Tag: police state

ALPRs are a tool of the police state to track your every move

Every time you pull out of your driveway, you probably still harbour the illusion that you are a free person going about your business. The reality is far more grim: your vehicle is bleeding data into a massive, unregulated dragnet the moment you pass the neighbourhood entrance. Automated Licence Plate Readers (“ALPRs”) and Flock cameras have infested our communities, quietly transforming the American landscape into an open-air panopticon.

You are no longer just a traveller; you are a heavily tracked data point in a system designed to treat every peaceful citizen as a suspect. The apologists for the police state are always quick to play the devil’s advocate when these surveillance grids face public scrutiny. They will breathlessly point out that ALPRs do sometimes help law enforcement track the plates of a stolen car or a violent suspect.

Police departments and the corporate salesmen hawking this gear parade these isolated victories in front of gullible city councils to justify millions in taxpayer funding. We are constantly told that solving a fraction of property crimes requires us to surrender our basic human dignity and privacy. But this statist narrative entirely ignores the tyrannical caveat that makes the whole operation illegitimate.

For every single actual criminal apprehended, the daily movements of tens of thousands of peaceful, innocent people are meticulously logged, tracked and stored in massive databases. You have committed no crime, yet the State knows exactly when you dropped your kids off at school, which doctor you visited and what political rally you attended. It is a pre-emptive strike by a paranoid ruling class against the very people they claim to serve.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, these automated systems do much more than just read numbers on a bumper. They capture the time, date and precise coordinates of every passing vehicle, storing this highly sensitive location data for months or even years. This allows law enforcement to retroactively hit “rewind” on anyone’s life without ever setting foot inside a courtroom to obtain a warrant.

The American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) has thoroughly documented how this dragnet operates, revealing that the overwhelming majority of people swept up in these databases are completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Despite this glaring fact, the data is pooled and shared across thousands of jurisdictions, essentially creating a national tracking system operated by private entities.

Taxpayers are literally being extorted to fund the infrastructure of their own surveillance. Nefarious corporate groups, like Flock Safety, are getting extraordinarily wealthy from this unconstitutional model. They sell fear to local politicians and walk away with lucrative contracts, deepening their network of unlawful data collection as we have consistently covered here at The Free Thought Project. The public is forced at gunpoint to foot the bill for a corporate-state partnership that actively violates their inherent rights.

This panopticon is being built piecemeal through thousands of localised contracts quietly approved by city councils, police departments and even private homeowner associations. Flock Safety alone has embedded itself in over 6,000 municipalities, operating a staggering network of more than 80,000 cameras nationwide to indiscriminately log the movements of peaceful people.

The financial windfall generated by this unconstitutional dragnet is nothing short of extortionary. Weaponising the public’s fear of crime, Flock Safety has ballooned into an $8.4 billion empire, siphoning massive amounts of wealth directly from the taxpayers they are constantly monitoring. With local governments shelling out up to $3,500 per camera annually, this corporate-state partnership raked in over $300 million in recurring revenue by early 2025. The public is literally being forced under the threat of state violence to finance their own digital incarceration, enriching corporate entities while fundamental rights are casually discarded.

To grasp the true, dystopian scale of this operation, consider that these private systems are performing over 20 billion scans of vehicles across the country every single month. They have successfully privatised the police state, transforming the basic, unalienable right to travel into an endless and highly profitable data extraction industry. We are witnessing the systematic abolition of privacy in real-time, orchestrated by corporate profiteers and rubber-stamped by local politicians who view citizens as nothing more than trackable data points. No wonder these people want to build hundreds more data centres despite already having more data centres than the next 14 top countries combined.

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Iran Sentences Singer Parastoo Ahmadi to 74 Lashings for Performing Without a Hijab

An Iranian singer, along with her production team, has been sentenced to 74 lashings for performing a patriotic song without a hijab in a viral video.

