Tag: police state

Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.

The arrest stemmed from an investigation into bank fraud cases in April and May 2025. Detectives reportedly reviewed video of a woman using a fake US army ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

By using facial recognition software, the investigators identified Lipps as a possible match. She was charged with eight felonies, the most serious of which carried a 10-year prison sentence.

But Lipps had never been to North Dakota in her life, and bank records later confirmed she was more than 1,200 miles away at the time of the alleged crime.

She was held in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days before being transported to North Dakota. Jail staff allegedly denied her access to her dentures and medication for extended periods.

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The Constitution Can’t Protect You If You Don’t Protect It

“What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the government was the reason we don’t have a Constitution anymore? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?”—Andrew P. Napolitano

What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364?

September 17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government but to restrain it.

Yet restraint is in increasingly short supply.

Across the political spectrum, Americans continue to tolerate abuses of power so long as those abuses are carried out by the “right” people, against the “wrong” people, or in the name of some emergency deemed too important to question.

That is how constitutional government dies.

Not all at once. Not with the Constitution formally abolished or the Bill of Rights ripped from the National Archives.

It dies by degrees: through executive power that expands while congressional authority withers; emergency powers that never quite disappear; wars waged with little regard for constitutional restraints; surveillance systems capable of tracking whole populations; federal agents empowered to operate with ever less accountability; military forces normalized on American streets; and courts that too often allow questions of standing, immunity and procedure to determine whether unconstitutional conduct will ever be confronted on its merits.

Every such precedent makes the next abuse easier. Every exception becomes a justification. Every temporary power becomes harder to claw back.

And every time Americans excuse an unconstitutional act because they approve of the person wielding the power, they help dismantle another guardrail meant to protect them when someone they distrust eventually takes control.

That is the danger we face.

The Constitution was never intended to depend upon the goodwill of those in power.

Quite the opposite.

Those who drafted the Constitution understood that power corrupts, that governments inevitably seek more authority, and that liberty survives only when power is divided, constrained, challenged and made answerable to the people.

The Constitution creates friction intentionally.

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EU’s Social Media Ban Could Bring ID Checks for Adults

As expected, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has announced that the EU Kids Act will propose that no child under 13 should be allowed on social media, while 13 and 14-year-olds should have limited accounts.

The announcement, just in time for the EU’s planned digital ID rollout, was made in von der Leyen’s State of the European Union address in Strasbourg on Wednesday.

According to von der Leyen, the Act would ensure that “no social media under the age of 13. No personal account under the age of 15.”

Children between the ages of 13 and 14 will be allowed a limited account, with a limited set of features, and with a time limit of one hour a day, and parents will have to set up and supervise these “mini accounts.”

Von der Leyen also said that the Act would reverse the burden of proof, so that instead of regulators having to prove that a service is unsafe, it will be up to the platforms to prove that their product is safe for minors.

The Commission President also took aim at Big Tech, saying, “I am aware that many perceive the power of big tech as overwhelming and impossible to roll back. I disagree.” She added, “Europe has the power to act. It is us who decide the rules, not Big Tech.”

The scope of the Act will cover social media, video sharing platforms, app stores, online games, as well as AI companions and chatbots, with a focus on “high-risk” services, although the definition of that category is not yet clear.

Other rules that have been reported as part of the Act are age checks for every new account, with existing users also subject to “proportionate” checks, taking into account the time they have been subscribed to a service. Verification will be done via an app, either the one developed by the Commission or a national equivalent. These apps will only return information about whether a user is over or under a certain age.

The draft also reportedly seeks to ban certain design features, such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications, as well as artificial notifications and rewards. The text is said to state that “technology companies bear primary responsibility for making their products safe.”

Fines for non-compliance can reach up to 6% of a company’s global annual turnover, while a supervisory fee will be introduced to make sure the Commission can enforce the new rules.

The Commission’s app was presented by von der Leyen in April in Brussels, and at the time, she said it was “fully open source. Everyone can check the code.”

