving or undeserving,” says Dr Hayes, noting that this tends to target those already marginalised. “Services such as border control, policing and social welfare are all subject to inherent bias. Machine-learning doesn’t eliminate those biases, it amplifies and reinforces them.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Amazon Goes Full Orwellian

December 21, 2018

Amazon Goes Full Orwellian

Bezos poised to become knower of all things, with strategic moves to collect info on individuals inside and out.

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it,” came a warning from George Orwell’s novel, 1984, that is rapidly, wickedly, becoming prophecy with new Amazon eye-in-the- sky technology and a dark and disturbing twist. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is poking that eye with a sharp stick.

And Jeff Bezos is not feeling the love.

In what appears to be Bezos’s latest strategic move in the quest to replace God as knower of all things is a hybrid monster of facial recognition software and a doorbell camera widget manufactured by Ring, a company that Amazon bought earlier this year.

In a gross assault on the right to privacy, a patent filed months ago essentially describes a product that captures information on people who as much as walk past a doorbell, sending real-time information to police databases. It also will allow customers the ability to upload to law enforcement photos of anyone they deem might be a sketchy individual.

What does a non-sketchy, normal person wear when ringing a doorbell?

Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney for the ACLU, is fired up and fighting:

“It’s rare for patent applications to lay out, in such nightmarish detail, the world a company wants to bring about. Amazon is dreaming of a dangerous future … ”

Or perhaps Bezos dreams of ruling the world.

Biometrics Bastardization

But attaining an unlimited collection of facial snapshots is just the beginning. A deeper dive into the patent application reveals that Amazon is prepping to expand its unlimited munitions stash of photos with other biometrics. And what it plans to extract from unsuspecting folks will horrify freedom-loving Americans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Comparing China and America: Economies Diverge, Police States Converge

December 1, 2018

Comparing China and America: Economies Diverge, Police States Converge

I have followed China’s development, its stunning advance in forty years from impoverished Third World to a huge economy, its rapid scientific progress. Coming from nowhere it now runs neck and neck with the US in supercomputes, does world-class work in genetic engineering and genomics (the Beijing Genomics Institutes), quantum computing and quantum radar, in scientific publications. It lags in many things, but the speed of advance, the intense focus on progess, is remarkable.

Recently, after twelve years away, I returned for a couple of weeks to Chungdu and Chong Quing, which I found amazing. American patriots of the lightly read but growly sort will bristle at the thought that the Chinese may have political and economic systems superior to ours, but, well, China rises whlle the US flounders. They must be doing something right.

In terms of economic systems, the Chinese are clearly superior. China runs a large economic surplus, allowing it to invest heavily in infrastructure and in resources abroad. America runs a large deficit. China invests in China, America in the military. China’s infrastructure is new, of high quality, and growing. America’s slowly deteriorates. China has an adult government that gets things done. America has an essentially absentee Congress and a kaleidoscopically shifting cast of pathologically aggressive curiosities in the White House.

America cannot compete with a country far more populous of more-intelligent people with competent leadership and the geographic advantage of being in Eurasia. Washington’s choices are either to start a major war while it can, perhaps force the world to submit through sanctions, or resign itself to America’s becoming just another country. Given the goiterous egos inside the Beltway Bubbble, this is not encouraging.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Yes, You Have the Right to Talk Back to the Government, But It Could Get You Killed

November 30, 2018

Yes, You Have the Right to Talk Back to the Government, But It Could Get You Killed

“The freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”— Justice William J. Brennan, City of Houston v. Hill

What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.

It’s not an easy undertaking.

Weaponized by police, prosecutors, courts and legislatures, “disorderly conduct” charges have become a convenient means by which to punish those individuals who refuse to be muzzled.

Deyshia Hargrave, a language arts teacher in Louisiana, was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and arrested for speaking out during a public comment period at a school board meeting.
Fane Lozman was arrested for alluding to government corruption during open comment time at a City Council meeting in Palm Beach County, Fla.
Dan Heyman, a reporter for the Public News Service, was arrested for “aggressively” questioning Tom Price, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services during an encounter in the West Virginia State Capitol.
College professor Ersula Ore was slammed to the ground and arrested after she objected to the “disrespectful manner” shown by a campus cop who stopped her in the middle of the street and demanded that she show her ID.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Creating a Suspect Society: The Scary Side of the Technological Police State

October 4, 2018

Creating a Suspect Society: The Scary Side of the Technological Police State

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”—Philip K. Dick

It’s a given that Big Brother is always watching us.