In 2024, Parastoo Ahmadi, age 29, livestreamed a video of her singing the patriotic song Az Khoone Javanane Vatan (From the Blood of the Youth of the Homeland) that went viral, generating millions of views. She and several musicians who performed with her was briefly detained before being released, but according to court documents obtained by The Guardian, she received a harsh and brutal punishment by the regime for not wearing a hijab.

According to court documents, the criminal court of Qom province sentenced the artists to flogging, a two-year ban on leaving the country and a two-year ban on engaging in artistic activities on charges that include offending public decency through the production and publication of “vulgar and immoral content” online.

Although the official judiciary news agency has yet to publish the ruling, rights groups and lawyers who reviewed the documents said the pattern of arrests and legal cases against artists publicly defying the regime reflects a broader effort to deter cultural dissent.

Bahar Ghandehari, the director of advocacy at the US-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, said that the punishment shows the severity of Iran’s human rights abuses.

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The Brits Should Declare Their Independence, Too

British tyranny is so repulsive that the British people owe it to themselves to overthrow their government masters.  It has been two-hundred-fifty years since America’s Declaration of Independence recognized the Crown system as a threat to Americans’ lives and liberties.  English-speaking peoples still suffering under the British yoke should follow suit.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a near-total ban on social media for children under sixteen years old.  Ten of the most popular social media platforms are now age-restricted, with the toxic-leftist Bluesky platform a notable exception.  The government claims to be “protecting children” from online harm.  That’s a lie.  If the British government cared about protecting British children, government ministers and police forces would not have covered up Islamic rape gangs targeting children for three-plus decades.  The British government would not censor online reporting of foreigners murdering young Brits.  The British government has systematically chosen to sacrifice the United Kingdom’s children.

This online “safety” measure must be understood, then, as a ruse meant to expand the government’s control over online information.  Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have similar surveillance systems in place — all ostensibly erected to “protect the children” but designed, in reality, to control the speech of citizens.  In these countries, the only way to communicate with other citizens on social media platforms is to prove your age by proving your identity.  Mandatory digital identification systems are disguised as child welfare checks.  The Brits and their Commonwealth vassals have built a surveillance system to monitor citizens’ thoughts, censor unapproved speech, and promote official propaganda.

Tyrant Starmer is pushing this online surveillance infrastructure while citizens in the U.K. are protesting and rioting against the British government’s murderous mass immigration policies — which have invited foreign rapists and killers to overrun the kingdom and slaughter citizens.

Third-world barbarism is exploding across Europe.  Official Eurostat numbers show that sexual violence offenses in the European Union have doubled over the last decade.  Rapes skyrocketed 150%.  Knife crimes and murders are off the charts.  Foreign nationals who have immigrated into Europe are responsible for roughly fifty percent of violent crime.

Just as the unelected European Commission ruling the continent continues to cover up immigrant crimes and censor citizens’ online discussion of these ongoing threats, the British government is more concerned about punishing native Brits for noticing that they are under attack than repelling violent invaders from Britain’s shores.  (If Keir Starmer had been in Winston Churchill’s shoes during the Nazi Blitz, the British government would have surely helped the Germans cover up the bombings while blaming all the destruction on British citizens!)

Starmer’s government spies run a propaganda outfit that controls all public “narratives” regarding immigrant crime against native Brits.  The group of spies write and release misleading statements, presented as coming from the families of victims, that are designed to downplay rapes, murders, and other violent incidents.  While these spies use propaganda and censorship to cover up serious crimes committed by immigrants, they simultaneously engage in information warfare against British citizens by branding legitimate public concerns over safety as “disinformation,” “far-right racism,” “violence,” and “hate speech.”  This spy group in charge of monitoring and shaping the public’s thoughts has flagged “reading Shakespeare, Chaucer or Milton, or books documenting grooming gang scandals as potential indicators of far-Right susceptibility.”  The British spies — a veritable Gestapo fabricating public “truth” — plant media stories, steer online discussions, and deploy operatives to disrupt or direct public protests.

