police state – Page 12 – Hellbound and Down

The Right To Be Left Alone

“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness… They conferred against the Government the right to be let alone — most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” ~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)

The rapid spread of public surveillance cameras represents something far more consequential than a new piece of police technology. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual and the state.

These cameras allow government agents to record, identify, catalog and retroactively track the movements of people who have committed no crime, are suspected of no wrongdoing and have done nothing to invite government scrutiny. That’s not public safety. It’s an assault upon individual privacy.

Privacy is not a privilege granted by government. It is an aspect of personal liberty that government exists to protect. It is a natural human right protected from the government in the Bill of Rights. The fact that a person leaves his home and travels upon a public road does not mean that he has surrendered that right.

There is an enormous moral and constitutional difference between a police officer who happens to observe a person in public and government surveillance that automatically and systematically records that person’s vehicle, location and movements; and stores that information for future use.

A free society doesn’t just protect people from crime; it protects them from arbitrary government. The presumption is liberty. Government is the negation of liberty. A person should not have to establish his innocence before the government leaves him alone. The burden always belongs to the government to justify all intrusions into personal liberty. Police cameras reverse that principle. They collect information about everyone the camera views and leave it to individuals to challenge the collections afterward.

The Constitution requires articulable suspicion connecting the person being surveilled to a legitimate law-enforcement objective to justify public surveillance. A vague assertion that the technology might someday help solve a crime or enhance public safety does not meet that standard.

The view that personal privacy and public safety are in equipoise — that they are merely two competing interests of equal moral and legal weight from which government officials are entitled to choose subjectively their preferred balance — is the core of authoritarianism.

Safety is one of the legitimate purposes for which government exists. Privacy is among the personal liberties that government exists to protect. It cannot be taken away without judicial approval. Government cannot justify violating a natural right merely by asserting that doing so might make people safer. If that were so, there would be no meaningful boundary on any governmental power.

There is a profound difference between investigating a specific crime through constitutionally authorized surveillance and constructing a permanent infrastructure of suspicionless surveillance. The former begins with evidence and seeks information relevant to a particular governmental purpose. The latter begins with everyone and waits for the evidence.

When 7,000 American police departments have these systems with no legislative approvals, we have the police making policy judgments. They are deciding that the government should possess a new capacity to observe innocent people, what information should be collected, how long it should be retained, who should have access to it and what purposes may justify searches; all this irrespective of the Constitution.

Those are not merely administrative questions. They are questions about personal liberty.

If elected legislators believe that such surveillance is necessary, they should publicly debate it, enact specific legislation mandating warrants, establish meaningful limitations and accept responsibility before the voters. The decision should not be buried in a police procurement process or treated as an ordinary equipment purchase.

Liberty cannot depend upon the benevolence, restraint or good intentions of government employees. The premise of the Constitution is that government power must be limited, checked and divided because government officials are human beings who possess power and will inevitably have incentives to abuse it.

The answer is not better government surveillance. The answer is what the Fourth Amendment requires: No government surveillance without search warrants.

The constitutional question cannot be reduced to whether someone was physically standing in a public place. A police officer seeing a car pass by is one thing. A government database capable of reconstructing months of a person’s movements is something fundamentally different.

The difference is the difference between observation and surveillance.

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ICE to Equip Agents With Electric-Shock Gloves to Safely Subdue Violent Suspects

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is preparing to equip its officers with specialized gloves capable of delivering an electric shock to help subdue violent or resisting suspects.

According to a Department of Homeland Security notice reported by the Associated Press, ICE plans to spend up to $20 million purchasing thousands of the devices for deployment early next year.

Known as the G.L.O.V.E. (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter) the technology is manufactured by Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies and has already been used by some police departments and correctional facilities.

The equipment functions as an ordinary pair of patrol gloves until an officer activates its electrical capability.

The glove must make direct contact with a person’s skin to deliver a brief but painful electrical stimulus designed to gain compliance.

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Trump teases national security emergency for elections: ‘Stranger things have happened’

President Donald Trump is leaving the door open to declaring a national security emergency over the 2026 midterm elections, stating Monday that “stranger things have happened.”

