Tag: police state

Oregon’s Union Crackdown Spreads

The state of Oregon passed a law last year that should outrage every American who believes in the First Amendment.

Not because it bans speech outright. Not because it targets a newspaper or a broadcaster. Because it targets a letter. An email. A text message. A conversation telling public employees they have a constitutional right to opt out of their union.

That’s what Oregon made illegal.

The Freedom Foundation has been communicating with public employees for years. We do it because back in 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Janus v. AFSCME that every government employee has a constitutional right to decline union membership and dues — a right workers will never find out about if they’re waiting for their union to inform them of it.

Someone else, most likely the Freedom Foundation, has to do it for them.

Oregon’s HB 3789, which took effect Jan. 1, was written specifically to shut down our outreach activities in that state — and potentially others. Egged on by their union puppet masters, lawmakers in that state approved legislation threatening heavy financial penalties for what the law describes as impersonating a labor union.

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Massachusetts Agrees to Delete Data From App It ‘Secretly Installed’ During Pandemic

Massachusetts officials have agreed to delete data from a contact tracing application that people said was installed on their phones without their permission during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under a settlement agreement approved by a federal judge on March 31, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health “shall (a) destroy any Primary Data in the Department’s possession, custody, and control, which the Department, exercising all due diligence, has located and … that was made available to the Department from the COVID Exposure Notification Setting on Android Devices; and (b) certify in writing to Class Counsel that such data has been destroyed and will not be provided to any third party.”

The state’s health commissioner also promised not to have data collecting applications installed on people’s phones without their permission for five years.

The settlement came in a case brought by plaintiffs who said the app in question, known as MassNotify v.3 or Exposure Notification Settings Feature-MA, was “secretly installed” on their phones without their permission.

American Institute of Economic Research senior fellow Robert Wright, who lives in Massachusetts, said the app was downloaded onto his Android phone around July 1, 2021, without his knowledge. Johnny Kula, a New Hampshire resident who travels to Massachusetts on a daily basis for work, also said he discovered the app on his phone around the same time, and that it was back on the phone later in 2021 after he uninstalled it.

The plaintiffs’ claims echoed reviews from app store users complaining they had not downloaded the app, but it appeared on their phones. The app, which allowed people to say they had tested positive for COVID-19, and alerted others who had recently been close in location to those people, was downloaded more than one million times, according to court filings. Similar applications were developed by at least 24 other states.

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Belarus Bans Promotion of LGBT Ideology, Pedophilia, and Childlessness

The Belarus parliament has passed a bill to criminalize the promotion of gender ideology, pedophilia, homosexuality, and deliberate childlessness, mirroring the laws of its neighboring ally, Russia.

The upper house gave the legislation the seal of approval on April 2, following its passage last month by the lower house, with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko expected to sign it into law.

The bill makes the “propaganda of homosexual relations, gender charge, refusal to have children, and pedophilia” punishable by fines and community labor.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in Belarus in 1994, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Same-sex marriage is unlawful in Belarus and in many European nations, including Italy, Cyprus, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Croatia.

Lukashenko, who has ruled the nation of 9.5 million for more than three decades, is known for his socially conservative views on marriage and the family.

‘The Classic Family’

Russian state media reported him as saying in March 2023 that although he thinks gay men may be “golden people,” he does not believe in the promotion of homosexual relationships because “we need people. Babies. Men don’t give birth. So let’s stick with the classic family.”

Some transgender activists have said that the country’s top security agency, which still bears its Soviet-era name, the KGB, has blackmailed individuals to force them to cooperate.

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Leading Ethics Journal Floats Forced Abortion For Minors

Pro-abortion rhetoric has long rested on a slick focus group-tested “pro-choice” mantra, which claims that abortion is necessary for women to have “bodily autonomy.” But pro-abortion “ethicists” are now asserting that “justice for girls” demands that all underage pregnancies end in the death of the unborn child — even if it requires physically or chemically subduing the mother against her will.

That is precisely the case made in a new essay in the April edition of Ethics, the University of Chicago’s elite philosophy journal. Across 31 full pages, our two authors, Alyssa Izatt, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia, and Kimberley Brownlee, her UBC professor, explain why compulsory abortion is essential for feminine justice. In fact, in two places they explain enforcing this upon objecting females “might then require sedation or physical restraint” even though it “could be traumatizing,” but still, “the use of restraint (chemical or physical) … is justified as a last resort when it is necessary to provide adequate care.” By “adequate care,” of course, the writers mean killing the mother’s preborn child.

