Tag: police state

Judge Ho rules that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment” – “general, exploratory rummaging” by law enforcement is ILLEGAL

The federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is maintaining its position that so-called geofence warrants, which were used to track Jan. 6, 2021, “insurrection” participants, are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment,” which protects We the People from unreasonable searches and seizures by law enforcement and other arms of the government.

Judge James C. Ho issued an opinion that while geofence warrants “are powerful tools for investigating and deterring crime,” they overtly violate the U.S. Constitution and the protections it affords to people living in this country.

“The defendants here engaged in a violent robbery – and likely would have gotten away with it, but for this new technology,” Judge Ho wrote. “So I fully recognize that our panel decision today will inevitably hamper legitimate law enforcement interests.”

“But hamstringing the government is the whole point of our Constitution. Our Founders recognized that the government will not always be comprised of publicly-spirited officers – and that even good faith actors can be overcome by the zealous pursuit of legitimate public interests.”

Justice Ho also quoted The Federalist No. 51, at 349 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) which reads in support of his ruling:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary,” but “experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions” because of “human nature,” which makes it “necessary to control the abuses of government.”

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Digital IDs are coming, whether you like it or not

The Biden administration is reportedly preparing to launch an initiative that could significantly alter the way Americans prove their identities. A draft executive order, which has been reviewed by journalists from Notus (a new, Washington DC-based publication), would push for the widespread adoption of mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and other forms of digital identification.

If implemented, this would mark a fundamental shift in how citizens interact with government and private sector services online — everything from how you access public benefits to how you verify your age before viewing adult-only content online.

The party line is that we need digital IDs because the government incurred staggering losses as a result of fraudulent claims during the pandemic. Over $100 billion was reportedly lost to unscrupulous unemployment claims between March 2020 and March 2023. Rather than understanding that government had failed in its duty to properly vet claimaints, the Biden administration would rather have us believe these failures highlight vulnerabilities in current identity verification systems such as physical driver’s licenses, which have proven easy to forge. The rise of AI-driven “deep fake” technology just makes matters worse.

They say digital IDs, supported by biometric technologies like facial recognition, are a robust solution. By moving identity documents onto smartphones, the government hopes to create a more secure and efficient way for Americans to verify their identities when accessing both public and private services online.

According to the draft of the executive order obtained by Notus, the Biden administration intends to “strongly encourage the use of digital identity documents” across federal and state levels. The order would mandate federal agencies to adopt a unified identity verification system, Login.gov, as the primary gateway for accessing federal websites. This system would also be made available to state and local governments for integration into their services.

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California’s Digital Plates Plan Raises Privacy Fears

California is one of the US states that have introduced digital license plates, amid opposition from a number of rights advocates.

Now, there is a legislative effort to have GPS location tracking embedded in these, to all intents and purposes, devices attached to the car.

Sponsored by Democrat Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, Bill 3138 is currently making its way through the state’s legislature. It refers to “License plates and registration cards: alternative devices,” and the bill has another sponsor – Reviver.

The company was founded by Neville Boston, formerly of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and promotes itself as the first digital license plates platform. It has made its way to both this proposal, and the law the current draft builds on – AB 984 (also sponsored by Wilson) – which was signed into law two years ago.

The problem with Reviver is that it has already had a security breach that allowed hackers to track those using the company’s digital plates in real-time. It doesn’t help, either, that the company is effectively a monopoly – the only one, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) notes, “that currently has state authorization to sell digital plates in California.”

Meanwhile, the key problem with AB 3138, warns EFF, is that it “directly undoes the deal from 2022 and explicitly calls for location tracking in digital license plates for passenger cars.”

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VPNs Vanish from Brazil’s App Store as Internet Freedom Faces Unprecedented Clampdown

In Brazil, a significant upheaval in digital privacy and access to information is unfolding, as a notable number of reputable VPN services—including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, and VyprVPN—have vanished from the local iOS App Store. This move is widely believed to comply with Brazilian authorities’ secret directives, reflecting a concerning trend towards online censorship.

This development is particularly alarming in light of the recent decision X made to shutdown its operations in the country. X terminated its operations after a protracted legal confrontation with Brazilian officials, who had accused the platform of insufficient efforts to combat disinformation, specifically its failure to block accounts spreading false information and hate speech. Despite the shutdown, X’s app is still accessible in Brazil.

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“The Council” – Who is Running the United States of America?

“The Council” and everyone and everything that emanates from them, has controlled the United States for the past fifty years for the purpose of extracting our nation’s wealth. Our constitutional government and the federal workforce’s purpose is to protect our wealth, and the “public good” of the American people. “The Council’s” purpose is to crush and destroy it.

They use the tools of indictments, obstruction, and government agencies they have weaponized to attack their enemies under false color of law. They alone select who will be winners and losers in politics, business, the economy, media, elections, education, and do so with complete amorality.

Exposing them by name, their corruption and means of control, and identifying how to dismantle their illegitimate power is the first step in the restoration of the United States of America as a constitutional republic.

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Report: Biden Administration Rushes Digital ID Plans

The Biden administration is working to expedite widespread adoption of digital IDs, including driver’s licenses, a draft executive order indicates.

Digital IDs are a contentious concept primarily because of the concentration of – eventually – the entirety of people’s sensitive private information in centralized databases controlled by the government, and on people’s phones, “client-side.”

That in turn brings up the issues of technical security, but also privacy, and the potential for dystopian-style mass surveillance.