But security consultant Paul Moore took the Commission up on that and found that the app stores sensitive data on phones and leaves it unprotected. According to Moore, he was able to hack the app in under two minutes.

The Commission first responded to this by saying the app was ready and could always be improved. A week later, a spokesperson described the version presented as “a demo version.”

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DOJ Sues San Jose, Alleging $1,600 Firearm Fee Is Unconstitutional

The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the City of San Jose, California, alleging that its nearly $1,600 firearm licensing fee infringes the Second Amendment right to carry firearms for self-defense. The fee has risen by about $300 over three fiscal years to $1,591.

“San Jose is a national outlier when it comes to burdening the exercise of fundamental rights. Its fees are abusive and violate the Second Amendment,” the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in the Sept. 16 lawsuit.

The DOJ asked the court to issue permanent injunctive relief that would prevent defendants from imposing any “abusive licensing fees.” The San Jose Police Department is also a defendant in the case.

“The City’s law enforcement officers are charged with enforcing its abusive licensing scheme and are doing so. Such law enforcement misconduct is unlawful,” the DOJ added.

In Washington, the nation’s capital, a concealed carry license costs $75, while in New York, a handgun license costs $340. In Boston, the nonrenewable processing fee for a license to carry is $100. And in Philadelphia, a new license to carry firearms costs only $20.

Compared with other California locations, such as San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Clara, and Alameda County, San Jose’s fees are still high, the DOJ said in the complaint.

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Friedrich Merz Again Calls For An End To Online Anonymity

German Chancellor and CDU leader Friedrich Merz is once again advocating for an end to online anonymity.

Merz spoke at the Chancellery in Berlin on Tuesday, where he received the winners of the 61st federal “Jugend forscht” youth research competition, and took their questions. The event was streamed live by the government.

One of the participants asked Merz about introducing a real-name requirement on the internet, and how it could be reconciled with the work of informants, investigative journalism, and the need to sometimes be able to communicate anonymously.

Merz’s answer did not address the question of journalism at all. Instead, he spoke about the difficulties in establishing who is behind an online message, and who to hold responsible, as well as the proliferation of messages generated by bots.

“Please, nobody come to me with free speech. This has nothing more to do with free speech,” Merz said. Free speech, he continued, is “at best” a libertarian understanding of politics out of parts of the United States, “that I personally do not share.”

A liberal society, he went on, must be able to protect its citizens “from false information, from personal denigration, from discrimination.”

Merz, who “grew up in the analog world” said he often wonders if the digital world should be allowed to have “completely different rules.”

In the old world, he said, if a newspaper published false information, one could take action against it, and this, he said, created a certain “hygiene.”

In the digital world, Merz is unhappy that people can use pseudonyms, abbreviations, or made-up names, “and we have enormous difficulty establishing at all who is responsible for it. Is it the platforms or is it the authors themselves? And if so, who actually are the authors?”

He mentioned the “coarsening of manners” and the role of bots in generating messages. According to Merz, his party’s (CDU) competitor, AfD, had benefited in Saxony-Anhalt from messages generated by bots.

It is essential to protect personality rights and “our democracy,” Merz said.

He did allow that there are good reasons to allow for anonymous expression, but did not go into any of them.

It’s also important to note that Merz was not announcing any new policy, bill, or law, and was answering a question from a teenager.

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FBI Surveillance, Social Media, AI, Partnerships Draw Scrutiny at Senate Hearing

The FBI is not collecting data from license plate readers, it is merely looking at data that is already collected by somebody else. This is how FBI Director Kash Patel explained the use of this surveillance tool during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 15.

“They collect information, not the FBI,” said Patel, adding, “Private companies have and private municipalities and towns put up cameras around traffic circles in the neighborhoods and the like.”

He also said that this is information “where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, basically publicly available information.”

As for the FBI, it “partners” with those who collect the data “on a case-by-case basis and not a rolling access basis.” And he repeated, “We have to use it lawfully, but we the FBI don’t continue to access that on a rolling basis.”

