Tag: police state

Senators Demand Answers on CISA’s Role in 2024 Election Oversight

US Senators Roger Marshall, Bill Hagerty, and Eric Schmitt have sent a letter to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), regarding its involvement in flagging online content.

CISA is an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the three Republicans want to know how it is preparing for the November elections – given, as they spell it out in the letter, CISA’s “past mistakes that put the agency in direct conflict with the First Amendment.”

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The senators specifically want to know how CISA is organizing and working now, to avoid repeating those same mistakes – namely, monitoring, flagging, and censoring political speech.

Even more specifically – the point is to make sure that there is acknowledgment from CISA that it will not engage in the same kind of activities, this electoral cycle around.

The letter cites the House Judiciary Committee reports as the basis for the senators’ belief this type of censorship was happening back in 2020.

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American Author Could Face Prison in Germany Over Satirical Swastika

A German court has found CJ Hopkins, an American writer living in that country, guilty of hate speech, which is treated as an unconstitutional activity. This overturned a previous acquittal by the Tiergarten District Court.

“Hate speech” in the case amounts to Hopkins using Nazi imagery to express his protest about Germany’s Covid-era policies, including what he called “New Normal Germany” – a satirical take on how that compares to Nazi Germany.

The imagery that caught the authorities’ attention was posted on X, including an illustration showing a white face mask with a white swastika superimposed on it.

Even though a lower court in January found this did not represent “hate speech,” on the last day of September, the Berlin Appellate Court disagreed. In a blog post, Hopkins, who has been residing in Germany since 2004, says that “the New Normal German authorities (…) were determined to punish me.”

To highlight the absurdity of the situation, Hopkins told the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) that the second trial went with anti-terrorism measures in the courtroom. This meant a small number of people were allowed to attend, behind a glass panel, while journalists could not bring in laptops or even notebooks and pens.

Now, the case is back at the Tiergarten Court which is supposed to sentence him – the author is looking at up to three years in prison. And while the Berlin court’s decision itself can’t be appealed, Hopkins told FIRE he would go to the highest legal instance in Germany – the Federal Constitutional Court (ostensibly after the district court rules again).

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Biden-Harris DOJ Aggressively Goes After Landlords That Use Criminal Background Checks to Screen Renters, Accuses Them of Race Discrimination

The Biden-Harris DOJ is aggressively pursuing landlords that use criminal background checks to screen renters.

“To keep with an Obama era housing rule that prohibits landlords from banning tenants with criminal records, the Biden administration is going after property owners that use background checks to screen perspective renters. Under the civil rights law known as the Fair Housing Act, housing discrimination is prohibited based on race or color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status or disability but Obama’s U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued an order in 2016 adding criminals to the protected class,” Judicial Watch reported.

Federal prosecutors argued in a lawsuit filed this month against the owners and managers of Suburban Heights Apartments in Kinloch, Missouri, that their criminal background checks discriminate against blacks because of racial disparities in incarceration rates.

The owners and managers of Suburban Heights Apartments, a residential property within proximity to UMSL, described itself as a “student village” and implemented criminal background checks to make living in the building safer for young renters.

However, the Biden-Harris DOJ is going after the landlord and accusing them of racial discrimination.

“The lawsuit seeks monetary damages to remedy the harms caused by the defendants’ policy, a civil penalty to vindicate the public interest and a court order barring future discrimination,” the DOJ said.

“It is well documented and known that there are statistical Black-White racial disparities in conviction and incarceration rates,” the DOJ lawsuit says.

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The U.S. Government Is Dramatically Expanding The Use Of Facial Recognition Technology

Do you want to live in a society where you are required to have your face scanned wherever you go?  If not, you may want to speak up now while you still can.  As you will see below, the U.S. government is aggressively expanding the use of facial recognition technology for identification verification purposes.  For now, the use of facial recognition technology will be optional.  But as we have seen before, once a voluntary option is adopted by enough people our leaders have a way of making it mandatory.  Of course it isn’t just our government that is pushing facial recognition technology.  It is popping up throughout our society, and given enough time it would literally be everywhere.