Unfortunately, thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Big Brother (and his corporate partners in crime) is getting even creepier and more invasive, intrusive and stalker-like.

Indeed, every dystopian sci-fi film (and horror film, for that matter) we’ve ever seen is suddenly converging into this present moment in a dangerous trifecta between science and technology, Big Business, and a government that wants to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful—but not without help from the citizenry.

On a daily basis, Americans are relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

As journalist Anna Myers notes, “Fingerprint readers, eye scans, and voice recognition are no longer just the security methods of high-tech spy movies. Millions of mobile phone, bank, and investment customers now have these technologies at their fingertips. Schwab uses voice recognition, Apple uses fingerprints, Wells Fargo scans eyes, and other companies are developing heartbeat or grip technology to verify user identity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Washington’s Matrix Is Closing Down Truth Throughout the Western World

September 15, 2018

Washington’s Matrix Is Closing Down Truth Throughout the Western World

For a number of years I have emphasized that 9/11 was used by Dick Cheney to significantly reduce the public’s, the judiciary’s, and Congress’ access to information about what the executive branch is doing, thereby preventing legal, legislative, and electoral action against the unlawful and unconstitutional behavior of the executive branch during the Cheney/Bush and Obama regimes.

Recently I discovered on my bookshelves Charlie Savage’s extraordinary book, Takeover (2007), which describes how Cheney and his minions, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, and Shannen Coffin, used secret Department of Justice (sic) memos and executive orders from George W. Bush to prevent the release of any information that would get in the way of Cheney’s agenda for war in the Middle East and a police state at home. If Americans understood that an immigrant from Korea, John Yoo, wrote secret DOJ memos that shredded both the separation of powers and US civil liberties, there would be even more opposition to immigration of peoples who are not dedicated to our founding document, the US Constitution.

Ten years later David Ray Griffin’s 2017 book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, also documents how Dick Cheney fed the US Constitution into a shredder.

I intend to review these two books together so that you can see that there is nothing left of the United States as defined by the US Constitution. What has caused me to mention them now is The Saker’s interview with Michael Hoffman about Amazon’s use by the government as a proxy censor. In the name of private enterprise choosing what it wants to sell, the Amazon monopoly enables the government to censor without the government violating the First Amendment.

Read this: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50261.htm and you will see how non-enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act has enabled Washington to create private monopolies such as Amazon that do the dirty work for Washington that the First Amendment prevents.

Battlefield America: The Ongoing War on the American People

August 24, 2018

Battlefield America: The Ongoing War on the American People

“A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a government with a taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be smartly rebuked, or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.”—John Salter

Police in a small Georgia town tasered a 5-foot-2, 87-year-old woman who was using a kitchen knife to cut dandelions for use in a recipe. Police claim they had no choice but to taser the old woman, who does not speak English but was smiling at police to indicate she was friendly, because she failed to comply with orders to put down the knife.

Police in California are being sued for using excessive force against a deaf 76-year-old woman who was allegedly jaywalking and failed to halt when police yelled at her. According to the lawsuit, police searched the woman and her grocery bags. She was then slammed to the ground, had a foot or knee placed behind her neck or back, handcuffed, arrested and cited for jaywalking and resisting arrest.

In Alabama, police first tasered then shot and killed an unarmed man who refused to show his driver’s license after attempting to turn in a stray dog he’d found to the local dog shelter. The man’s girlfriend and their three children, all under the age of 10, witnessed the shooting.