As examples of how this works, he mentioned the Brown University shooting, where “we weren’t able to get any facial recognition on the individual, but what we were able to get based on a Flock camera was a license plate,” which helped locate the suspect who “died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in New Hampshire.”

And then there are kidnappings across state lines, where “we have saved children over and over again,” Patel said.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) brought up Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has not been reauthorized and has been expired since June 12, but is still in use thanks to the existing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order, which runs out in spring 2027.

Lee’s concern is not that the government is allowed to collect data of non-US persons abroad, which is the purpose of 702, but what happens to the data of Americans who are in contact with those foreign targets and get swept up in the process.

Lee asked why the FBI cannot be required to go to the FISA court for a warrant before being able to query this data. He said that the current system, based on the government’s “internal procedures” is not sufficient to protect Americans’ privacy, and that the past abuses have shown this.

Lee said a query should have “nothing to do with an agent wanting to vet a potential tenant for his rental property, vet a romantic interest, investigate his father…for a suspected extramarital affair.” He added, “These are real-world examples.”

Patel’s response was that the FBI is “flying blind” and cannot establish probable cause for a warrant because it does not know what information it is looking for in the first place. “We don’t have access to that information. We don’t know what we don’t know. And we wouldn’t be able to establish a predicate probable cause because we don’t have access to the information,” he said.

He also said that “what the FBI does not do is collect on U.S. citizens. What the FBI does do is access pursuant to the federal statute already lawfully collected information.”

The FBI director also said the FBI is “responsible for three percent of 702 collection,” with the rest belonging to the intelligence community. He said 702 had produced “terrorist attacks that we’ve prevented, children that we found, on narco traffickers that we were able to annihilate and arrest.” He added, “Were that to go dark, we would have a lot of problems or we would have no ability to trace that information.”

Senator Cornyn asked if it is true that 702 makes up 60 percent of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and Patel confirmed this.

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked about how the FBI uses private sector partnerships, specifically to catch predators. Patel said that the FBI must work with the private sector.

He also said that the FBI is “utilizing the fact that this great information has been collected and sitting on the shelf,” referring to data harvested by private companies, and that the FBI is now “professionally partnered and officially partnered” with more private sector companies in social media and AI than ever before.

He spoke about a 600% increase in AI investment, and then a 605% increase “since I hit the seat,” and credited these partnerships with “the largest reduction in violent crime in American history.”

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The Trump Administration Shut Down a Police Misconduct Database. Now It’s Facing a FOIA Lawsuit

Last year the Trump administration shut down a national database of misconduct by federal law enforcement officers. Now it’s facing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for refusing to release records about that decision.

A coalition of civil rights and police accountability groups filed a FOIA lawsuit on September 4 after waiting 10 months for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release records about why it pulled the plug on the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a nonpublic database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.

The Justice Department launched NLEAD in 2023 to assist federal agencies with hiring and oversight. However, in one of his first acts after returning to the White House in 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the department to delete it. In a written statement to The Washington Post, the White House said former President Joe Biden’s executive order creating the database “was full of woke, anti-police concepts.”

Before the DOJ scrapped NLEAD, it had logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers—more than 70 percent of them Bureau of Prisons (BOP) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees.

Anthony Enriquez, vice president of U.S. advocacy and litigation at the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, says the lawsuit is not seeking the misconduct data itself, but rather records “about how and why the government dismantled its own accountability tool.”

“You can’t build a national misconduct database, watch federal agencies run 10,000 searches against it in eight months, shut it down, and then tell the public that there’s nothing urgent about explaining why,” Enriquez says.

The Kennedy Human Rights Center, along with the National Police Accountability Project, Black Lives Matter D.C., and National Immigration Project, filed a FOIA request last October seeking records concerning the creation, operation, and decommissioning of NLEAD, as well as whether the data was preserved or destroyed.

The Justice Department first agreed to fast-track the FOIA request based on the heightened public interest in the records, but then reversed its decision. The coalition’s FOIA lawsuit says the department has been sitting on their request for 10 months now.