The British government claims the power to block “false information” that is “legal but harmful.”  On its website, the British government defines “extreme right-wing terrorist ideology” to include the belief that “‘Western culture’ is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups.”  British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall claims that it is “illegal” to promote “disorder” on social media.  Meanwhile, Starmer’s government tyrants are instructing journalists how to report immigrant attacks on British citizens.  These are the actions of dictators who do not care about “protecting the children.”

Surveying the daily violent crime by immigrants and the British government’s ongoing cover-ups, former Prime Minister Liz Truss says there is a government campaign to “undermine the family” and the “nation state.”  She says that forced diversity has corrupted the institutions and that government ministers suppress information and attack citizens while protecting barbarians.  She concludes that mass migration and government control over information are being used as weapons to destroy Western civilization.

For years, we Americans have watched the evils of globalism expand both at home and abroad in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of continental Europe.  Branded by its international supporters as some kind of final, utopian stage of human governance, globalism is just another Frankensteinian beast — created from all the worst parts of Marxist-communism, Leninism, Maoism, fascism, Nazism, authoritarianism, oligarchy, corporatism, elitism, and central bank hegemony.  Globalism is totalitarianism.  Its god is government, although it has created special liturgical rituals regarding an imaginary “climate change” apocalypse meant to scare the world’s peasants into accepting the supremacy of government authority and bureaucrats’ (globalism’s “priests”) centralized power over all economic transactions.

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Federal Appeals Court Allows Ohio to Enforce Social Media Law Requiring Parental Consent for Minors

A federal appeals court has ruled that Ohio can enforce legislation requiring children under 16 to obtain parental consent before using social media platforms, marking a significant development in state-level efforts to regulate minors’ online activity.

TechSpot reports that the Cincinnati-based 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-1 decision overturning a lower court ruling that had previously blocked Ohio’s Social Media Parental Notification Act from taking effect. The law mandates that websites reasonably likely to be accessed by children under 16 must verify users’ ages and secure parental approval before allowing minors to create or use accounts.

The legislation was originally passed in 2023 and took effect in January 2024. However, it faced an immediate legal challenge from NetChoice, a technology industry advocacy group representing major platforms including Meta, TikTok, YouTube, Snap, and X. A federal judge initially found the law unconstitutional and blocked its implementation, but the appeals court has now reversed that decision and sent the case back with instructions to lift the block.

In the majority opinion, Judge Eric Clay acknowledged that the law does impose some burden on speech but argued it is narrowly tailored to address what Ohio identified as a compelling state interest. According to Clay, the legislation aims to protect children from online harms and prevent them from agreeing to platform terms of service without proper supervision.

“At bottom, the Act imposes a parental consent requirement,” Clay wrote. “That requirement constitutes a marginal burden that precisely targets the multi-faceted problem that Ohio has identified: Children’s unsupervised assent to terms and conditions for use of platforms that take advantage of and harm them.”

The decision represents a rare victory for state efforts to restrict minors’ access to social media platforms, as similar laws in other jurisdictions have been blocked on free speech grounds. Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson praised the ruling as a win for families, stating it provides parents with necessary tools to monitor and control what their children view online.

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A Republic or an Empire?

The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, embraces two value sets. The first is natural rights, and the second is limited government. After 250 years, neither value has survived, and the opposite of each currently prevails in America.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration in three days while staying at a rooming house in Philadelphia. He had been greatly influenced by the British philosopher John Locke. Locke is the godfather of the theory of natural rights, which he extrapolated from the natural law teachings of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) did not argue that humans have inherent natural rights, but rather that the concept of justice demanded by human nature should be “naturally just” when addressing claims for protection of persons and property, whether those protections were legislated or not. The “whether legislated or not” is the first known articulation of a higher civil law, higher than the government’s own laws.

