Tag: police state

New Report Finds Police Continue To Use Facial Recognition Even After It’s Banned

A major report in the Washington Post has found that law enforcement officers in U.S. several cities where facial recognition tech is banned for police have asked neighboring forces to search face databases for them.

Facial recognition has been prohibited in San Francisco since 2019. But Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s former district attorney, sums up the problem: “Police are using it but not saying they are using it.” The Post says the SFPD have outsourced at least five attempts to make facial matches. Some of these were done by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), a “multi-jurisdiction program serving law enforcement agencies in the region.” Others were farmed out to the Daly City Police Department. None were successful.

Police in Austin, Texas, however – also among the biggest U.S. cities to ban facial recognition – recorded 13 requests to a neighboring department for assistance with biometric face matching, and some of these led to arrests. Austin city employees are barred from using facial recognition as well as “information obtained” from the technology, with certain exceptions. But the suburb of Leander, just a 30-minute drive north of Austin, has no such restriction.

Leander’s police force has access to Clearview AI, which has courted many law enforcement agencies in the U.S., despite lingering questions about whether its method of scraping the public internet for facial images is 100 percent consensual. According to the Post, the Leander force also has a recognized Clearview AI “influencer”: Officer David Wilson, who performed several searches for the Austin force via Leander’s Clearview account. Emails seen by the Post show that officers contacted Wilson directly for the express purpose of requesting facial recognition searches.

Clearview, to its credit, officially prohibits their clients in law enforcement from sharing access to accounts. Yet anyone with a Netflix subscription knows that formal rules only matter if they are enforced. Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That has publicly promised customers that Clearview will try and close the loophole that allows police to export results of facial scans, even if they cannot share access. But Wilson sent most of his facial recognition results to Austin via email.

KXAN reports that Austin city council gave a statement saying the city was unaware of the complaint regarding police outsourcing facial recognition, and that investigations are underway.

Keep reading

Lawmakers Push for the Censorship of “Harmful Content,” “Disinformation” in Latest Section 230 Reform Push

Section 230 of the Communications Act (CDA), an online liability shield that prevents online apps, websites, and services from being held civilly liable for content posted by their users if they act in “good faith” to moderate content, provided the foundation for most of today’s popular platforms to grow without being sued out of existence. But as these platforms have grown, Section 230 has become a political football that lawmakers have used in an attempt to influence how platforms editorialize and moderate content, with pro-censorship factions threatening reforms that force platforms to censor more aggressively and pro-free speech factions pushing reforms that reduce the power of Big Tech to censor lawful speech.

And during a Communications and Technology Subcommittee hearing yesterday, lawmakers discussed a radical new Section 230 proposal that would sunset the law and create a new solution that “ensures safety and accountability for past and future harm.”

We obtained a copy of the draft bill to sunset Section 230 for you here.

Keep reading

Terrible: Police Officer Shoots Small Deaf, Blind Dog At Point-Blank Range

Bodycam video captured the moment a police officer in Sturgeon, Missouri, shot and killed a small blind and deaf dog for no apparent reason last week.

Responding to a call about a loose animal, the officer can be seen lazily trying to place a lasso around the canine’s neck before choosing to shoot it in the head instead of continuing to make attempts at leashing the animal.

Later in the video, the dog’s owner approaches the officer and confronts him over the unnecessary shooting.

When the sobbing owner tries getting answers, the cop is defensive and offers half-assed apologies.

Keep reading

Fontana pays nearly $900,000 for ‘psychological torture’ inflicted by police to get false confession

Within hours after Thomas Perez Jr. called police to report his father missing, he found himself in a tiny interrogation room confronted by Fontana detectives determined to extract a confession that he killed his dad.

Perez had told police that his father, 71-year-old Thomas Perez Sr., went out for a walk with the family dog at about 10 p.m. on Aug. 7, 2018. The dog returned within minutes without Perez’s father. Investigators didn’t believe his story, and over the next 17 hours they grilled him to try to get to the “truth.”

According to court records, detectives told Perez that his father was dead, that they had recovered his body and it now “wore a toe tag at the morgue.” They said they had evidence that Perez killed his father and that he should just admit it, records show.

Perez insisted he didn’t remember killing anyone, but detectives allegedly told him that the human mind often tries to suppress troubling memories.

At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

Keep reading

Exposing The CIA’s Secret Effort To Seize Control Of Social Media

While the CIA is strictly prohibited from spying on or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil, a bombshell new “Twitter Files” report reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of InQtel – the CIA’s mission-driving venture capital firm, along with “former” intelligence community (IC) and CIA analysts, were involved in a massive effort in 2021-2022 to take over Twitter’s content management system, as Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag report over at Shellenberger’s Public (subscribers can check out the extensive 6,800 word report here).

According to “thousands of pages of Twitter Files and documents,” these efforts were part of a broader strategy to manage how information is disseminated and consumed on social media under the guise of combating ‘misinformation’ and foreign propaganda efforts – as this complex of government-linked individuals and organizations has gone to great lengths to suggest that narrative control is a national security issue.

Keep reading

Lawmakers move to automate Selective Service registration for all men

A new plan from House lawmakers would automatically register men for a potential military draft when they hit age 18, avoiding potential legal consequences connected to failing to file the paperwork at the proper time.

Language included in the House Armed Services Committee’s draft of the annual defense authorization bill would mandate the automatic registration of all males between ages 18 and 26 living in America in the Selective Service System, the federal database used for a military draft in case of a national emergency.

The system hasn’t been used for that purpose for 52 years, but men who fail to register can face a host of legal consequences, including forfeiture of eligibility for federal programs and possible jail time.

