Blog

California bill 2273 would require websites and apps to verify visitors’ ID

California’s bill CA AB 2273, designed to enact the Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) is just one among the bills raising concerns in terms of how they might negatively affect the web going forward.

Like their counterparts in the EU, legislators in California, according to their critics, present online child safety as their only goal – and a stated desire to improve this is hard to argue with, even when arguments are valid – such as that the proposed bills may in fact do nothing to better protect children, while eroding the rights of every internet user.

Among other things, AB 2273 aims to require sites and apps to authenticate the age of all their users before allowing access. Attempts to introduce mandatory age authentication have also cropped up in other jurisdictions before, but have proven controversial, technically difficult to implement, with a high potential to compromise user data collected in this way, and intrusive to people’s privacy.

In California, the situation doesn’t look much different as critics of this bill say that authentication will require site operators and businesses to deal with personal data collection from every user, and worry about using and storing it securely.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

In addition, some kind of government-issued ID – or surrendering biometric data such as that collected through facial recognition – is necessary to prove one’s age in the first place; and this is where forcing sites and services to require this information would effectively mean the end of anonymity online.

Keep reading

Cop Beaten to Death by Fellow Cops During Exercise on How to Respond to Civilian Unrest

The mother of a Los Angeles police officer is coming forward this week alleging that her son 32-year-old officer Houston Tipping, was beaten to death by fellow cops during department training last month. Tipping was playing the role of a civilian and was beaten by fellow officers and suffered fatal head and neck injuries.

Shirley Huffman, Tipping’s mother filed a notice of claim against the city this month as part of a wrongful death lawsuit. Her son suffered a massive spinal cord injury during the event on May 26 and died three days later. He was buried last week.

Huffman stated in her lawsuit that the training exercise “had already been questioned” before her son was killed as other officers had previously suffered injuries during the training.

In a statement after Tipping’s death, police claimed that Tipping was injured while “grappling” with another officer in a tragic “accident.”

 At the time of the accident Officer Tipping was a bike instructor engaged in a training scenario involving grappling with another officer. During the scenario Officer Tipping fell to the floor and suffered a catastrophic spinal cord injury. Officers immediately began CPR and summoned a LA Fire rescue who transported Officer Tipping to USCMC.

This is a point with which Huffman disagrees. Huffman alleged her son was “repeatedly struck in the head severely enough that he bled,” and that the beating resulted in injuries requiring stitches. He also suffered multiple breaks in his neck, which caused his death, the claim said, according to the LA Times. 

Bradley Gage, an attorney for Huffman, said Tipping suffered injuries to two parts of his head and to four vertebrae.

“Chief Moore stated that Officer Tipping impressed his peers with a ‘willingness to go the extra mile to make the world a better place,’” her claim stated. “Yet, that wasn’t enough to avoid other officers paralyzing him and eventually killing him in violation of law, and his civil rights.”

Keep reading

These Mormons Have Found a New Faith — in Magic Mushrooms

On a Sunday afternoon in March, a group of 30 strangers huddle under a park pavilion in Salt Lake City, Utah, sipping hot cocoa and shaking hands shyly as snow clots the cottonwoods. A clean-cut gang of mostly white professionals, they are united by their interest in the Divine Assembly, a two-year old church with 3,000 members that considers psilocybin its holy sacrament. 

The church’s co-founders, husband and wife Steve and Sara Urquhart, mingle quietly with the psychedelic-curious, many of whom are either new to tripping or considering their maiden voyage. Steve sticks to the sidelines, every so often reaching to smooth a conical white beard that, combined with his blue eyes and bearlike frame, make him look like a punk Santa Claus. The long beard is the only outer marker of his new identity: Before pivoting to mushroom churches, Urquhart was one of the most powerful Republicans in the Utah State Legislature, serving from 2001 to 2016, with a stint as majority whip in the House before eventually moving over to the Senate. Former colleagues and friends recall his small-government brand of Republicanism as “rock-ribbed.” He was also, like more than 60 percent of Utah and approximately 86 percent of the Legislature in 2021, deeply, devoutly Mormon. 