You heard that right. Good-bye, “My body, my choice!” Hello, “Do as you’re told, honey!” Leftist patriarchy parading as feminist empowerment. The pro-abortion ethic is growing ever more sinister.

The authors’ reasoning consists of a basic syllogism, which they admit even the most radical pro-abortion warriors have previously failed to piece together. 

First, abortion is a fundamental, uncontested good. This prejudice is crystal clear in their paper. The only negative observation of abortion they could muster is this: “Having an abortion can be challenging and distressing, even for adult women.” That’s it. They add, “It can be a life-and-death decision, a reality that is far beyond the scope of appropriate childhood responsibilities.” Can be? They never confess whose life is at stake, but one clearly assumes they mean the young mother if she brings her unborn child to term.

Second, the authors assume that underage pregnancy and childbirth are always wrong because of risks to the mother. While the essay is mum on abortion’s risks, it spends pages detailing the physical and psychological dangers of pregnancy for girls and young women. In fact, the authors boldly state without qualification that “a child’s best interests are served by the provision of an abortion: Prioritizing her wellbeing necessitates that physicians and family members view her impregnation as a malady to be treated and take steps to terminate it.” Note that the authors consistently infantilize any female under 18 as “a child.”

Ergo, forced abortion upon underage girls and young women is clearly the most ethical action because they lack the maturity to realize abortion is life-preserving health care. As such, “medical professionals would be failing a child if they withheld abortion care, even if they did so because the child was averse to it.” That is their case.

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British Law Enforcement No Longer Policing Social Media Posts Looking for ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’, as Commissioner Celebrates Increased Ability To Investigate Real Criminals

British police are back to investigating crime, not hurt feelings.

The United Kingdom is the leading country in incarcerating citizens for social media posts, and – what’s worse – police wasted time and resources with something called ‘non-crime hate incidents’.

You read it right: perfectly legal posts.

But now, the police are no longer involved in these internet arguments, and that has enabled officers to ‘solve more real crimes’.

The Telegraph reported:

“Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said the force had doubled the number of real hate crimes that it had solved since he announced in December last year that his force would no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs).

In an exclusive article for The Telegraph, he said this change had already saved officers ‘thousands of hours’, enabling them to devote more time to ‘preventing and solving crime, protecting vulnerable people, and responding to real risks of harm’.”

It’s been two days since Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the abolition of NCHIs nationally.

“Sir Mark, whose force pre-empted the national move, said NCHIs had ‘eroded’ the public’s trust in the police because of ‘unclear guidance’ from policing bodies and the Government on how to apply them.

Officers had been knocking on people’s doors to deal with ‘online squabbles and everyday disagreements that never met the threshold of criminality’, he said.”

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The FBI’s FOIA Blacklist

The Freedom of Information Act was designed to empower citizens to hold their government accountable. But evidence suggests the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has quietly adopted a practice that turns that principle on its head: labeling some of the people who file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as “vexsome.”

In effect, the agency has created a FOIA-specific blacklist. Yet when asked, it denies having done so.

The FBI has maintained what it calls a list of “vexsome” FOIA filers for years. The label itself is odd — the proper term would be “vexatious” — but the implication is clear enough. Certain individuals and organizations who file frequent records requests are flagged internally as troublesome.

That practice is deeply at odds with the very text of the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA exists because the late Representative John Moss (D-CA) spent 10 years encountering delays, evasions, and outright refusals by federal agencies and departments to give him information he needed for oversight purposes. Moss understood that many citizens and watchdog groups asked the same kind of persistent questions of executive branch officials as he did, but they lacked a statutory basis to force such information disclosures. It’s why Moss worked so hard to get FOIA into law. Investigative journalists, transparency organizations and researchers often file dozens — sometimes hundreds — of requests in pursuit of public records. The law anticipates and protects that behavior.

There is nothing in the FOIA statute authorizing federal agencies to maintain lists of “vexatious” requesters or to single out particular citizens for special scrutiny because they use the law frequently. The statute’s presumption is exactly the opposite: that access to government records belongs to the public, and that agencies must justify withholding them.

Yet internal records obtained through FOIA requests by transparency researcher John Greenewald, who runs the document archive The Black Vault, show that the FBI has indeed categorized certain requesters in this way.

