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How Federal Surveillance and “Parallel Construction” Undermine the Rule of Law

When we talk about NSA spying, most people’s eyes glaze over. They just don’t think it will have any impact on them. After all, the surveillance agency only spies on foreigners and terrorists, right? And if some Americans’ data ends up in NSA databases in the process, well, that doesn’t really matter. It’s the price we pay for security.

But in fact, federal surveillance and the investigative practices it fosters undermines and subverts the fundamental rule of law in the United States.

State and local law enforcement agencies use the reams of data the NSA collects to prosecute Americans. Most of these cases have nothing to do with terrorism or national security. In fact, the vast majority relate to the so-called “war on drugs.” In the process, these state and local cops shred due process, obliterate the Fourth Amendment and make a mockery out of the “rule of law.”

Using a secretive process known as “parallel construction,” police build cases on illegally obtained, warrantless data collected by the NSA and other federal agencies without anybody ever knowing. These investigations take place in complete secrecy with no judicial oversight. Oftentimes, suspects and defense attornies have no idea how police obtained information.

Former NSA technical director William Binney called parallel construction “the most threatening situation to our constitutional republic since the Civil War.”

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Now The Public Health Dictators Want You Masked in Your Own Home — And Other Tyrannical Weekly News

Now that another COVID variant has emerged with a scary new name, governments are excited to flex their dictatorial COVID powers once again.

Santa Cruz County, California is back with an indoor mask mandate, but this time with a twist.

The public health order states that in addition to public places like restaurants and gyms:

“Masks must be worn in private settings, including your home, when non-household members are present.”

And yes, this applies to the fully vaccinated.

It’s hard to imagine that this order is legal or how local authorities will be able to enforce the rule.

The sheer insanity is that these bureaucrats think they have this kind of power to begin with.

Click here to read the health order.

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In the wake of Austria’s drastic lockdown of unvaccinated people, EU chief calls for throwing out Nuremberg Code

Ursula Van Der Leyen, the head of the EU commission, told the press on Wednesday that she is in favour of scrapping the long-standing Nuremburg Code and forcing people to get vaccinated against COVID.

“Hey, it’s just the Nuremberg code. Only what we learned from the Nazi atrocities, not least those that were medical,” sarcastically notes esteemed professor, lecturer and podcaster Dr. Jordan Peterson.

In Austria, people over 12 who are not vaccinated are currently almost completely locked down, only allowed outside for absolutely essential tasks like food or medical appointments.

In an interview she gave to the BBC, the EU chief  said that it was “understandable and appropriate” to consider vaccine mandates, especially due to the new Omicron variant of COVID 19, which has been now detected in 12 different member nations of the EU.

“How we can encourage and potentially think about mandatory vaccination within the European Union? This needs discussion. This needs a common approach, but it is a discussion that I think has to be led,” commented Van Der Leyen to the BBC.

The WHO, however, has strongly encouraged countries not to enact travel bans because of Omicron, and further iterated that early data points to the fact that most Omicron cases are not severe. Most of the world’s governments are not paying attention to the WHO’s guidelines on this occasion, however.

The Nuremberg Code was enacted in 1947, immediately after the Second World War to prevent many of the egregious human rights abuses enacted by the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese during the war.

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Unvaccinated Nevada state workers to pay insurance surcharge

Nevada will be the first state to charge state workers enrolled in public employee health insurance plans a surcharge if they aren’t vaccinated.

The state Public Employees’ Benefit Program Board voted on Thursday to charge unvaccinated workers up to $55 per month to offset the costs of testing those who haven’t gotten shots are required to undergo in certain workplaces.

“This is pandemic has been shouldered on the burden of everyone. And now this particular burden — the testing — should be shouldered on the burden of those who refuse to (be vaccinated),” said DuAne Young, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak’s policy director.

Surcharges for state workers and adult dependents on their plans will go into effect in July 2022.

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Orwellian Facebook censorship strikes again

Facebook’s fake fact checkers, working on behalf of various money interests, have long been known to ignore blatant false information when it’s put out by favored government, public health officials or other special interests as long as it’s on-the-narrative.

And they censor factual information.

It’s a dynamic that might even make George Orwell shake his head and say, “Even I never predicted it would be this blatant, and allowed to continue.”

Now, a new tale under the category of “You can’t make this stuff up.”

Facebook banned a post I made that was nothing more than a factual citation of a historical quote from Hitler’s propagandist, Goebbels.

It was posted entirely without comment. But a fair read of it would be to infer how dangerous and powerful false propaganda can be.

How that becomes worthy of censorship can only be explained in today’s highly-managed information landscape where facts are not to be heard and read if the chosen minders don’t want people to know them and share them.

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Meta asks users to send nudes

Meta, the new name for Facebook Inc., has co-developed a platform that asks people to submit their intimate photos and videos in order to prevent them from being used as ‘revenge porn’ on Facebook or Instagram.

The tool is for “adults over 18 years old who think an intimate image of them may be shared, or has already been shared, without their consent,” Meta said in a blogpost on Thursday.

The new platform, which Meta developed together with the UK Revenge Porn Helpline and 50 other NGOs, aims to prevent the publication of ‘revenge porn’, rather than just removing the delicate files after they’ve already appeared online.

Concerned users are being asked to submit photos or videos of themselves naked or having sex to a hash-tagging database through the StopNCII.org (Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Images) website.

The special hashtags, or “digital fingerprints,” are then assigned to those materials by the tool, and can be used to instantly detect and curb attempts to upload them online by the perpetrators.

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One in 44 U.S. children diagnosed with autism, new data suggests

New autism numbers released Thursday suggest more U.S. children are being diagnosed with the developmental condition and at younger ages.

In an analysis of 2018 data from nearly a dozen states, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that among 8-year-olds, 1 in 44 had been diagnosed with autism. That rate compares with 1 in 54 identified with autism in 2016.

U.S. autism numbers have been on the rise for several years, but experts believe that reflects more awareness and wider availability of services to treat the condition rather than a true increase in the number of affected children.

A separate CDC report released Thursday said that children were 50 percent more likely to be diagnosed with autism by age 4 in 2018 than in 2014.

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