Login.gov is billed as “a single sign-on solution for US government websites”, and now users of Login.gov will be given the option to use facial recognition technology to verify their identities…

An online hub for Americans to access benefits and services across the federal government is giving its users a new option to sign on.

The General Services Administration will begin offering facial recognition technology as an option for users of Login.gov, a one-stop for government-provided public services, to verify their identities.

GSA’s Technology Transformation Services announced Wednesday it will allow Login.gov users to verify their identity online through facial technology that meets standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 800-63-3 Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2) guidelines.

We are being told that this will help reduce identity theft and fraud, and I don’t know anyone that likes identity theft and fraud.

But do we really want to live in a dystopian world where our faces are constantly being scanned all the time?

I certainly don’t.

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Israel Jails American Journalist for Reporting on Iranian Missile Strikes

Jeremy Loffredo, an American journalist for The Grayzone, has been arrested by the Israeli military for his reporting inside Israel.

Loffredo was jailed just a few days after releasing a report on Iranian missile strikes in Israel, information the Israeli military has been trying to censor. According to the Israeli news site Ynet, because of the report, Loffredo faces charges of “aiding the enemy during wartime and providing information to the enemy.”

Representatives from the US embassy attended a hearing on a police request to extend Loffredo’s detention, but so far, the US government has been silent and has not publicly called for his release.

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Kamala Jailed Black Woman For Daughter’s School Absences When Child Had Sickle Cell Anemia

Former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently shined a light on testimony from a California mother who was jailed by Kamala Harris after the woman’s sickle cell anemia-stricken daughter missed too many school days.

During Harris’ time serving as the District Attorney of San Francisco, she decided to punish parents for their kids’ truancy after learning the state was missing out on around one billion dollars in revenue due to the absences.

RFK Jr. explained video of the mother telling her Kamala story is going “absolutely viral” online.

In the viral clip, the mother explained her daughter was in the hospital for 60 days due to her ailment.

The mom, Cheree Peoples, was eventually arrested over her daughter’s 60-day hospital stay despite the fact she had already graduated high school with a 3.8 GPA.

Kennedy said, “Kamala Harris sent police to her house and handcuffed the mother and jailed her. She lost her job, she lost her home. She had to live in hotels thereafter. The police, when they arrested her she said to them, you can see her on the tape. She said, ‘Are you really going to handcuff me?’ She was wearing her pajamas. She was dragged out of bed, handcuffed behind her back. The police said, ‘If you want to complain, complain to Kamala Harris.’”

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Arizona State University Caught in Free Speech Tug-of-War Over Gov-Funded “Disinformation” Battle

Arizona State University (ASU) is a public school and therefore undisputed subject to the US Constitution’s free speech rules. Yet a new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demonstrates that it was prominently involved in working with, and on behalf of the US government. To affect free speech.

That would be a blatant example of what Congress is investigating and what the critics are calling Big Tech-(Big) Government collusion, given that the target of the “collaboration” the university was involved in was online “disinformation.”

The thing to remember when talking about this collusion is that the current White House had enough wits about it to never make a “beeline” reaching the end result of censorship. From what is known from the congressional probe and the Twitter Files alone, this was always instead a meandering effort that included many seemingly intermediary and/or legitimate actors.

According to James Rushmore for Racket News, in this case, ASU was the recipient of grants (and, in line with the overall “process” – the purpose of the one given in January 2024 and reported by the Washington Examiner is not clearly stated). The grant though did come from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

In and of itself, not ring many alarm bells – until the reason behind it, and the activities of GEC are taken into account. Those activities, in the case of ASU’s involvement, meant working with government agencies to flag what was decided to be disinformation, but also something referred to as “falsified media.”

The obsession with “Russian disinformation” featured here as well, a hallmark of “arguments” of the political party that came to power in 2020 in the US. But also a hallmark that had been introduced into public discourse with the party’s defeat four years earlier. The claims have since, but it seems to no avail, been thoroughly debunked.