“We were all the way in,” Urqhuart says of the proudly peculiar American religion with about 6.7 million adherents in the U.S. and about 16.6 million globally. Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 during the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York, Mormonism (or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as church authorities requested it be called in 2018, though many Latter-day Saints, or Saints for short, still use the term “Mormon”) bases its teachings on the revelations of Smith, whom they consider a prophet. According to Smith, who claimed to have translated the Book of Mormon from a pair of gold plates inscribed with “reformed Egyptian,” Latter-day Saints are God’s chosen people destined to restore the original Christian gospel — a gospel that included, they professed up until 1890, polygamy. 

“I knew all the secret handshakes,” Urquhart later divulges after one shot of tequila, and he means it quite literally, demonstrating a dizzying pattern of grips, bumps, and daps that look straight out of a Monty Python skit. 

In all likelihood, Urquhart and others believe now, Smith lifted those handshakes and many other ceremonial elements from the Freemasons, the then-popular secret society that counted Smith as a member. Urquhart also believes, 100 percent seriously, that the LDS Church (the mainstream one he and Mitt Romney are from, not the fundamentalist offshoots depicted in Under the Banner of Heaven) is a cult. Specifically, he says, alluding to the church’s polygamist history and fact that some bishops still ask teens if they are masturbating, “a sex cult with really bad sex.”

Church or cult, Urquhart crashed out of it around 2008. In the park that Sunday, he is in good company. Although the Divine Assembly is not limited to former LDS members, or “post-Mormons” as they refer to themselves, the majority of the crowd by default is, and they’re aching for a new kind of spirituality to fill the void. One couple, Yesenia and Guillermo Ramos, tell me they left the LDS Church in 2012, after it began to feel like the opposite of what they thought it stood for. “God is love,” Yesenia says with conviction, but within the church, she says she felt judged for her decision to be both a mom and a nurse, rather than a stay-at-home mom. Furthermore, Yesenia says, she was sick of the pressure to appear perfect all the time, a common complaint among LDS women that Dr. Curtis Canning, president of the Utah Psychiatric Association, has called “Mother of Zion Syndrome.”

Keep reading

Newspeak In The 21st Century: How To Become A Model Citizen In The New Era Of Domestic Warfare

As early as mid-Nov 2020, Biden was already discussing the need to pass further laws against domestic terrorism. This is interesting since under the 2001 Patriot Act (which was meant to be a temporary enforcement in reaction to 9/11, however, is still in place 19 years later), domestic terrorism is already defined as;

“activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state; (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.”

So, the question begs, what else needs to be added to the Patriot Act, which was recognised at the time of its enforcement as something that should only be temporary since it was understood that it infringed upon civil liberties? Come to think of it, why is the Patriot Act still in place, which allows for the indefinite continuation of human rights violations such as warrantless wiretapping; illegal torture, kidnapping, and detention; mass surveillance; government secrecy; Real ID; no-fly list; political spying; abuse of material witness statutes; and attacks on academic freedom?

As Glenn Greenwald wrote in his formidable paper The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming, “what needs to be criminalized that is not already a crime?”, keeping in mind that as of June 2020, the United States has the highest prisoner rate in the world, followed by El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Thailand and Palau.

Well, the answer is apparently simple and as always for our own good. We have come to a point in time where the enemy is not some radicalized ideology, it is not some foreign despot, it is not even the threat of war (whether it be economic, cyber or nuclear), but rather it is ourselves. We, the people, are the new enemies of the State.

You may protest “Not I! I am a model citizen! I pay my taxes on time, I am never late or call in sick for work, I make sure to be up-to-date with the newest ‘woke’ revelations and I don’t engage with anything outside of the mainstream matrix during my free-time.”