The Cato Institute learned this firsthand when the FBI labeled it a “vexsome” FOIA requester during the previous administration. More recently, when I filed a FOIA request seeking records explaining how the FBI defines or uses that designation, the Bureau responded that it could find no records responsive to the request — even though records labeling individuals or groups as “vexsome” were previously available to Greenewald.

The FBI cannot both maintain a category of “vexatious” requesters and simultaneously claim no records exist describing how that category is used. That’s why Cato has filed a new FOIA lawsuit to force the FBI to produce the records at issue.

The deeper problem is what such labeling represents. FOIA was enacted in 1966 to prevent federal agencies from deciding which members of the public deserve access to government information. Congress deliberately structured the law so that requests are judged by their legal merits — not by who submits them or how often they do so. Indeed, the statute has been updated multiple times over the past 60 years in response to agency or department tactics designed to evade the statutes’ very purpose.

Once agencies begin categorizing requesters as nuisances or troublemakers, they create a de facto enemies list composed of the very taxpayers and citizens they are sworn to serve. A system meant to promote transparency risks becoming one in which the government quietly tracks and stigmatizes those who seek to hold it accountable for its conduct — or misconduct.

Agency and department heads routinely claim that FOIA is administratively burdensome — yet they never ask Congress for line-item appropriations to ensure processing is quick and efficient. Agencies process hundreds of thousands of requests each year — and in tens of thousands of cases invoke one or more of FOIA’s nine exemptions to keep information secret that in most cases should never have been withheld in the first place. Those tactics alone force requesters to retain lawyers capable of litigating through the delays, obfuscations, and denials. The FBI’s “vexsome FOIA filer” program takes this bureaucratic game to a whole new level.

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UK’s New Pandemic Plan Would Turn Big Tech Into a Mass Location Tracking Network

Britain’s new £1 billion ($1.3m) pandemic strategy treats a future outbreak as a “certainty” and proposes building a contact tracing system that would feed on real-time location data harvested with the help of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.

The plan, published by the Department of Health and Social Care, also calls for PPE stockpiles, new emergency legislation, and a biosecurity research hub in Essex.

But the centerpiece that deserves the most scrutiny is the contact tracing proposal, which would create a surveillance architecture designed to track the movements of millions of people, ready to switch on at a moment’s notice.

The UKHSA will run the new system, which the strategy document says will use “live location data” and artificial intelligence to provide “a more rapid, large-scale detection and alert system during pandemics.”

The agency plans to “explore options to work with ‘big tech’” to build it, with deployment targeted for 2030. The government is pre-building a location surveillance system in partnership with companies whose entire business model depends on harvesting as much personal data as possible.

The strategy doesn’t name which companies, what data-sharing agreements would look like, or what happens to your location history once the pandemic ends.

The UK government has already tracked its own citizens through their phones without telling them. A 2021 report by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors (SPI-B) revealed that government-funded researchers tracked one in ten people in Britain via their mobile phones in February of that year, without the users’ knowledge or permission.

Researchers used cell phone mobility data to select over 4,200 vaccinated individuals, then monitored them through 40 call data records with corresponding location observations. The data was used for behavioral analysis, tracking radius of movement on vaccination day, whether people visited businesses during opening hours, and whether they went straight home afterwards. None of this was made public at the time.

When the tracking came to light, a spokesperson for Big Brother Watch said citizens would be “disturbed to discover they were unwittingly tracked and subjected to behavioral analysis via their phones.”

“No one expects that by going to get a vaccine they will be tracked and monitored by their own Government,” the spokesperson said. “This is deeply chilling and could be extremely damaging to public trust in medical confidentiality. Between looming Covid passports and vaccine phone surveillance, this Government is turning Britain into a Big Brother state under the cover of Covid. This should be a wake up call to us all.”

The government’s defense was that the data was collected at cell tower level, not the individual level, and that it was “GDPR-compliant” data provided by a company that “collected, cleaned, and anonymized” it.

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The Free Speech Act: A Demolition Plan For Britain’s Speech Laws

The Adam Smith Institute has published the Free Speech Act 2026, a model bill that would dismantle virtually the entire legal architecture the British state uses to police speech.

Written by Preston Byrne, an Adam Smith Institute Senior Fellow, alongside co-authors Elijah Granet and Michael Reiners, the legislation runs to 32 sections and seven schedules.

