Tag: police state

EU Agencies Propose Encryption Backdoors and Cryptocurrency Surveillance

The EU is attacking encryption again, this time in a report put together by several agencies, including EU law enforcement Europol, and the European Council’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.

This EU’s site says that this “first report on encryption” – by what the bloc calls its Innovation Hub for Internal Security, is looking for ways to “uphold citizens’ privacy while enabling criminal investigation and prosecution.”

“The main challenge is to design solutions that would allow at the same time a lawful and targeted access to communications and that guarantees that a high level of cybersecurity, data protection and privacy,” says the report.

The objective answer to the supposed conundrum of how to achieve both goals is always the same: you can’t.

Yet the EU, various governments, and international organizations continue to push to undermine online encryption and keep framing their initiatives the same way – as both their supposed care for privacy (and importantly, security), and making law enforcement’s job much easier (saying that the goal is to “enable” that, suggests there’s no other way to investigate, which is not true.)

And, how on Earth the EU intends to “safeguard fundamental rights” (of citizens) while at the same time proposing what it does in this document, is anybody’s guess. But EU bureaucrats are “safe” from being asked these questions – at least not by legacy, corporate media.

The report’s proposals include a number of ways to break encryption, mention encryption backdoors (the sneaky euphemism is, “lawful access” to communications and data), as well as password cracking and cryptocurrency and other forms of surveillance.

The not-so-subtle abuse of language and tone continues while discrediting encryption, as services like Meta’s Messenger, Apple Private Relay, and Rich Communication Systems (RCS) protocol are dubbed, “warrant-proof encryption technologies.”

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New UK Government Signals Potential Backtrack on Plans to Drop Digital ID

It’s been mere days since former UK Labour PM Tony Blair, a globalization extraordinaire, and a (digital) ID cards enthusiast remarked that it might take “a little persuading” for his country’s new government to get with that particular program.

And it seems the new Labour government really only needed a little persuasion – after “rejecting” Blair’s call to implement digital ID cards on July 7, by July 10 there were statements by an influential party figure calling that path “inevitable.”

However, that figure – former Home Secretary David Blunkett – is not a member of the just-formed cabinet, and was with his statements challenging current Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who opposed the idea.

But, Blunkett – who served in Blair’s government – said that “the government would have to streamline (growing digital records) into a single ID.”

Fast forward one week, and it seems Cooper’s cabinet colleague, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology Peter Kyle, is starting to reverse course.

Somewhere in the meanwhile, Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds first said the government would be “looking at all sources of advice” – only to quickly backtrack and say there were no ID card plans.

All this leaves observers puzzled as to what the government’s actual stance on this important issue is.

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Man Who Was Arrested for Flipping Off Cop Settles for $175,000

A man who was arrested and charged for flipping off a Vermont State Police (VSP) officer settled his case last month for $175,000.

“Far too often, police abuse their authority to retaliate against and suppress speech they personally find offensive or insulting,” Lia Ernst, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Vermont, tells Reason about the case. “This settlement demonstrates that violating these rights does not come without a cost.”

Through the settlement, Gregory Bombard will receive $100,000 in damages. The ACLU of Vermont and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which both represented Bombard in his suit, will receive the remaining $75,000.

All told, Bombard spent “about a year fighting the criminal charges and more than three years seeking declaratory relief,” a spokesperson for FIRE tells Reason.

Jay Riggen, the officer who arrested Bombard, “retired from VSP effective May 31, 2024,” a spokesperson for the Vermont State Police tells Reason. “We have no additional comment on this case.”

In February 2018, Bombard was stopped by Vermont State Trooper Riggen, who believed Bombard had given him the finger while driving—an allegation Bombard denies. However, after Riggen walked away from the car, Bombard flipped Riggen off and swore at the officer in frustration for having been pulled over.

In response, Riggen pulled Bombard over again and arrested him for disorderly conduct. “The first one may have been an error,” said Riggen during the arrest, referring to the reason for the initial stop, but “the second one certainly was not.”