Civil liberties groups have called for the creation of centralized databases of police misconduct because, traditionally, poor information sharing between departments and lax background checks have allowed problem officers to hop from one department to another, leaving a string of misconduct, rights violations, and expensive lawsuits.

“This was about giving people more information to make smart hiring decisions,” Enriquez says. “Just as you always check someone’s recommendations whenever you’re hiring for your department, we want to do that with people who are entrusted with public safety before we put a weapon in the hands of someone and give them the authority to arrest or even use deadly force. We want to make sure that they don’t have a record of abusing that authority.”

Federal law enforcement unions opposed NLEAD, arguing that it included minor administrative infractions and didn’t give officers due process channels to dispute their inclusion.

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Netanyahu: I’ll introduce bill to revoke citizenship of those who slander IDF abroad

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he will introduce two bills to punish those who slander IDF soldiers abroad.

The first bill will introduce the option of revoking their citizenship, and the second will increase the sum they can be sued for if found guilty, Netanyahu says in a video, explicitly referencing Democrats party chief Yair Golan, former military advocate-general Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi and the filmmakers behind the recent film “NAZA.”

“Their place isn’t here,” says Netanyahu, adding that he expects all Zionist parties to support the measures.

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Christian teachers fired in Canada over beliefs now face losing their licences

Two Ontario teachers who say they were fired after refusing to compromise on their Christian beliefs are facing another professional battle, this time, one that could cost them their teaching certificates altogether.

I first interviewed Matthew Alexander in 2023, after he and his wife, Nicole, were suspended from their teaching positions in different schools. Matthew had spent 24 years in education without disciplinary issues and had held leadership positions in schools. Nicole, who also had an unblemished record, was teaching kindergarten.

According to Matthew, after their son, Josh Alexander, made headlines for taking a stand against biological males accessing female washrooms at his high school, he and his wife appeared to become targets despite neither of them teaching at their son’s school.

Matthew says the board raised concerns about his association with Josh, the Christian youth organization Save Canada and even Christian pastors he had been photographed with. Nicole, meanwhile, was suspended after quietly removing a Pride flag someone had placed on her kindergarten classroom door.

The couple says they were ultimately given an ultimatum: agree to comply with the board’s requirement that they “celebrate and affirm LGBTQ issues in the classroom” or lose their jobs.

The Renfrew County District School Board later terminated the couple on October 26, 2023. “We had never discriminated against anybody, always had warm, welcoming classrooms,” Matthew told me. “But somehow if we won’t celebrate, we’re not allowed, not allowed to teach.”

Now, the Alexanders are facing an investigation by the Ontario College of Teachers, the regulatory body responsible for their professional teaching certificates.

Matthew said the implications could extend far beyond simply losing the ability to return to the classroom.

“The ramifications are broad, wide and very serious,” he said, warning that an adverse professional ruling could carry significant financial consequences and affect future licensing opportunities.

The couple has joined forces with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which is assisting with their legal defence through crowdfunding efforts as they continue their fight.

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Alberta woman forced into human rights hearing over anti-Pride flyer

An Alberta woman will face an eight-day human rights hearing over a flyer she distributed opposing a rainbow crosswalk and raising concerns about transgender ideology.

The Alberta Human Rights Tribunal hearing against Westlock resident Benita Pedersen begins Monday.

Pedersen distributed the two-sided flyer in June 2023 after learning that the Town of Westlock planned to paint a rainbow crosswalk incorporating colours from the transgender pride flag.

The front urged residents to “Say NO to the rainbow crosswalk in Westlock” and provided instructions for contacting municipal officials and attending a council meeting.

The reverse side contained stronger language about transgender ideology, children and medical transitions. It described certain treatments as “chemical castration and genital mutilation” and claimed that children could be left “infertile and unable to reproduce.”

The flyer alleged that “the transgender agenda is part of the de-population agenda, which is part of Agenda 2030.”

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