Tag: police state

Section 702 Surveillance Reaches Its Friday Deadline. Why “Going Dark” Is a Myth.

The government’s broadest warrantless surveillance power is set to expire Friday after the House refused to keep it running.

Lawmakers voted down a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Thursday, 218 to 198, with 19 Republicans joining most Democrats against it and seven Democrats crossing over in support.

Speaker Mike Johnson had fast-tracked the bill under a process that needed a two-thirds majority, so the lopsided count sank it. The House then left town for a scheduled weeklong recess, which removes any path to a quick fix. Congress has already punted twice since the original April deadline.

The reaction from the program’s defenders followed a familiar script. They raised the same alarm at earlier deadlines and the catastrophe never showed up.

When Congress last renewed the authority in 2024, the law slipped past its midnight deadline and lapsed for under an hour before the Senate restored it and the surveillance kept running through the gap.

The warnings are back this week regardless. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, pressed for renewal ahead of the World Cup and backers keep noting that Section 702 feeds more than half of the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

“Democrats in the Senate are playing political games right now with the lives of Americans,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “It’s a very dangerous situation.”

What actually arrives at midnight Friday is legal limbo, not a blackout.

The FISA court signed off on the current collection in March and that order runs until 2027, so the machinery keeps operating on permission it already holds.

The court’s authorization runs for another year and the program continues whether Congress acts or not. The honest word for the risk is uncertainty, the kind that government lawyers and company lawyers argue over, and uncertainty does not sound like an emergency. So the defenders reach for “going dark” instead.

What sunsets at midnight is all of Title VII of the surveillance law, which carries separate powers the government uses to spy on Americans living abroad.

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ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor

Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.” Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn’t take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. “In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect’s face is partially shadowed and off-axis,” the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer’s grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

“These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect’s order,” the lawsuit notes. “Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald’s.”

Further, the McDonald’s manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect’s previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone’s GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon’s name came up, investigating officer Scott O’Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon’s vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

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US Jewish leaders throw support behind bipartisan House antisemitism bill

New York Reps. Dan Goldman and Mike Lawler introduced bipartisan legislation Wednesday aimed at expanding federal support for securing Jewish institutions and combating antisemitism.

The bill, a House companion to the Jewish American Security Act in the Senate, would increase funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps secure religious institutions,  to $1 billion, extend funding to Jewish organizations, and allow additional funds to be directed toward law enforcement.

It would also mandate that the Department of Education appoint a dedicated antisemitism coordinator and force social media platforms to explain their handling of online antisemitism.

The bill received support from major national Jewish groups. On Wednesday, during a press conference in Washington, DC, Lawler and Goldman were joined by a host of Jewish leaders, including representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the American Jewish Committee, as well as organizations affiliated with the Reform and Orthodox movements.

“Jewish communities across the United States are facing a real and growing security crisis, and the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that all Americans can gather, worship, and live openly and safely as who they are,” Eric Fingerhut, the CEO and president of the Jewish Federations of North America, which has promoted the bill, said in a statement.

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Report: Personal Crimes in Gun-Controlled Australia Triple that of Gun-Friendly USA

Personal crimes such as rape and sexual assault are three times higher in gun-controlled Australia than in the USA, a report in the Spectator/Australia on Wednesday details.

Written by Malcolm Roberts and John Lott, Jr., the report begins by explaining that the establishment media’s approach to coverage and the method of compiling crime stats leads many to believe Australia’s “crime rate is low compared with the countries like the United States.”

The media “reinforces the myth” of lower crime while less than 20 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to Australian police. However, in the U.S.,  45 percent of such personal crimes are reported to police. This difference in the level of personal crime reporting skews the figures seen by the populations of both countries and feeds into the establishment media’s low-crime narrative.

After a hard look at the real numbers, Roberts and Lott wrote: “Australia’s rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia’s assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates.”

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Carney using kids’ safety as cover to strip Canadians’ freedom

The Liberal government is preparing to introduce a new digital safety bill that would ban social media for users under 16, but on Tuesday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show, Ezra said this new legislation has nothing to do with protecting children.

