Tag: police state

Feds Target Journalist Tim Burke With Law Intended for Hackers

People engaged in journalism frequently acquire information others wish would never see the light of day. This often means gathering tips in violation of workplace rules or through other people’s carelessness. That can result in legal battles and, in the age of technology and cybercrime, in governments coming after the curious with tools crafted for malicious hackers. All this appears to be the case with Tim Burke, who has been targeted with a controversial law by the feds after gathering information through electronic means.

“Federal prosecutors in Florida have obtained a disturbing indictment against well-known journalist Tim Burke,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) warned last week. “The indictment could have significant implications for press freedom, not only by putting digital journalists at risk of prosecution but by allowing the government to permanently seize a journalist’s computers.”

Specifically, in the February 15 indictment, federal prosecutors say that Burke “intentionally intercepted, endeavored to intercept, and procured another person to intercept and to endeavor to intercept, the contents of a wire, oral, and electronic communication as it was occurring, by means of a device, namely a computer.”

Burke’s home was raided last year after he distributed intercepted video, including outtakes of the rapper Ye (formerly Kanye West) making antisemitic comments during an interview with Tucker Carlson while the host was still with Fox News. Burke has built a reputation with his very online presence and distinctive style. He has also rubbed some people the wrong way with his reporting and, perhaps, the means by which he acquires material. But the prosecutors going after Burke are also accused of resorting to questionable tactics, including invoking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking law.

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Georgia Deputy Canned After Arrest for Rape, Child Molestation, Police Say

A deputy in DeKalb County, Georgia, was fired after he was arrested Sunday on a slew of sex-crime charges, including child molestation, authorities said.

Derrick Gardner, 34, was arrested Sunday by the DeKalb County Police Department and was charged with trafficking of persons for sexual servitude, rape, child molestation, first-degree cruelty to children, enticing a child for indecent purposes, and aggravated sexual battery, authorities said.

DeKalb police spokesperson Michaela Vincent told The Daily Beast Monday that officers responded to a 911 call and a report about a rape on Sunday and arrested Gardner following their investigation.

Gardner was subsequently fired from his post at the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office.

“Gardner’s employment has been terminated,” DeKalb County Sheriff Melody Maddox said in an emailed statement, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment on Monday.

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Chris Wray’s FBI Forced a Young Mother to Stand Outside Barefoot with Her 4-Yr-Old Boy in His Pajamas in 12° Weather While They Ransacked Her Home – She Lost Her Baby the Next Day

Chris Kuehne was sentenced on Friday for his actions on January 6, 2021 at the US Capitol.

Chris is a 22-year veteran who received numerous medals and awards, including the Purple Heart, a Navy Commendation Medal with Valor, and a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal with Valor for actions in combat.

Chris has personally sacrificed his blood, sweat, and tears serving our country and has paid the price for his duty and continues to live with debilitating and invisible injuries. Even before this Chris has protected people and helped people in need. As a 9-year-old Cub Scout he was awarded the Boy Scouts of America’s highest honor, the Medal of Merit, for saving his young sister from a burning car.

On January 6, 2021, Chris went inside the Capitol but did not cause any harm or damage – in fact, he cleaned trash off the floor, helped to stop theft of government property, asked people to leave the building, and went up to Capitol Police Officers to ask how he could help. Chris was also set up by an FBI operative that day. Chris committed no violence and did nothing wrong.

One month later, in the early morning of February 11, 2021 Chris, his four-year-old child, and his wife Annette, who was pregnant at the time were awakened to sirens, cell phone rings, and bursts of colorful lights reflecting through our windows.

Annette later went public about the raid, “The FBI instructed Chris to come outside immediately. Our 4-year-old was awakened from the chaos, and I picked him up and ran downstairs to open the front door. Our house, street and neighboring streets were completely surrounded by armed FBI and law enforcement. It was a scene that we see so many times in the movies, but now it was here at my house! There were three large armored tactical vehicles parked on my front, side and back yard, and police vehicles that extended throughout the entire community. I open the door, and for a second, I didn’t realize that there were about twenty FBI SWAT Team members with semi-automatic rifles pointed at my son and I. We were covered by the bright red lasers pointed at our faces, chests, and various points on our bodies.”