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Bombshell DHS Document Proves Pandemic Lockdowns Planned In 2007

We’ve just come across a document hosted by the Department of Homeland Security, posted March 2023, but written in 2007, that amounts to a full-blown corporatist imposition on the US, abolishing anything remotely resembling the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. It is right there in plain sight for anyone curious enough to dig.

There is nothing in it that you haven’t already experienced with lockdowns. What makes it interesting are the participants in the forging of the plan, which is pretty much the whole of corporate America as it stood in 2007. It was a George W. Bush initiative. The conclusions are startling.

“Quarantine is a legally enforceable declaration that a government body may institute over individuals potentially exposed to a disease, but who are not symptomatic. If enacted, Federal quarantine laws will be coordinated between CDC and State and local public health officials, and, if necessary, law enforcement personnel…The government may also enact travel restrictions to limit the movement of people and products between geographic areas in an effort to limit disease transmission and spread. Authorities are currently reviewing possible plans to curtail international travel upon a pandemic’s emergence overseas.

“Limiting public assembly opportunities also helps limit the spread of disease. Concert halls, movie theaters, sports arenas, shopping malls, and other large public gathering places might close indefinitely during a pandemic—whether because of voluntary closures or government-imposed closures. Similarly, officials may close schools and non-essential businesses during pandemic waves in an effort to significantly slow disease transmission rates. These strategies aim to prevent the close interaction of individuals, the primary conduit of spreading the influenza virus. Even taking steps such as limiting person-to-person interactions within a distance of three feet or avoiding instances of casual close contact, such as shaking hands, will help limit disease spread.”

There we have it: the pandemic plans. They once seemed abstract. In 2020, they became very real. Your rights were deleted. No more freedom even to have house guests. In those days, the rule was to enforce only three feet of distance rather than six feet of distance, neither of which had any basis in science. Indeed, the actual scientific literature even at that time recommended against any physical interventions designed to limit the spread of respiratory viruses. They were known not to work. The entire profession of public health accepted that.

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DOJ Doubles Down On Claim That Medical Marijuana Patients ‘Endanger Public Safety’ If They Own Guns

The Justice Department is doubling down on its position that medical marijuana patients who possess firearms “endanger public safety,” “pose a greater risk of suicide” and are more likely to commit crimes “to fund their drug habit”—justifying, in the government’s eyes, a federal ban on gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that upheld the constitutionality of governments setting certain gun restrictions in a case centered around domestic violence-related prohibitions, the justices remanded a pending cannabis and Second Amendment rights case back to the lower court for reconsideration.

Late last week, plaintiffs and DOJ submitted briefs in a separate case that responded to the potential implications of the high court’s latest decision for the federal statute barring gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

In the filings submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, DOJ urged the panel to affirm an initial district court ruling that deemed the cannabis and firearms ban to be constitutional, while appellants are requesting a reversal of the order.

This is the latest development in the two-year case, with a group of Florida medical cannabis patients arguing that their Second Amendment rights are being violated because they cannot lawfully buy firearms so long as they are using cannabis as medicine, despite acting in compliance with state law.

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DeSantis Anti-Marijuana Legalization Campaign Gets $100K Donation From Cannabis Exec As Hemp Businesses Pledge $5M To State GOP

Amid new reporting that Florida-based hemp businesses are rallying behind Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) campaign to defeat a marijuana legalization initiative—with an apparent pledge from hemp executives to donate $5 million to the Republican party as it works to oppose the effort—one particular cannabis-affiliated company has come under the spotlight after contributing a $100,000 boost to the governor’s so-called “Florida Freedom Fund” after its initially tepid fundraising start.

This comes weeks after the governor vetoed a bill to ban most consumable hemp products in a move that some suspect was at least partly meant to garner the industry’s favor in his anti-marijuana crusade.

DeSantis launched the political action committee—which is targeting both the legalization measure and a separate abortion rights initiative that will appear on the November ballot—last month. It has about $121,000 on hand, the bulk of which comes from POB Ventures, which is linked to a medical cannabis worker training institution and a chain of hemp businesses.