“Parents can limit what their kids watch with the push of a button,” he said. “This is really about everyone else. Again, using kids as the excuse.”

The bill, reported by the Globe and Mail ahead of its introduction, would create a new digital regulator to establish safety standards for social media platforms. It would also address artificial intelligence and chatbots.

But the mechanism required to enforce an under-16 ban, Ezra noted, is the problem. To determine who is under 16, every user would need to verify their age — meaning every Canadian would need to hand their personal identification to the government just to log on.

“Mark Carney wants to make everyone sign into the internet,” he said. “It’s not actually about kids, is it?”

Ezra drew a direct line to the Liberals’ past censorship efforts, noting that child protection and anti-terrorism provisions have repeatedly been used as packaging for speech regulation bills — provisions that already exist in the Criminal Code, added as a distraction from the bills’ real purpose.

“Governments use children as a cover for their plots,” he reminded viewers.

The timing raised eyebrows, as the day before Canada’s announcement, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered an almost identical speech calling on tech companies to introduce device controls to prevent children from sending and receiving explicit images.

Ezra said the parallel is not a coincidence. “On everything from censorship and digital ID to environmentalism and mass immigration, I really think Keir Starmer is setting a lot of Canadian policy,” he said.

The irony, he noted, is that Starmer has refused to call a meaningful public inquiry into the U.K.’s rape gangs and even vigorously opposed one when he was the country’s chief prosecutor.

“What a laugh to pretend he cares about kids,” Ezra said.

Another provision in the bill would grant the Canadian government a security backdoor into any app it chooses. Ezra also pointed out that every major social media platform in Canada is American owned, meaning new fines and restrictions would amount to a tax on U.S. tech firms.

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The White House’s AI Deal: Kill State Laws, Demand Your ID

The White House is dangling something the technology industry has wanted for years: a federal block on state AI laws and the price is a national age verification push that chips away at anonymous internet use.

The administration is negotiating a federal preemption of state AI laws in exchange for its support of key tech policy priorities from the Hill, according to Axios, and the bills it would back include the Kids Online Safety Act, the NO FAKES Act, and age verification requirements.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is steering the talks. “Senator Blackburn is spearheading the negotiation with the White House to finalize legislative text of an AI preemption package that includes protections for kids, creators, and communities through the Senate version of KOSA, the NO FAKES Act, and age verification requirements,” a Blackburn spokesperson said.

The administration kept its own language vague. “The White House continues to proactively engage across government and industry,” a White House official said.

Strip away the framing and the age verification piece asks something concrete of you. To prove you are old enough, you upload a government ID, submit to a face scan, or let a service study your behavior closely enough to guess your age. None of those confirms age and nothing else. They confirm identity and they leave a record that outlives the check.

The internet that once let you be a username starts to demand your legal name, your face, or your documents.

The bigger trade sits underneath the child-safety language. States have been writing their own AI rules, some addressing how companies collect biometric data and automate decisions about residents.

Preemption would freeze that, removing one of the few places people have to push back on how these systems handle their data.

The maneuvering also signals which bill is fading. A bipartisan proposal from Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) isn’t the likely vehicle for AI policy in this Congress. That bill would preempt state AI laws for three years and require certain developers to address risks before releasing models.

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UK Plans To JAIL Tech CEOs Who Refuse To SPY On Every Phone

New measures would compel client-side inspection of every photo, video and message on devices, escalating the digital ID lockdown already plotted for British smartphones in coordination with major technology firms.

Privacy advocates warn the “child safety” framing masks a broader drive to turn personal phones into mandatory surveillance endpoints, with criminal penalties aimed at any executive who resists.

Reclaim The Net, an organization dedicated to countering online censorship and digital surveillance, flagged the draft legislation in recent updates. 

The group described how UK authorities are preparing to imprison tech executives for up to five years under the Online Safety Act if companies refuse to build and deploy scanners capable of reviewing every piece of content on user devices.

The push targets expanded “client-side scanning” features, requiring devices to inspect material before it is sent or received.

Existing tools from Apple and Google, such as nudity detection in Messages or sensitive content warnings, would be broadened into comprehensive, always-active systems. Non-compliance would trigger direct penalties against company leadership rather than the firms alone.