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Fatal crash in police chase doesn’t count, Kansas says — because it was on purpose

When a Bonner Springs police officer began chasing a man in June 2021 for an expired license plate, speeds on Interstate 70 escalated to 100 mph.

Then the officer intentionally hit the car to bring the chase to an end, a maneuver called a tactical vehicle intervention or TVI.

The driver, Darrell Vincent, of Kansas City, Kansas, was ejected and killed.

In an odd loophole, Vincent’s death is not counted in statewide or federal statistics on police chases because the officer purposely struck his car.

That officials choose not to include injuries or deaths caused by deliberate actions by police is one example of how police chases are not reliably counted by state or federal authorities.

“I think that’s wrong because it was a chase,” said Darrius Vincent, Darrell Vincent’s son. “It cost him his life and I just don’t think that was a good thing. It was a very bad thing.”

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FCC To Force Broadcasters To Publish Race And Sex ‘Scorecards’ Of Employees

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3 to 2 this month to require U.S. broadcasters to record and publicly disclose the race, ethnicity, and sex of their employees.

The now-pending regulation was first introduced after Congress’ 1992 Cable Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck it down in 2001 as unconstitutionally enabling the hiring of Americans for their skin color. The policy remained suspended until President Joe Biden’s FCC nominee received Senate confirmation in 2023 and flipped control of the commission to Democrats.

The FCC argued reinstating the race policy is “critical” because “it will allow for
analysis and understanding of the broadcast industry workforce” and is “consistent with Congress’s goal to maximize the utility of the data an agency collects for the benefit of the public.” The commission claimed it could not generalize or aggregate racial and sexual data because it would be “less useful.”

“We find no basis to conclude that the demographic data on a station’s annual Form 395-B filing would lead to undue public pressure,” the commission claimed.

FCC member Brendan Carr, however, said the rule moving into place is not consistent with the Consitution nor employment confidentiality requirements in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“The FCC’s ostrich-like claim that the record is devoid of any evidence that this public scorecard will be used to pressure broadcasters into making race- and gender-based hiring decisions does not withstand even casual scrutiny; indeed, it only raises additional questions under the law,” Carr wrote.

In his dissenting statement, Carr dubbed the proposed rule a product of activists who want “to see businesses pressured into hiring people based on their race & gender.”

“This is no benign disclosure regime. The record makes clear that the FCC is choosing to publish these scorecard[s] for one and only one reason: to ensure that individual businesses are
targeted and pressured into making decisions based on race and gender,” Carr wrote.

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Use Of Force Expert Says Capitol Police ‘Set One Man On Fire’ With Concussion Grenades On January 6

Veteran use of force expert Steven Hill, a former SWAT team supervisor with the Albuquerque Police Department, warns police waged a “terror attack” against the crowd of peaceful demonstrators during the J6 Stop the Steal rally when they launched a concussion grenade that set at least one man on fire.

Hill, an investigator with J6Truth, has examined over 1000 hours of J6 footage over the past two years and taken the stand in three J6 trials as an expert witness while assisting defense attorneys including those representing the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys with gathering exculpatory evidence.

J6 Truth’s team of investigators, including Hill and this reporter, have identified at least a dozen of instances of police flagrantly breaking the law during the January 6 protests.

In footage captured from a demonstrator’s camera on the West Plaza of the US Capitol at 1:24 pm, cops are seen firing a “sting ball grenade” into a peaceful crowd that set at least one man on fire, an illegal aberration of standard operating procedures and violation of all District of Columbia ordinances.

“You see a sting ball grenade that has been hand-thrown by officers into a crowd of peaceful oblivious demonstrators who are at least 30 to 50 feet behind the frontline of demonstrators,” Hill highlights in a 2-minute video of the explosion.