St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) also did not define explicitly the existence of natural rights, but he did argue that norms of human behavior are knowable from the exercise of reason aided by revelation. He is the seminal thinker to express the view that right and wrong is knowable to all persons, whether legislated or not; and this knowledge — because it is common to all — is itself a higher law. He called this universal knowledge the natural law.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) did not articulate natural rights, but he did proceed deep into the ideas of Aristotle and Augustine and taught that all human beings possess innate moral claims and innate moral obligations to honor the moral claims of other persons; and these claims and obligations are knowable by the exercise of reason.

John Locke (1632-1704), whose writings Jefferson read at the College of William and Mary, and which James Madison read at Princeton, drew upon all three philosophers to argue that Aquinas’ moral natural law claims are really natural rights, and these, too, just like knowing right from wrong, are inherent in our humanity and are superior to the government.

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Florida Sues TikTok Over Age Verification Failures as Digital ID Mandate Takes Effect

Florida wants every social media user in the state to prove how old they are. The method is up to the platforms and the options include government ID uploads, biometric face scans, payment credentials, and behavioral profiling. Now the state is suing TikTok for not doing it fast enough.

Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a 66-page complaint Monday in St. Lucie County Circuit Court, accusing TikTok of letting children under 14 create accounts, skipping parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, and lying to parents about what their kids actually see on the app.

The lawsuit names TikTok Inc., its parent company ByteDance and several related entities. It’s the first enforcement action under House Bill 3, Florida’s Online Protections for Minors Act, which took effect January 1, 2025 after spending two years tangled in court challenges.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here. 

HB 3 bans social media platforms with addictive design features from contracting with children 13 and younger and requires parental consent before 14- and 15-year-olds can open accounts.

Violations carry fines of $50,000 each. But to block minors, platforms first have to figure out who is and isn’t a minor, which means age-checking every user, adults included.

Florida is building an identity verification regime for the internet under the banner of protecting kids and the surveillance costs of that project land on millions of people who have done nothing wrong.

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UK City Council Launches Court Bid to Ban Union Jacks That ‘Intimidate Diverse Communities’

Brits are cheering on their team in the 2026 FIFA World Cup and showing their support by flying their country’s flag. And that’s problematic for Bristol City Council, which has voted to ban the flying of the St. George’s Cross.

Residents say Torrington Avenue in the Knowle West area of the city has become an iconic symbol of patriotism over the years – with photographs of flags draped across the street often pictured during big footballing moments.

But Bristol City Council’s Green leader Tony Dyer has released a statement forbidding people from flying flags “on lampposts or railings or any public property”.

Mr Dyer told residents: “please do not attach anything to lampposts – it causes health and safety issues”.

The council leader went on to say: “we are currently taking down flags in sensitive locations as a priority and will be reviewing our strategy for removing other flags on our property”.

LBC reports that Torrington Avenue is known as the U.K.’s most patriotic street because of its flag displays.

That’s aside from the headline to this piece, though. We’ve covered the “Raise the Colors” movement in the U.K., in which patriots hang flags from flagpoles and lightposts, only to have them taken down by authorities. Oxfordshire County Council is reported to have supercharged its legal battle to ban raising British flags on lampposts.

The council has applied for an injunction to block the Raise the Colours group from hanging the flag in a bid to “protect” its residents and “values,” reports GB News.

A council spokesman said on Wednesday: “Residents across Oxfordshire, from Adderbury to Wallingford, have complained to the council about safety risks, intimidation and distress linked to this activity.

“The ongoing scale and persistence of the behaviour by Raise the Colours has created safety risks, caused distress within communities, and led to abuse and intimidation directed at council teams and residents.”

Former England boss Harry Redknapp decried the anti-flag action in a major intervention last night.

“We are proud to be British – that is what we are. Fly your flags, be proud of your country. Don’t be ashamed to be British,” he said.