Proponents, on the other hand, like to focus on the “convenience” that such a shift from physical to digital personal documents is promised to bring.

In the US, some states have started this process via digital driver’s licenses, and the executive order is urging (“strongly encouraging”) both federal and state authorities to accelerate this, as well as other types of digital ID.

Where this policy seems to be converging to is coming up, at long last, with a functional way to carry out online identity verification. Namely, digital ID would be combined with biometric data obtained through facial recognition, and other forms of biometrics harvesting.

Centralization of data – opponents say to better control it, even if that makes it less secure – is a key component of these schemes, and so the Biden executive order speaks about making it obligatory for federal agencies to join “a single government-run identity system, Login.gov,” reports say.

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Back to the Future With Price Controls

Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris is demonstrating why monetary debasement has always been a favorite way for government officials to plunder the citizenry. Rather than focusing on the Federal Reserve as the root cause of prices rising across society, she’s blaming rising food prices on grocery-store owners. Consequently, she says that if she is elected president, she’ll get a federal “anti-gouging” law enacted that prevents grocery stores from raising prices.

In other words, she’s going to impose price controls, which inevitably means that we are going to have to deal with shortages of everything in grocery stores that has a price control imposed on it.

Of course, this is what governments have done since the invention of the printing press. Debasing the currency by printing ever-increasing quantities of money and then blaming the resulting rising prices on greedy, rapacious, evil, profit-seeking, capitalist swine has always been the way that government officials plunder the citizenry without having the citizenry figure out what the government is doing to them.

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From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain.

The big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.[1]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and big financial institutions, like BlackRock and Vanguard, are also involved, whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, pushing biosynthetic (fake) food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating and financing the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.[2]

The billionaire interests behind this try to portray their techno-solutionism as some kind of humanitarian endeavour: saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, ‘helping farmers’ or ‘feeding the world’. But what it really amounts to is repackaging and greenwashing the dispossessive strategies of imperialism.

It involves a shift towards a ‘one world agriculture’ under the control of agritech and the data giants, which is to be based on genetically engineered seeds, laboratory created products that resemble food, ‘precision’ and ‘data-driven’ agriculture and farming without farmers, with the entire agrifood chain, from field (or lab) to retail, being governed by monopolistic e-commerce platforms determined by artificial intelligence systems and algorithms.

Those who are pushing this agenda have a vision not only for farmers but also for humanity in general.

The elites through their military-digital-financial (Pentagon/Silicon Valley/Big Finance) complex want to use their technologies to reshape the world and redefine what it means to be human. They regard humans, their cultures and their practices, like nature itself, as a problem and deficient.

Farmers are to be displaced and replaced with drones, machines and cloud-based computing. Food is to be redefined and people are to be fed synthetic, genetically engineered products. Cultures are to be eradicated, and humanity is to be fully urbanised, subservient and disconnected from the natural world.

What it means to be human is to be radically transformed. But what has it meant to be human until now or at least prior to the (relatively recent) Industrial Revolution and associated mass urbanisation?

To answer this question, we need to discuss our connection to nature and what most of humanity was involved in prior to industrialisation — cultivating food.

Many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories, myths and rituals that helped them come to terms with some of the most fundamental issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs.

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UK to release criminals early from jail to accommodate ‘keyboard warriors,’ protesters arrested after riots over school girl murders

Britain’s prisons are set to release prisoners in order to make room for those locked up due to the recent riots that took place after three school girls were stabbed to death by the son of Rwandan immigrants. Many of those who are facing prison terms were convicted over social media posts. Some 460 people have been arrested due to the riots so far. 

“The UK is turning into a police state,” Elon Musk said. “Keyboard warriors” are facing specific scrutiny from the judiciary, with one man facing jail time for posts said to have “instigated” riots. A 53-year-old woman who posted “burn the mosque down” and is the only caretaker for her disabled husband was sentenced to 15 months in prison. 12-year-old boys are also among those convicted.

The prisoner release plan, called Operation Early Dawn, was “triggered for a week in March,” The Times reports, and it requires police to release suspects on bail if confinement space is lacking. In this case, the plan will be enacted in the North East and Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lancashire, and Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire regions.

The riots are being blamed for the expansion of these measures and it’s believed, per a senior government source cited by The Times, that “the large numbers of people imprisoned for their role in the riots will probably lead to emergency early release measures staying in place for longer than expected.” 567 new prison cells have been opened ahead of schedule to cope with the demand.

“From September 10, thousands of prisoners will start being released 40 percent of the way through their sentence as part of the emergency measures announced last month,” The Times reports.

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Government to introduce ban on machete and zombie-style knives – as Brits urged to surrender their weapons

Machete and zombie-style knife owners are being urged to surrender their weapons ahead of a government ban on owning them next month.

A nationwide scheme will be run at police stations across England and Wales for four weeks from August 26 to September 23.

People who hand over the potentially dangerous knives before it becomes illegal to own them on September 24 will not face repercussions.

After then, the weapons will be added to the list of dangerous prohibited items already banned – including butterfly knives, Samurai swords and push daggers.

Anyone caught with a zombie-style knife or a machete after this time faces time behind bars.

People can also dispose of the weapons using surrender bins by contacting their local police, council or an anti-knife crime charity.

Individuals are being encouraged to contact their designated police station first to get advice on how to package up any weapons and bring them into the station.

Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson urged the public to ‘do the right thing’ to make streets safer.

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