“As you watch where the grenade lands, you see that this group of people — some of them are praying, talking with others, shooting cell phone video facing away from the officers and unaware as to what the Capitol officers are doing,” he continues. “The riot control weapon is a rubber ball grenade that uses a small charge that will split the ball in half and eject tear gases, rubber balls or both.”

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The Irish Should Reject The New ‘Hate Speech’ Bill

The Republic of Ireland could soon become one of the worst violators of the human right to free speech in the Western world. Despite the government claiming to espouse liberal ideas, the looming Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill would usher in a dangerous new standard for state-driven censorship. The expression or possession of content or even ideas deemed “hateful” would be illegal under the law, with serious implications for everyday people simply seeking to live according to their convictions.  

The Irish need only look to the case of Finnish member of parliament Päivi Räsänen — criminally prosecuted for over four years for a Bible-verse tweet, to recognise the suffocating impact “hate speech” laws engender. Finnish state prosecutors are pushing her case into its fifth year with an appeal to the country’s supreme court, making no attempt to hide their insatiable quest to silence and sanction the parliamentarian for her peaceful expression of Christian conviction. 

Räsänen’s “crime” consisted of sharing her Christian position on marriage and sexuality in a 2019 Twitter post. When her church decided to officially sponsor a Helsinki “Pride” event, she expressed an objection in light of Biblical teaching, posting a verse from the New Testament book of Romans. Lengthy police interrogations followed by criminal prosecution ensued, absurdly under the section of the Finnish criminal code titled “war crimes and crimes against humanity”.  

Räsänen was dealt three criminal charges, carrying a potential prison sentence of two years, for the tweet, in addition to her comments on a 2019 radio debate and in a church pamphlet she had authored nearly 20 years before. Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola was charged alongside her for publishing the booklet for his congregation. 

Räsänen and Pohjola were twice unanimously acquitted of all charges, but with the pending supreme court appeal, it’s clear that free speech in Finland hangs very much in the balance. The prosecution of individuals in the public eye has a particularly repressive effect — few and far between will be the brave person willing to speak their mind when the state, utilising near limitless resources, makes clear its tireless pursuit of censorship.  

Such is the reality increasingly facing us in the West who dare to voice our beliefs in the public square. While “hate speech” laws are pervasive throughout Europe, with the proposed new law, Ireland is setting a new low bar for censorship. Notably, the draft bill goes so far as to include a sentence of up to five years in prison for the mere possession of “hateful” material.  

Not content with its existing array of free speech restrictions, the government has based the necessity of the new law on the need to counter rising violence in Ireland, following a surge of incidents largely tied to tensions over immigration. The argument is that restricting speech somehow increases safety on the streets—but history has shown no proof of this. What it has shown is that censorship is the preferred answer to any problem the state faces. It’s easier for those in power to silence dissent, than to deal with the problems plaguing their societies.  

The thought of Irish police raiding homes to seize materials, including books and even something as ridiculous as memes on phones, recalls some of the darker episodes of the past century.

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Biden Admin. pressured Amazon to censor books about vaccine safety risks during Covid

White House officials pressured Amazon in 2021 to censor and minimize access to books on its online site that questioned the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to e-mails released earlier this month by House Judiciary Committee Chairman, U.S. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio.

The campaign to curtail any vaccine-related book sales during the height of the pandemic was led by President Biden’s Senior Advisor for Covid-19 Response, Andrew Slavitt, and sought to avoid the spread of “propaganda and misinformation.”

“Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?” Slavitt wrote to Amazon in a Mar. 2, 2021, e-mail.

In initial discussions, Amazon officials discouraged “a manual intervention” to censor or remove certain book titles from populating in search results, concerned that it would be too obvious and lead to further criticism. “We will not be doing a manual intervention today,” one e-mail between Amazon executives read. “The team/PR feels very strongly that it is too visible, and will further compound the Harry/Sally narrative (which is getting the Fox News treatment today apparently), and won’t fix the problem long-term … because of customer behavior associates.”

The Amazon officials, whose names were redacted from the e-mails, reveal that another individual at the company “gave very direct guidance to the teams to be boring and not do anything that is visible and will draw more attention.”