People such as yourself think, that when the Biden Administration is calling for tougher laws against domestic terrorism, that it is obviously meant for the ‘other guy,’ those uneducated bigots who are screaming at the top of their lungs “Treason!” and inciting what we are told to be forms of ‘insurrection,’ all in the name of the archaic ideas of ‘patriotism’ and the ‘U.S. Constitution.’

You, unlike so many others, have no problem recognising that the U.S. Constitution is actually part of the problem, that by the standards used today, the U.S. Constitution is itself responsible for ‘inciting violence’ and thus guilty of domestic terrorism, and thus needs to be revoked.

But you see… that’s just not good enough.

Though you are well on your way to becoming a model citizen in the 21st century, you still have a little ways to go. It is for this reason that a guide to 21st century Newspeak has been recently released to make sure that well-intentioned citizens like yourself are fully informed of what is required of you in terms of appropriate behaviour, as well as appropriate thoughts, and though this will take a little more time, appropriate instincts.

Keep reading

Was the Bust of “White Supremacists” at Idaho LGBTQ Pride Event Another FBI False Flag Operation to Boost J6 “Insurrection” Narrative?

On Saturday, June 11, officers of the Coeur d’Alene Police Department and Kootenai County (Idaho) Sheriff’s Office made a dramatic bust of a U-Haul truck filled with uniformed “white supremacists” who, reportedly, intended to cause a riot at an “LGBTQ Pride” event. However, that is only part of the story. It appears that the primary intent of those arrested (virtually all of whom were out-of-state actors) was to barge in uninvited and associate themselves with Christian groups that were carrying out a peaceful, prayerful counter-demonstration to the LGBTQ event at a different nearby park. The story of the arrests immediately went viral with sensational headlines, photos, and video footage tailored to fit the relentless media theme of red states as dangerous bastions of right-wing, racist, Trumpist, homophobic extremism. In this article we will be reporting on the story behind the headlines, the lessons that this incident provides, and the warning it signals about similar events that are likely in store for us in the future.

As the Nancy Pelosi/Liz Cheney dog-and-pony hoax known as the House Select Committee on January 6 revved up in June, patriots across the country went on alert, concerned that provocations might be cooked up to justify the committee’s ongoing “investigation” and to boost the Pelosi-Cheney narrative that “white nationalism” is running rampant in the republic. This is not the result of patriot paranoia; there is good reason to be concerned that agents provocateurs from the Antifa/BLM Left or the FBI (or both) would create violent incidents that the Fake News media would exploit to further demonize conservatives and advance the “progressive” police-state agenda. After all, it is not like this has never happened before. There is ample evidence that FBI operatives played enough key roles in the Capitol melee of January 6, 2021 to warrant the suspicion that it was a “Fedsurrection” rather than the “insurrection” the media bloviators and political hacks would have us believe it was.

Remember too that the FBI’s man in charge of its Washington, D.C., office at the time of the “insurrection” (and still serving in that capacity) is Steven D’Antuono, the same FBI official who orchestrated and oversaw the phony kidnapping plot of Michigan’s radical Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, by a “militia” group composed almost completely of the FBI’s own agents or its paid informants. That FBI operation culminated in sensational arrests just three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, conveniently timed to provide the Biden campaign and its media collaborators with ammunition to blast Donald Trump 24/7 with accusations that he was encouraging and inspiring terrorism and insurrection. It couldn’t have been more advantageously concocted to aid the Democrats if it had been scripted by the Democratic National Committee. And perhaps it was, since, as the recent history of the Trump and Biden administrations shows, the DNC and the DOJ/FBI work together seamlessly. And even though the trials of the “Whitmer kidnap plot” have, thus far, ended in acquittals for the defendants on grounds of entrapment and have exposed gross criminal abuse and conspiracy by the FBI, it has been almost completely ignored by the daily outrage lobby of the controlled media. Thus, the DNC/DOJ/FBI cabal undoubtedly feels emboldened to continue with impunity these criminal operations against the American people.