It would repeal seven entire Acts of Parliament, create a statutory right to free expression, ban the state from censoring lawful speech directly or through third parties, and give citizens a private right of action to sue when their rights are violated.

Byrne, a dual-qualified English solicitor and US attorney, is best known as the lawyer who responds to Ofcom’s enforcement notices with cartoon hamsters.

He represents 4chan in its federal lawsuit against the UK’s speech regulator in Washington, D.C., and acts for every current US-based enforcement target of the Online Safety Act.

He is also the architect of the GRANITE Act, the first foreign censorship shield bill in American history, which passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 before running out of time in the state Senate.

All of that, Byrne writes, was prologue. “The big fight, the real fight, is to restore free speech in the UK. Publishing this Model Bill today, we mean to start it.”

The Bill’s stated purpose is to answer a single question: “If the UK wanted to enact something like the First Amendment, what would the resulting statute look like?”

The answer is a controlled demolition.

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US State Dept Settles Free Speech Suppression Lawsuit

The US State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, accepting a consent decree that bars it from using, financing, or promoting technology designed to suppress or “fact-check” the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and domestic media outlets.

The settlement also prohibits the Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs for those purposes, whether through formal agreements or informal arrangements.

We obtained a copy of the joint motion for you here.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented The Daily Wire and The Federalist, secured what amounts to a binding admission that the government had been doing exactly what it was accused of. The Department now acknowledges that its plaintiffs’ speech on COVID-19, sexual ethics, the biological nature of sex, and election integrity was constitutionally protected all along. It took three years of litigation to get the government to say that out loud.

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Missouri Senate Passes Bill To Ban Intoxicating Hemp THC Products

After nine hours of debate over competing proposals to ban intoxicating hemp products, the Missouri Senate finally approved a House bill Tuesday night that would align state law with a federal ban set to take effect in November.

It also includes provisions to protect marijuana consumer privacy and cannabis workers’ right to organize.

It now heads back to the House, which can either ask for a conference to work out differences with the Senate or send it to the governor.

The bill, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Dave Hinman of O’Fallon, would prohibit hemp products from containing more than 0.4 milligrams of THC per container, which is among the limits included in a provision in the federal spending bill Congress approved last year.

Even if Congress reverses course and decides to allow the sale of these products, Hinman’s bill would only permit them to be sold in Missouri’s licensed marijuana dispensaries. And if Congress chooses to delay the ban for a couple years, Missouri would still ban all products, except for intoxicating beverages.

“I had just a good opportunity over in the Senate to work with several of the senators to get some of the things that they wanted to get on there that I think actually benefit the bill,” Hinman told The Independent Wednesday morning. “So I’m very happy with the things that were done last night and look forward to bringing that to the House tomorrow.”

Resistance to the bill came from Republican senators who expressed concern that the hemp industry members weren’t included in the final negotiations that took place for more than 12 hours Tuesday.

And Democratic state Sen. Karla May of St. Louis argued Missouri would be taking a more restrictive approach than the federal government because the proposals would deem the intoxicating hemp products as “marijuana.”

“They claim they’re mirroring the federal regulation,” May said during the debate Tuesday. “There’s some things in there that’s going far beyond the federal regulation, such as…hemp-derived cannabinoids will be put under the marijuana umbrella and have to be sold in dispensaries.”

May successfully led a nearly seven-hour filibuster on the first bill brought for discussion, sponsored by Republican state Sen. David Gregory, which would have made the ban effective as soon as the governor signed it.

“We spent pretty much from 11 a.m. until really 9 p.m. trying to figure out where we wanted to go, trying different things,” Hinman said, regarding Gregory’s bill. “We couldn’t get everyone really to agree, and so the senator [Gregory] suggested, ‘Let’s just go back to Hinman’s bill and go with that.’”

In an unusual move, the senators decided to reconvene the Senate Fiscal Oversight Committee at about 10 p.m. The same committee had decided not to vote on Hinman’s bill earlier that day, saying Hinman needed to reach a resolution with the hemp industry.

There was no public notice of the fiscal oversight committee’s evening meeting, which ended when senators voted to move the bill forward and allowed the full Senate to take it up for debate.

An amendment was approved to keep dispensaries from collecting marijuana consumers’ information unless they “opted in,” Hinman said, and another ensured all cannabis workers can unionize and shouldn’t be considered “agricultural workers” who aren’t protected under federal law. A group of workers in St. Louis have been battling this point since 2023.

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