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Unregulated, Exploitative, and on the Rise: Vera Institute’s Report on Electronic Monitoring

Incarceration rates in the United States have long been among the highest in the world, and in response to the systemic flaws and biases unveiled by the renewed scrutiny of the criminal legal system, many advocates have championed new policies aimed at reducing sentences and improving conditions in prisons. Some have touted the use of electronic monitoring (EM) as an alternative fix to ensure that people whose cases have yet to be adjudicated are not physically detained. Unsurprisingly, those most often making these claims are the for-profit firms offering EM technology and the governmental agencies they contract with, and there is little data to back them up. In a new report, the Vera Institute of Justice provides the most detailed data yet showing that these claims don’t match reality, and outlines a number of issues with how EM is administered across the country.

Another Private Sector Wild West

According to interviews and an analysis of policies across hundreds of jurisdictions, the Vera Institute found that the use of EM was an unregulated patchwork across counties, states, and the federal government. As private firms market new products, the level of testing and quality assurance has failed to keep up with the drive to get contracts with local and state law enforcement agencies. Relying on technology produced by such a disordered industry can lead to reincarceration due to faulty equipment, significantly increased surveillance on those being monitored and their household, and onerous requirements for people under EM than when dealing with probation or parole officers.

Even the question of jurisdictional authority is a mess. The Vera Institute explains that agencies frequently rely on private firms that further subcontract out the hardware or software, and individuals in rural areas can create profitable businesses for themselves that only serve as a middleman between the criminal justice system and the hardware and software vendors. The Vera Institute suggests that this can lead to corruption, including the extortion by these small subcontractors of people held on EM, often with no oversight or public sector transparency. That presents a problem to the data collection, public records requests, and other investigative work that policymakers, advocates, and journalists rely on to find the truth and inform policy.

Further, the costs of EM are frequently passed on to the people forced to use it, sometimes regardless of if they have the means to pay, whether the EM is an obstacle to their employment, or whether they are under monitoring pre-trial (where presumption of innocence should apply) or post-sentencing (after a guilty verdict). And these costs don’t necessarily buy them greater “liberty,” as many forms of hardware or app-based software increased around-the-clock surveillance at the hands of private firms, once again with little to no oversight or ability to access data through public records requests.

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SOUTH CAROLINA BAN ON PRISONERS’ MEDIA INTERVIEWS VIOLATES FIRST AMENDMENT, LAWSUIT SAYS

South Carolina violates the First Amendment by forbidding incarcerated people from speaking with the press, according to a lawsuit filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of South Carolina against the state’s Department of Corrections.

“The South Carolina Department of Corrections (“SCDC”) enforces the nation’s most restrictive policy on media access to prisoners,” the complaint says. The suit alleges that the state “bans interviews by anyone, on any topic, and by any real-time means: in person, by video, or by phone. And although correspondence by mail is allowed, publication of a prisoner’s written speech is similarly prohibited.”

According to a copy of the SCDC’s media policy, the agency prohibits “personal contact interviews with any SCDC inmate, untried county safekeeper, or death row inmate by anyone,” and bans “news and non-news media representatives” from taking photographs, or audio or video recordings of SCDC prisoners.

In a press release last summer, the SCDC said, “Inmates in the custody of the S.C. Department of Corrections are not allowed to do interviews.”

“The department believes that victims of crime should not have to see or hear the person who victimized them or their family member on the news,” the press release said. “Inmates lose the privilege of speaking to the news media when they enter SCDC.”

The press release also included a copy of a letter from an SCDC official to the attorney of Richard Murdaugh, a former lawyer convicted of murdering his wife and son. (Murdaugh maintains his innocence.) The letter scolded Murdaugh and his legal team for speaking to the press.

The department’s letter stated that, in violation of the SCDC policy, Murdaugh read excerpts of his journal to his attorney, who recorded Murdaugh’s voice and sent the audio files to the media. Murdaugh received a disciplinary infraction. The letter warned the violation could jeopardize Murdaugh’s access to his attorney.

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