Keep reading

Supreme Court Refuses to Limit Warrantless Surveillance

According to the Supreme Court, the legality of NSA mass surveillance can’t even be legally challenged.

This was the message the Court sent when it refused to take up Jewel v. NSA, allowing an appellate court decision to stand.

The high court’s decision further underscores the futility of depending on federal courts to challenge federal surveillance power. Tenth Amendment Center executive director Micheal Boldin called it “a really bad strategy.”

“We don’t expect it to ever get the job done.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the NSA in 2008 on behalf of Carolyn Jewel and several other AT&T customers in an effort to end dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary people. The EFF based its case on declarations from three NSA whistleblowers, along with other evidence that included documents published by the Washington Post and the Guardian. The evidence showed that the NSA collected communication directly from fiber optic cables. It also revealed a domestic telephone record collection program that the government confirmed in 2013.  Mark Klein worked as an AT&T tech who claimed the communications giant routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

In 2015, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White denied the plaintiffs’ challenge saying that it would require “impermissible disclosure of state secret information” The Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the district court opinion, affirming that “state secret privilege” blocked the plaintiff’s efforts to tp prove that their data was intercepted. Unable to prove that, they had no standing to sue.

As EFF put it, the Supreme Court allowed the case to be dismissed because the surveillance program that everybody has known about since Edward Snowden released a trove of documents in 2013 is a “secret.”

 “Yes, you read that right: something we all know is a still officially a “secret” and so cannot be the subject to litigation.”

As the EFF explains, the U.S. government contends that “even if all of the allegations of serious law-breaking and Constitutional violations are true, surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans is exempt from judicial review.”

Keep reading

“My Body, My Choice” Activists Malfunction When Asked About Vaccine Mandates

A video shows pro-abortion activists who embrace the concept of “my body, my choice” having brain malfunctions when asked about vaccine mandates.

The past few days have seen infinite instances of the same people who called those skeptical of mandatory vaccines every slur in the book suddenly do a 180 and claim the government has no right to have a say over their bodily autonomy.

That made for some interesting responses when Alex Stein confronted Roe vs Wade demonstrators with the hypocrisy of their own rhetoric.

“Are you in favor of my body, my choice?” Stein asked protesters, all of whom agreed.

“What about vaccine mandates?” he countered.

One man responded by engaging in a deluge of verbal diarrhea, while another simply said, “Get the fuck out of here, man.”

Vaccine mandates were “better for the community,” said another woman, before refusing to accept that a baby was a baby.

“That isn’t a baby,” said another woman who was pro-vaccine mandates.

“I’ll throw your phone on the floor if you don’t stop,” another man angrily responded.

“This is not going where we want it to go,” said another older woman who could not compute the dichotomy while her husband held a sign saying “sick of the hypocrisy.”

Keep reading

The well-traveled road from member of Congress to foreign agent

Earlier this month, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress that, among other important provisions to combat undue foreign influence in politics, would ban former members of Congress from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments. 

New Quincy Institute research finds that this congressional action is long overdue as the revolving door from Congress to lobbying on behalf of foreign interests has been spinning feverishly.

It’s no secret that when members of Congress leave office, they turn to one profession above all others: lobbying. Year in and year out, it’s the same story of former elected officials selling their connections and knowledge of how to make things happen (or not happen) in Washington to high-paying special interests. While this lobbying is often done on behalf of American interests — like big pharmaceutical, banking, or weapons firms — former lawmakers have been lobbying on behalf of foreign interests more and more often in recent years.

We analyzed Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings since 2000 and found that at least 90 former members of Congress have registered as foreign agents, representing nearly half (87) of all countries in the world, and the trend has only become more pronounced in recent years. This raises critically important questions for U.S. national interests and highlights the importance of legislation to combat the potential risks of former members of Congress working for foreign interests.

Keep reading