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The Government Compels Silence Again

When Congress enacted the Stored Communications Act of 1986 (SCA), it claimed the statute would guarantee the privacy of digital data that service providers were retaining in storage. The act prohibited the providers from sharing the stored data, and it prohibited unauthorized access to the data, commonly called computer hacking – except, of course, if the recipients or the hackers were working for the federal government.

Just as it did with the Patriot Act of 2001 – which permits one federal agent to authorize another to conduct a search of stored data, without a judicially issued search warrant – the SCA permits judges to issue “orders” for searches without meeting the probable cause standard required by the Fourth Amendment.

Just like the Patriot Act – which in its original form prohibited the recipient of agent-issued search warrants, called National Security Letters (NSLs), from telling any persons of their existence – the SCA requires judges who issue orders for a search, upon the request of the government, to bar the custodian of the data who has received the order from informing the person whose data is sought.

What if the person whose data is sought has a claim of privacy on the data? What if the owner and creator of the data relied on the Fourth Amendment to keep the government’s hands off of it? What if that person was the President of the United States at the time he created the data? What if he has a claim of executive privilege on it? What if all persons have a privacy claim on all stored data and have a right to resist the government’s efforts to seek it?

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Most People Don’t Trust The Government For Marijuana Information, Federally Funded Study Shows

American adults typically don’t get their information about about marijuana from government or medical sources, instead relying mostly on friends and family, according to a new study that was partially funded by a federal agency.

The nationally representative survey of 1,161 adults found that government agencies were the least popular source of cannabis-related information (4.7 percent in the probability-weighted results). And while health and medical care providers were also among the least common sources, at 9.3 percent, they were higher on the list than budtenders (8.6 percent).

The most popular sources of marijuana information, meanwhile, were friends and family (35.6 percent) and websites (33.7 percent).

The study, which received support from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and was published this month in the Journal of Cannabis Research, concludes that most people “draw healthcare information about cannabis from friends and family or online, with very few consulting their healthcare provider or government agencies.”

Notably, people who reported using cannabis for medical reasons were significantly more likely than others to cite healthcare professionals as a source of their marijuana-related information compared to other respondents (16.4 percent versus 5.2 percent, respectively).

Given the trend toward liberalization of cannabis policies in the U.S.—and what the paper describes as potentially “broad effects on public health outcomes related to cannabis” if marijuana is moved from Schedule I to Schedule III of the federal Controlled Substances Act—the paper urges more attention to ensuring healthcare providers are educated on cannabis-related matters and that government messaging is handled with care.

“As cannabis accessibility and legality is increasing,” it says, “there is a strong need for better clinician education, public outreach strategies, and improved communication between patients and clinicians about cannabis.”

NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said of the new survey findings that cannabis use “is not a new phenomenon and is not going away” and that sources like healthcare providers and government agencies have a responsibility to seek out and provide accurate information.

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Banking on Betrayal: UK Government’s New Plan for Mass Bank Spying

Civil rights advocates may be saying, “stop bank spying” – but authoritarian-presenting governments are sure to be thinking, “who better to spy on you with?”

Banks not only have fine-grained information about their clients’ financial situation, but also their behavior and habits – and as recent incidents, for example in Canada, but also the UK in different circumstances show, they are not above using their power to debank and therefore censor people. On behalf of governments.

This time in the UK, the Labor cabinet looks set to bring back a legislative plan that would give financial institutions new mass surveillance powers. Now as before, the premise, activists say, is combating welfare fraud.

But the result would be mass bank spying – and “a severe intrusion into the nation’s privacy,” as Big Brother Watch put it.

In a letter to Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall, the privacy group and a number of like-minded allies informed the official that they oppose the Fraud, Error and Debt Bill, and refer to it as work to usher in mass financial surveillance powers in the UK.

This time via banks, with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as the government actor.

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