Conservative commentator and Real America’s Voice host Wayne Allyn Root made the suggestion in an interview, noting that it could be done if the Senate fails to pass the SAVE America Act when it returns from its recess next month.

The host commented that if the president does declare a national security emergency and federalize the elections, then he would get everything he wanted without needing the Senate’s assistance.

“Let me just say that stranger things have happened, okay? I’ll leave it at that,” Trump told the host abruptly.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act is a nationwide voter ID bill that has strong support from the Trump-aligned conservative voter base. It requires people to present proof of citizenship to register to vote and requires Americans to show ID when voting.

If the president does try to declare a national security emergency and take over the midterms, he could still be blocked by Congress through a joint resolution, according to The Hill. That joint resolution would likely require veto-proof two-thirds majorities in both chambers, according to the outlet.

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A WORLD OF SPOOKS: Germany Approves New Sweeping Powers for Intelligence Services, Leading to Fears of Mass Surveillance

Can Germany beef up its intel game without treading on constitutional protections?

We have been reporting since late last year on TGP about how Germany, besides being engaged in an overhaul of its armed forces, is also working to upgrade its intelligence capabilities to face the dangerous new world that we’re living in.

So, today (12), the German cabinet approved new powers for its intelligence services to ‘hack communications and disrupt foreign adversaries’ operations’.

Reuters reported:

“The measures, which ‌have been under discussion for months, would allow both the BND, the foreign intelligence service, and the BfV, the domestic security service, broader authority to access digital communications, collect data and carry out active operations to thwart attacks.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the measures, which would incorporate artificial intelligence tools, would ‘revolutionize Germany’s security architecture’.

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He Spoke at a Town Meeting. Then Flock Cameras Started Tracking His Car.

A resident steps up to the mic at a town council meeting, says something inconvenient, then drives home — unaware that somewhere in a police database, that license plate just became a person of interest. No warrant. No probable cause. Just an officer with a grievance and a subscription service the town approved at a meeting most residents never knew about.

That scenario isn’t hypothetical anymore. In 2026, it’s documented — from Georgia to Rhode Island.

How Flock Works – and How It Can Be Weaponized

The system was built to catch criminals; the problem is there’s nothing reliable stopping it from being aimed at everyone else.

Flock Safety sells automated license-plate reader (ALPR) networks to police departments nationwide. The pitch is straightforward: catch criminals faster by searching vehicle movement data after incidents occur. What the system doesn’t include is a reliable filter between a legitimate investigation and a personal score to settle. Unlike federal wiretap law, no federal statute currently governs ALPR data retention periods or inter-agency sharing agreements, leaving oversight entirely to municipal contracts.

The documented abuse cases are piling up:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation identified more than 50 agencies running hundreds of Flock searches tied to protest activity
A CNN report from July 2026, citing an Institute for Justice tally, found at least two dozen cases where officers resigned or were arrested for allegedly using Flock to stalk romantic partners
A police chief in Braselton, Georgia, was arrested for allegedly using ALPR cameras to stalk and harass private citizens
Court documents show searches conducted far outside officers’ jurisdictions, according to a 2026 investigation republished by Yahoo
Flock told 404 Media it was “aware of 15 incidents of abuse” — a figure critics argue the platform’s design makes structurally impossible to trust

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Graphic: UK Cop Tries to Arrest Man Who Bought Baseball Bat and Carried It Out of Store, Crowd Comes to Man’s Defense Instead of Cop’s

The United Kingdom’s police force is beyond satire. They resemble something out of a comedy skit, but no one is laughing at their enforcement of one-sided draconian laws.

Instead, the world is horrified and outraged at the absurd lengths officers will go to arrest people.

We can now add purchasing a baseball bat to that list along with mean words and posting memes online.

On Sunday, British activist Tommy Robinson posted footage of an arrest being made by an officer for that exact reason. The man being detained had just purchased a bat from a nearby store.

It was still in the packaging, as the fed-up crowd repeatedly yelled. Multiple officers were on the scene to assist.

Again, this was all for a man holding a baseball bat he’d just bought.

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No Fourth Amendment In American Airports?