In an exclusive interview with Marijuana Moment, the CEO of POB Ventures, Patrick O’Brien, said he’s not against adult-use cannabis legalization in principle—but is instead troubled by the specific language of the ballot initiative because it provides an option, rather than a mandate, for regulators to approve additional licenses. He suggested the framework could create a monopolized cannabis economy that primarily benefits the state’s existing medical marijuana companies, including the multi-state operators such as Trulieve that have primarily financed the legalization campaign.

“If you look very closely at the writing, they just messed up—and it was with full intent to mess this up,” O’Brien, who also runs the education platform Sativa University and the cannabis product company Chronic Guru, argued. “All they had to do was make a simple change from ‘may’ issue more licenses to ‘must’ issue more licenses, and we would have had a recreational market.”

By giving regulators that licensing discretion, the measure could effectively kneecap prospective businesses outside of the existing medical cannabis space, he claims.

But there’s been criticism of the major contribution to the DeSantis PAC, which O’Brien says he will continue to support beyond the initial donation.

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Cops Called on 8-Year-Old Child for Being Outside

Kay Eskridge is a Kentucky mom, former child protective services worker, and fan of the Free-Range Kids movement. Over the years, she’s written to me several times about our shared passion for fostering kids’ independence. This includes a note she sent in 2021 saying that a 7-year-old riding her bike in their quiet Louisville neighborhood had been stopped by cops who wanted to know where her mother was.

But earlier this summer, it happened to Eskridge’s own kid.

“The police were called because my 8-year-old was riding her bike on our street,” says Eskridge.

Her note arrived in my inbox recently. Subsequently, we connected over a Zoom call. She set the scene: Her daughter, Julia, had just finished second grade. Thanks to a weird schedule, Julia arrives home two hours before her friends. That leaves her bored and eager for fun by late afternoon. On May 18, when at last a friend had made it home, Julia hopped on her bike to ride eight houses over to his place.

“She was three houses away,” says Eskridge, “and the police stopped her.”

The policeman was actually someone the family knew. (Eskridge’s husband is in local politics.) He told the girl that “this isn’t a good time to be outside,” according to Eskridge. Julia assured the officer that she was used to traffic and knew how to ride her bike, and continued on her way.

The officer left her alone but decided to pay a visit to the Eskridge house.

Her husband answered the door, but when Eskridge heard what was going on, she took matters into her own hands.

“I was not about to let him handle this,” she says. “So I come bursting through and say, ‘Can a child not ride her bike on the street in this neighborhood anymore? Is that what we’re saying?'”

The policeman assured her no, it wasn’t that. Rather, a woman had called the police because she was “upset that a child was outside.”

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Congress ‘Can Regulate Virtually Anything’

Two years after Harvard gave him the boot and three years before Congress banned LSD, Timothy Leary set out on a road trip from Millbrook, New York, in a rented station wagon. The 45-year-old psychologist and psychedelic enthusiast was accompanied by his girlfriend, Rosemary Woodruff, and his two teenaged children, Susan and Jack. They had planned a month-long family vacation in Yucatan, Mexico, after which Leary and Woodruff would stay behind to work on his newly commissioned autobiography. Leary and his companions arrived in Laredo, Texas, on the evening of December 22, 1965, and crossed the international bridge to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

At the customs station on the Mexican side of the bridge, Leary recalled in his 1983 memoir Flashbacks, he learned that the visa he needed would not be approved until the next day. That turned out to be the least of his troubles.

“All the grass is out of the car, right?” Leary asked as he started driving the station wagon back across the bridge. Jack had flushed his, but Woodruff said she had been unable to retrieve her “silver box” of pot from her bag because “there were two uniformed porters leaning against the car.” Since trying to toss the contraband off the side of the bridge seemed inadvisable, Susan hid it in her clothing.