But the number of individuals who have skipped registering has increased in recent years, in large part because registration options were removed from the federal student loan process two years ago. That had accounted for nearly a quarter of all registrations in prior years.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., sponsored the automatic registration language and called it both a money-saving and common-sense reform.

Keep reading

Israel’s censorship of the AP is a cautionary tale for the US

Philosophers consider slippery slope arguments to be logical fallacies. But those philosophers haven’t met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. 

It took Israel about three weeks after banning Al Jazeera — due to purported national security risks stemming from its Qatari funding — to use the same law as a pretext to censor the Associated Press, one of the world’s largest news agencies. 

Fortunately, Israel quickly reversed course after pressure from the U.S. and press organizations. But the ordeal should serve as a cautionary tale for President Biden and U.S. lawmakers and prosecutors. They keep empowering future administrations to harass the media — apparently trusting them, against all historical evidence, to use restraint.  

And if (more like when) the U.S. government does abuse its new powers against the press, the superpower is not likely to back off in response to international pushback like Israel did. Otherwise Julian Assange would be a free man. 

Israel’s justification for the raid was that the AP broke the law by providing images to Al Jazeera, which is among numerous clients worldwide that receive video feeds from the AP. There was no allegation that any image endangered national security, but officials nonetheless seized the AP’s equipment, killing its live feed and temporarily stripping millions of people of a view inside Gaza. 

Perhaps Israeli authorities saw transparency itself as a national security threat. The U.S. should be able to relate — officials who once sought to censor the Pentagon Papers on security grounds now acknowledge the government’s real concern was embarrassment. 

Israel has shut the international press out of Gaza (in addition to killing at least 100 journalists). Some even floated sanctioning the country’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, for criticizing the current government. Biden’s administration is reportedly concerned about journalists turning public opinion against Israel by exposing the devastation the Israel-Gaza war has caused. 

With that backdrop, who could’ve predicted that Israel wouldn’t stop with Al Jazeera once it started censoring news outlets? Well, other than press freedom advocates everywhere. 

Keep reading

Thursday’s Energy Absurdity: In California, the tax-per-mile ‘conspiracy theory’ becomes reality

For several years now, boosters of the failing energy transition have publicly dismissed critics who have speculated that their ultimate goal where transportation is concerned is not merely to shift private car owners to adopt EVs, but to make the cost of owning a car so expensive that all but the most elite in society give up their cars altogether. Anyone reaching that imminently logical conclusion based on the evidence at hand has been dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ or something worse.

One easy way to make owning a car increasingly costly would be to tax drivers on a cents-per-mile basis. With EVs replacing some percentage of gas-powered cars, states are finding their slush funds of taxes collected at the gas pump dwindling and are looking for ways to get the revenue flowing again. Some states, like Texas, are doing that with a hefty annual fee on EVs, but taking that route is hard to hide and tends to get hubris-filled EV buyers into a tizzy about having to actually help pay for the roads their extremely heavy vehicles do so much to damage. Go figure.

So, politicians being politicians, many are looking for a way to do this that’s somewhat easier to hide and seems “fair,” at least on the surface. For this reason, we now see the politicians and regulators in California (because of course it’s in California – where else?) now running tests on assessing a new tax based on miles driven each year.

Keep reading

UK “disinformation unit” spied on citizens and flagged online speech for removal during pandemic

New documents reveal that authorities in the UK considered placing government employees inside of social media companies to form a type of digital KGB that would control online speech during the pandemic.

This is according to recently released minutes from the governing board of the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). They show that, as many people suspected, British authorities were actively involved in monitoring people’s speech online and flagging certain viewpoints for removal.

At one point, they discussed a strategy to “embed” civil servants in various companies that were running social media platforms, and there is nothing in the document to indicate that they did not follow through on this.

The CDU, which has since been rebranded the National Security Online Information Team in response to heavy scrutiny, insists that it is “countering disinformation and hostile state narratives” but the agency, along with government-hired private contractors, was put in charge of surveilling British citizens and silencing those who were deemed to be “COVID measures dissenters.”

Instead of going after foreign adversaries who were spreading misinformation, they were targeting British citizens – from journalists and medical professionals to politicians – who were criticizing the government.

Keep reading

By month’s end, WHO seeks to pass Orwellian pandemic treaty to implement algorithmic surveillance and control systems worldwide

The World Health Organization (WHO) body of experts are set to convene in Geneva, Switzerland, at their 77th World Health Assembly from May 27 to June 1, 2024. At the assembly, WHO’s member countries will cast their votes on the final version of the agency’s “pandemic agreement.”

This agreement will give the beleaguered agency more power over sovereign nations, including the power to order targeted lockdowns and mitigation measures. The agreement will allow a global body of experts to use surveillance tools and implement broader mandates for PCR testing, masks, so-called vaccines and other countermeasures. Right now WHO is developing a standardized algorithm to quantify airborne transmission risk to dictate public policies on human interactions.

WHO’s psychotic ARIA tool doubles down on germaphobia, analyzes aerosols and micromanages human activity

WHO is currently collaborating with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to develop an online tool [PDF] that will evaluate and predict risks associated with future airborne virus transmission across various public and private settings. This surveillance tool, named ARIA, will model the hypothetical spread of airborne pathogens in indoor settings, so WHO can craft precise directives on mitigation measures for business owners, households, healthcare centers and others indoor venues.

According to WHO, ARIA was developed by “a global group of experts” who conducted a “comprehensive review of the scientific literature.” Again and again, we are told to “trust the experts” – even though WHO’s guidance has caused significant damage to families, economies and livelihoods worldwide.

Keep reading