Do you, as an American citizen, have to hand over your cell phone — along with the access code to open it — upon a (warrantless) demand by a border agent at the airport?

There’s a case grinding through the courts about that right now because one man, a Mr. Sam Tunick, refused.

Not only did he refuse but he had an app on his phone that triggered its erasure once you keyed in a particular code to open it. That was the code he gave CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) when they demanded his code to open it. And then his phone was, indeed, erased right there on the spot, in the hands of the CBP agent.

That’s when CBP got really p***ed off.

According to the reporting on his case, this man was not a criminal. He was not under suspicion or surveillance for anything, so far as we know. He is not related to Spencer Tunick, an artist who famously creates mass nude photo shoots in public places. He was, in point of fact, a left-wing activist with environmental interests, but, again, without any contact with or prior interest from law enforcement that we know of.

He was just a guy. Coming home from an international trip (the Dominican Republic.).

You may well be thinking, “A left-wing activist with an erasure code? Sounds suspicious!”

Let me pause to explain why I don’t think so.

A “right-winger” I know just traveled internationally recently and she traveled with a burner phone to avoid exactly this kind of search in another country. It was England specifically.

In England there is no Fourth Amendment and they can search your phone when you land. They also have no First Amendment and they have terrible censorship laws now. You can be arrested and jailed for social media posts. Even some perfectly benign ones, like “Islam is incompatible with Liberty” — that kind of thing.

The Dominican Republic also has no Fourth Amendment and if they simply suspect you have contraband or are engaged in some other illegal activity (so a very wide berth), they have every right to inspect your phone. Maybe this young man just didn’t want the hassle. Maybe this app was this “left-winger’s” choice instead of a burner, and in the heat of the moment, decided to deploy it once facing our own CPB here in the U.S.

In short, I don’t find it suspicious at all knowing the legal overreach climate we are living in now. And we certainly can’t be searching American citizens and seizing their devices based on politics alone. I hope we can all agree on that.

Back to the case:

One attorney, Mike Fox of the Cato Institute characterized Mr. Tunick’s situation this way: “This is new, uncharted territory.”

The Supreme Court has never ruled on your Fourth Amendment rights as they specifically relate to your cell phone at American airports/border crossings. They have ruled on whether or not your phone is searchable in the interior of the United States and the answer is “no” — not without a warrant.

But somehow an American in an American airport on American soil has to surrender his rights to an American customs agent? What is this sorcery?

Let’s review the Fourth Amendment, in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court has ruled on Fourth Amendment exceptions at border crossings, but not cell phones in particular. That’s why you have to go through customs and scanners and open your luggage, etc. We’ve all been doing it forever without a thought.

But your phone ought to be a separate matter entirely, containing as it does, your digital “papers and effects.” According to the available reporting, there was no “probable cause” to search Mr. Tunick. CPB wasn’t looking for anything specific, which is what a warrant would demand. They just wanted to go out on a scenic drive, seeing what they could see on his phone.

Hell. No.

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The War on Drugs Has Come to the Maternity Ward

At first glance, a new mother taking part in a drug screening seems reasonable. For the sake of the mother and child, a doctor performs a clinical test to rule out any complications or signs of risks to the newborn.

But the story quickly takes a dark turn. If there’s a positive test result, it doesn’t stay between the doctor and the patient. In 24 states and Washington, D.C., a positive test alone is enough to initiate a child welfare report, according to a report by the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association. Depending on the state, that test could land the mother on a child abuse registry. Worse still, the mother may be notified the test has occurred only after the fact.

This seems to run afoul of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ferguson v. City of Charleston (2001), where the Court found it unconstitutional to drug test pregnant women without consent solely for “law enforcement purposes.”

However, Enrima Ukoha, an obstetrician-gynecologist and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, tells Reason this practice—known as “test and report”—is “common” and “often happens in non-consensual ways.” In fact, over six years, The Marshall Project found “at least 70,000 cases in 21 states” where parents were referred to law enforcement after a positive test for drug or alcohol use.

Ukoha says a lot of medical professionals are influenced by “stereotypes and stigma” associated with people who use substances in pregnancy, leading them to make “false assumptions about their ability to parent.”