In New York, Customs and Border Protection officers have come under fire for subjecting female travelers (including minors) to random body searches that include strip searches while menstruating, genital probing, and forced pelvic exams, X-rays and intravenous drugs at area hospitals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the United Kingdom Became a Police State

July 7, 2018

How the United Kingdom Became a Police State

This article will demonstrate how the United Kingdom has steadily become a police state over the past twenty years, weaponizing its institutions against the people and employing Orwellian techniques to stop the public from seeing the truth. It will demonstrate, contrary to official narratives, that both overall levels of crime and violent crime have been increasing, not decreasing, as the size of the state in the UK has gotten bigger. It will also expose how the Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010, deliberately obscured real crime data with estimated crime rates based on survey data as opposed to the real numbers. I will demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion perpetuated by progressive myths, life was much safer in Britain during the era of classical laissez-faire from the 1850s to 1911.

In his 10 years in power from 1997 to 2007, Tony Blair passed an astonishing 26,849 laws in total, an average of 2,663 per year or 7.5 a day.1 The Labour Party continued this madness under Gordon Brown who broke the record in 2008 by passing 2,823 new laws, a 6% increase on even his megalomaniac predecessor.2 In 2010, Labour’s last year in power before handing over the reigns to the Blairite social radical, David Cameron, there was a 54% surge in privacy cases brought against public bodies,3 and the Cabinet were refusing freedom of information requests at a rate of 51%.4 The vast number of new laws under Labour does not count the 2,100 new regulations the EU passed in 2006 alone, which apparently is average for them.

Many of these vast changes under Blair and Brown were in the area of criminal law. By 2008, Labour had created more than 3,600 new offences.5 Many of these, naturally, were red-tape regulations. To give you an idea:6

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Police State in Slo-Mo

July 6, 2018

Police State in Slo-Mo

For many years, I’ve forecasted that the US will evolve into a police state; that it will begin slowly; then as more and more freedoms are removed, the creation of the police state will accelerate.

We’re now seeing that acceleration, as more and more Americans are detained, questioned, and having their property confiscated than ever before.

As an example, in 2016, some 20,000 travellers in and out of the US were stopped, often at random. Typically, their baggage was searched, their documents photocopied, access codes to their electronic devices demanded and their files copied. In most cases, no explanation was given, but they were advised that if the search was refused, they would be detained indefinitely.

The following year, in 2017, the numbers of people detained rose by 50%, to 30,000.

It’s important to note that the travellers were not threatened with arrest, which suggests that the authorities were working on the basis that the Patriot Act of 2001 allows all of the above activities—without cause being given, without a warrant being obtained, without access to a phone call or legal representation being allowed, and that the individuals in question may be detained, indefinitely.

This, of course, is in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that people have the right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

However, when people travel, they are particularly vulnerable, so the travellers in question are extremely unlikely to refuse. They understand that, “indefinitely” means, “until a Supreme Court ruling is passed, overturning the Patriot Act as unconstitutional.” If it hasn’t happened yet and isn’t under consideration, it’s safe to say that the level of police state allowed under the Patriot Act is permanent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Police State Takes A Giant Leap Towards Pre-Crime

June 27, 2018

The Police State Takes A Giant Leap Towards Pre-Crime

If you think we still have privacy rights or a 4th Amendment you are living in the past. Technology has moved past our individual rights and technology is now determining what day and time a crime will be committed in your neighborhood and produce a list of suspects that need to “questioned” prior to a crime being committed. Technological profiling.

Wearing a head cover that’s new to you? Well, it could mean you’re about to commit a crime. Show up in an area for the first time? Well, why are you there and what are you doing? Sounds like criminal activity to me.

You’re guilty for being human and simply living your life according to your beliefs. The police state will not allow you to be, nor it will it allow you to explore new areas, dress differently and if you do, you will categorized, profiled and a note added to your file for future reference.

Technology has been transforming every aspect of society, including revolutionary new capabilities for police departments from tattoo-recognition technology to the growing use of drones. The June edition of Wired magazine explores this topic. Wired editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson joins “CBS This Morning: Saturday” to discuss the kind of devices officers are using and why they are prompting concerns about racial profiling and privacy. Source – CBS This Morning

I always knew tattoo’s were a bad idea for me and now I know why. My guess is the technology is currently, or will be soon enough, that will be able to determine the ink type, profile of the ink in the tattoo and be able to pin-point where the tattoo was created.

Nicholas Thompson, while not exactly gleeful over the situation, he is not expressing a level of concern this situation warrants. What is being described is straight out of the movie Minority Report and George Orwell’s 1984.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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