The county has so far spent £15,000 to remove more than 300 Union and St George’s Cross flags from lampposts.

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UK police officer uses AI to create evidence in multiple criminal cases

Law enforcement agencies across the world have rushed to integrate AI into their investigations, promising faster arrests and higher case closure rates. The rising number of wrongful arrests attributed to AI facial recognition systems, however, tells another story: that speed and accuracy are two entirely different things.

But while false arrests due to facial recognition software can easily be blamed on glitchy technology, an even more disturbing pattern is starting to emerge, as AI-wielding officers don’t just misidentify suspects, but use the technology to fabricate evidence.

Over the weekend, the BBC reported that officials in Derbyshire County, England, are investigating one law enforcement officer who’s alleged to have used generative AI to “create evidential material in a number of cases.”

The yet-unnamed officer has not been arrested, but has been suspended from duty pending the outcome of the investigation, which is reportedly being undertaken by Derbyshire police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

“A criminal investigation has been launched into an allegation of perverting the course of justice after the alleged use of AI systems by an officer to create evidential material in a number of cases,” a Derbyshire police spokesperson told the Financial Times.

It’s the first case of its kind in the UK, coming days after the country’s brand-new national PoliceAI centre issued guidance advising officers to stop using generative AI to prepare court statements due to the tech’s tendency to hallucinate answers.

“We’ve said to some police forces, ‘you can’t do that, because we haven’t gone through all the checks and balances’,” Alex Murray, head of the PoliceAI centre, told the Financial Times in an interview. “We need to slow it down a bit.”

While AI hallucinations have indeed found their way into police reports due to laziness – like the case of Utah police whose report claimed an officer transformed into a frog – the seriousness of the Derbyshire investigation suggests that’s unlikely to be the case here.

If anything, it sounds more like the Maine cops who were caught last year posting photographs of a “drug bust” that had clearly been tampered with using generative AI.

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Colorado Gun Owners Sue Over New Law Allowing Warrantless Access to Dealer Records

A new Colorado law has raised the hackles of a coalition of gun owners in the state, leading them to challenge its constitutionality in federal court.

Signed into law on June 2 by Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, the Requirements for Firearms Dealers Act requires all gun sellers in the state to allow any “duly authorized peace officer” to inspect their sales records “at all times.”

The bill follows in the footsteps of 11 other states and Washington, D.C., by extending the state’s record-keeping requirements for firearms dealers to all retail transactions, including transfers. Dealers will be required to note the customer’s name, age, and address, as well as the firearm’s serial number, letters, make, and caliber. Failure to comply could result in a fine of up to $75,000, the loss of a dealer’s license, and up to a year in jail. 

Gun owners in the state are pushing back against this overreach. Ten days after Polis signed the bill into law, three firearms dealers and two firearms associations filed a joint civil suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, arguing that the bill is a “warrantless-inspection scheme for firearms dealers” that violates the Fourth Amendment because it includes no stipulations for warrants or probable cause and no restrictions on time or frequency.

Colorado’s law would make it easier for law enforcement to engage in fishing expeditions. Under the law, a Colorado police officer could presumably demand that a dealer provide records of firearms sales for the last month, with no mention of a crime being committed or a suspect in mind. While the bill does prohibit law enforcement from creating or maintaining a firearms registry, that provision seems moot if firearms dealers are themselves forced to maintain the registry for cops. 

While the court challenge is ongoing, it’s difficult to see how Colorado’s law complies with the Supreme Court’s precedents on warrantless searches. 

In New York v. Burger (1987), the Court ruled that a warrantless search of a “closely regulated” industry violates the Fourth Amendment unless it satisfies three criteria: the state must have a substantial interest in regulating the industry; the warrantless inspections must directly serve that interest, be necessary for the regulatory scheme; and the statute must offer a constitutionally adequate warrant substitute, such as notification and limits on “time, place, and scope,” to “impose appropriate restraints” on an officer’s discretion. 