The practice developed as part of the response to the opioid crisis roiling the nation. Each year, nearly 10 percent of births in the U.S. are affected by drug or alcohol use.

To deal with the issue, Congress amended the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 in ways that made it easier for these nonconsensual tests to occur. The 1974 law ties federal grant funding to state-level development of “plans of safe care” for infants “born and identified as being affected by substance abuse or withdrawal symptoms.” It also requires healthcare providers involved in the “delivery or care” of affected infants to “notify the child protective services system”; however, it also states that nothing in the law should be read as requiring “prosecution for any illegal action.”

In 2016, Congress passed an amendment changing the requirement to include infants affected by all substance abuse by striking the word illegal from its substance abuse clause. In 2018, lawmakers passed another amendment that put money behind the idea, authorizing grants to assist state agencies with “developing, updating, implementing, and monitoring” their plans of safe care. And in 2019, the law was again amended to provide “civil and criminal liability” to anyone who makes a “good-faith report of child abuse or neglect.”

There is no federal definition for child abuse or neglect. Left to their own devices, each state has adopted different standards for reporting and treatment. Ukoha says the process “varies across providers, institutions, and states,” but the result is that “individuals are tested in pregnancy without their knowledge or consent.”

Apart from potentially being separated from their newborns, mothers risk placement on child abuse registries—which would prevent them from holding certain jobs or participating in school activities—or incarceration. In the case of Idaho mom Nicole Hamann, one positive test for THC got her 10 years on the state’s child protection registry, according to a joint report by CBS News and The Marshall Project.

But moms can find themselves facing criminal charges even when the substances are legal. In South Carolina, Ayanna Harris-Rashid was arrested and faced a 10-year felony sentence after testing positive for THC. Harris-Rashid admitted to using CBD, which is legal in the state and can contain trace amounts of THC, to “relieve cramping and nausea.” Her charges were dropped a year after her arrest.

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Texas Locked a Foreign Company’s Domain Over Missing Digital ID Checks

In Travis County, Texas, a judge has frozen motherless.com, the .com domain of a foreign pornography operator, taking it down worldwide until it posts a $9.14 million bond and builds an age verification digital ID system to the state’s own specification.

Kick Online Entertainment is a foreign corporation, and the order admits so, which is the reason the writ went somewhere else. A state court cannot summon a company overseas, but it can order the American firm that keeps the registry of every .com name, and that registry is what makes a domain resolve at all.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The case turns on HB 1181, Texas’s age-verification law for adult sites. That firm is Verisign, a nonparty to it, and Judge Maya Guerra Gamble signed the writ of attachment on June 4, 2026, filed four days later in State of Texas v Kick Online Entertainment.

The order directs Verisign to place motherless.com on “a registry lock, hold, or similar status until replevied by Defendant,” the legal term for the operator posting a bond to get its domain back.

The domain is frozen rather than taken, though the difference means little here. What Verisign actually applied on was serverHold plus server-level prohibitions on deleting, transferring and updating the name. A hold pulls motherless.com out of the .com zone file, so it resolves for nobody.

Kick must post a bond of $9,140,000, and that bond is “conditioned on Defendant’s implementation of age verification that conforms with Texas Civil Practice and Remedies code chapter 129B,” together with an affirmation that it will satisfy the civil penalties entered against it on September 30, 2024. A company outside the state’s reach is being made to both pay and obey a Texas statute before its property comes back. This is specific performance of a state law, pulled from a foreign operator by holding an asset hostage at the registry.

Among the court’s stated reasons the writ is “appropriate and justified” is the finding that “Defendant is not a resident of this state and is a foreign corporation,” which turns the state’s inability to reach a company into a ground for taking its property.

The order then pre-authorizes more of the same, closing with the line that “as many writs as the State deems necessary shall issue,” so the count of future seizures is set by the attorney general and not by a judge weighing each one. And Texas was excused from the security these writs normally demand, because the order says “the State of Texas is not required to post a bond prior to the issuance of the Writ of Attachment.”

The party taking the asset posts nothing. The party losing it posts $9.14 million.

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