At the inspection point on the U.S. side, Leary explained that he “didn’t enter Mexico” and had nothing to declare. After a suspicious customs agent picked up what looked like a cannabis seed from the car floor near Leary’s feet, the encounter escalated into searches of the vehicle, the passengers, and their luggage. A “personal search” of Susan discovered what the U.S. Supreme Court would later describe as “a silver snuff box containing semi-refined marihuana and three partially smoked marihuana cigarettes”—about half an ounce, all told.

Leary claimed ownership of the stash, which earned him a 30-year prison sentence. That astonishingly severe penalty was based on two federal charges: transportation of illegally imported marijuana and failure to pay a transfer tax on the contraband.

Those puzzling charges provide a window on the constitutionally dubious origins of federal drug prohibition, which was smuggled into the U.S. Code disguised as tax legislation. Federal gun control laws followed a similar route, expanding along with conventional conceptions of congressional power.

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Whistleblower says FBI abuses security clearance process to ‘purge’ conservative agents

The Security Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is abusing security clearance approval to oust agents believed to be politically conservative, according to a whistleblower complaint reviewed by the New York Post.

(Article by Calvin Freiburger republished from LifeSiteNews.com)

The Post reported that the unidentified whistleblower alleges that the nation’s top law enforcement agency suspends or revokes clearances of agents on the basis of their political affiliations or lack of COVID-19 vaccination, because “if an FBI employee fit a certain profile as a political conservative, they were viewed as security concerns and unworthy to work at the FBI.”

The allegations directly contradict sworn testimony denying the practice to Congress last year by Jennifer Leigh Moore, the Security Division’s assistant director.

A nonprofit called Empower Oversight is representing the whistleblower and submitted his claims to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) on June 28. Empower president Tristan Leavitt also told Congress in a letter that the FBI is also retaliating against the agent for what he is trying to expose.

“The outcomes of clearance investigations and adjudications were often pre-determined by the Division’s acting Deputy Assistant Director and the acting Section Chief responsible for security clearance investigations and adjudications, who often overruled line staff and even dictated the wording of documents in the clearance process,” Leavitt wrote. “Over the last few years, the FBI has used the clearance process as a means to force employees out of the FBI by inflicting severe financial distress: suspending their clearance, suspending them from duty without pay, requiring them to obtain permission to take any other job while stuck in this unpaid limbo, and delaying their final clearance adjudication indefinitely – even years.”

One victim of such practices was former FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen, who last year was revealed to have lost his security clearance for circulating news articles and opinion videos related to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot for “situational awareness,” according to an interim report by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. “Because these open-source articles questioned the FBI’s handling of the violence at the Capitol, the FBI suspended Allen for ‘conspiratorial views in regard to the events of January 6th.’”

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Tennessee Woman’s ‘Fuck Em’ Both 2024′ Sign Is Protected Speech, Rules District Court

A federal judge has ruled a Tennessee woman can’t be fined for saying what we’re all thinking, even if it’s in the form of a yard sign.

This past week, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee ruled that the town of Lakeland, Tennessee, violated resident Julie Pereira’s First Amendment rights when it fined her for placing a “Fuck Em’ [sic] Both 2024″ sign in her yard.

According to her First Amendment lawsuit filed last month, Pereira’s sign “simply and cogently” expressed her own opinion that neither major party candidate was an acceptable choice for president. A Lakeland code enforcement official disagreed, slapping Pereira with daily fines of $50 for violating the city’s prohibition on “obscene” signs.

The city only stopped fining Pereira after she covered the u on her sign with tape. By that point, she’d wracked up $688 in fines and other fees because of her sign.

But, unwilling to either pay those fees or dilute the “potency” of her message, Pereira sued the city of Lakeland for violating her First Amendment rights.

“In the interest of protecting not only my rights, but all citizens in the state of Tennessee this case has been taken to the next level because of its constitutional impacts,” she wrote on Facebook, per the New York Post‘s reporting.

In a brief, three-page ruling, the U.S. district court agreed with Pereira. The court barred the city from taking any further enforcement action over her sign and instructed the city to reimburse Pereira for the fines she’d paid, plus $31,000 in attorneys fees, and $1 in nominal damages for having her constitutional rights violated.

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