Colorado’s law might satisfy the first criterion. But it appears to fall short of the other two entirely, especially since the law is broad enough to allow sheriffs and campus security alike to inspect the records of any firearms dealer in the state.

Even when the law permits the government to inspect a business without a warrant—an administrative search—the Supreme Court ruled in Los Angeles v. Patel (2015) that the subject must be afforded a review by a “neutral decisionmaker” for the search to be constitutional. Colorado law does not provide firearms dealers with an opportunity for such a review before inspection.

Aside from the record-keeping provisions, the bill adds new administrative burdens for firearms dealers by requiring businesses in the state to provide the Department of Revenue with a “comprehensive security plan.” It also tasks the department with adopting rules on acceptable security measures that dealers must comply with. Those requirements will go into effect in October 2027.

State Sen. Cathy Kipp (D–Fort Collins), a cosponsor of the bill, told Complete Colorado the new law “builds on a new bureaucracy established in 2024” to stop “preventable shooting deaths” and reduce gun violence. But another outcome is far more likely: treating gun owners and firearm dealers like de facto criminals.

Colorado lawmakers have created an environment ripe for confrontation between law enforcement and legally armed Americans, all while violating Coloradans’ right to privacy.

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Supreme Court Upholds Marijuana Users’ Gun Rights, Rejecting Trump DOJ Arguments In Major Second Amendment Case

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously sided with a man who was prosecuted for possessing a gun while being a regular consumer of marijuana, ruling that the government’s actions violate the Second Amendment.

The opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch is narrow in scope and does not entirely strike down the federal law known as 922(g)(3) that prohibits people who illegally consume controlled substances from possessing or purchasing firearms.

But it does say that as applied to the man in the current case, Ali Danial Hemani, it is unconstitutional to automatically bar people from lawful gun ownership just because they happen to use marijuana occasionally.

It also says that the broad ban and the government’s effort to defend it are “at odds with” the Trump administration’s move to federally reschedule cannabis.

The government “asks us to conclude that anyone who regularly uses marijuana is categorically violent and dangerous without any further showing,” the opinion says. “All based on little more than its current say-so, one at odds with its own regulatory actions. And affording the government that kind of ‘broad power to designate any group as dangerous and thereby disqualify its members from having a gun’ would risk allowing it to ‘quickly swallow’ the Second Amendment.”

The court’s opinion in U.S. vs. Hemani does not address “efforts to ban addicts, or those presently intoxicated, from possessing a firearm,” it says. “We do not address other prophylactic laws Congress might adopt after determining that users of a particular drug pose a special risk of misusing firearms. We do not address 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(1)’s provision disarming individuals convicted of felonies (often including drug-related ones).”

“We do not even address whether the government could bring a prosecution under §922(g)(3) accompanied by individualized proof that the defendant’s use of marijuana (or any other drug) renders him a danger to himself or others. Or proof that a certain drug always renders its users dangerous because of its potency or for some other reason. None of those issues is before us and we do not pass on them either way.”

“All that is before us is one, if surely ambitious, theory. The government maintains that it may automatically strip Mr. Hemani of his Second Amendment right to possess a firearm because he uses marijuana a few times a week,” Gorsuch wrote. “More than that, because he possessed a gun despite this prohibition, the government insists it may imprison him for up to 15 years and disarm him for life.”

“According to the government, none of this turns on how much marijuana Mr. Hemani uses or what effect it has on him. It makes no difference either if he keeps a firearm only in his home for selfdefense, never misuses a gun while intoxicated, and never poses a danger to himself or others as a result of his marijuana use. The only thing the government must show, it says, is that an individual like Mr. Hemani regularly uses any amount of any controlled substance.”

The court’s opinion details recent large-scale federal policy changes concerning marijuana, and how they undermine the broad statute seeking to strip cannabis consumers of their Second Amendment rights.

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