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Amsterdam Bans Meat Ads as the War on Food Expands

Amsterdam’s decision to ban meat advertising should be viewed as part of a much broader trend that has been unfolding for years. Politicians insist this is about climate change. Every new restriction is presented as a noble sacrifice for to save the environment. Yet the target is almost always the same: farmers, ranchers, livestock producers, and regular people who are forced to sacrifice their health and livelihood for the globalist agenda.

The Netherlands has already spent years battling its own farming community through nitrogen regulations, forced buyouts, and restrictions that have pushed many family farms to the brink. Massive farmer protests erupted because people recognized that this was never merely about emissions. Agriculture was being redesigned from the top down. Now the campaign has moved beyond production and into culture itself. If citizens cannot be persuaded to abandon meat voluntarily, then governments will gradually make meat less visible, less available, more expensive, and increasingly stigmatized.

Many people dismissed concerns years ago when international organizations began discussing alternatives to traditional meat consumption. The World Economic Forum published articles exploring insects as a future protein source and repeatedly promoted dietary shifts away from actual meat. The argument was always framed around sustainability, carbon reduction, and environmental goals. They attempted to normalize chewing on bugs as an alternative to a steak. They claim it is our duty as global citizens to sacrifice essential nutrition to save the planet, despite knowing well that these measures would not make a meaningful dent in anything.

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This Company Will Add Phone, AirPod, and Smartwatch Trackers to License Plate Readers

 A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.

The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data.

SignalTrace “bridges license plate recognition data with sensor-captured device identifiers—such as those from mobile phones, Bluetooth wearables, and vehicle systems—to create a unique, trackable ‘electronic fingerprint’ for investigative use,” according to a product sheet describing the tool, written by surveillance company Leonardo, which advertises SignalTrace.

The sort of data Leonardo says SignalTrace can sweep up includes the RFID tags in key cards and pet microchips; devices with Bluetooth such as wireless headphones, fitness trackers, and mobile phones; components of a car like tire pressure sensors and infotainment systems; and Wi-Fi sources such as vehicle hotspots and laptops, according to the product sheet.

The idea is to correlate these unique device identifiers to a license plate. If a Leonardo camera detects a license plate and sees where a vehicle was at a specific time, it can then allegedly link those unique device identifiers to it.

The sheet suggests SignalTrace collects this data for it to be searched by law enforcement much later. One line says SignalTrace “stores device and correlation data securely in the EOC [Enterprise Operations Center] for future queries and analysis.”

“When multiple devices consistently move together with a vehicle, SignalTrace’s algorithms link them to that vehicle’s license plate and time-stamped location data. This correlation provides investigators with another layer of actionable intelligence, even if a suspect changes or removes a plate,” the sheet reads.

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All It Took Was a Single Non-Woke Word for This Man’s Life’s Work to Come to the Brink of Ruin

A Danish man spent years building a clothing company. Over the years, he fashioned, through hard work, careful study, trial and error, attention to trends, and sheer perseverance, a popular clothing brand. In the last few days, however, he has come to the brink of ruin, and of seeing all his labors come to naught.

No, his place of business wasn’t robbed or burnt down. He wasn’t defrauded. He didn’t lose all his money at the gaming tables, or succumb to drug use. What threatens to destroy his life’s work is that he told a truth that many people might admit behind closed doors, but that hardly anyone would ever say publicly. Tobia Sloth said it. All it took was a single word. And now he is paying the price. But that doesn’t make what he said any less true.

The Danish-language news outlet Nyheder reported Sunday that “a single comment from the director has caused problems for a Danish clothing brand. The popular clothing brand Norse Projects – and not least its founder, Tobia Sloth – has ended up in a regular s**tstorm.”

It all started with a silly icebreaker-type survey at LinkedIn: “A Linkedin user asked on the platform what you would remove from Earth that would make it better if you could only choose one thing.” The expected answers came flooding in, but not from Tobia Sloth: “While just under a thousand users have answered everything from ‘nanoplastic particles from the biosphere’ to ‘rainforest destruction’ and ‘mercury-based gold mining,’ Tobia Sloth’s one-word response was without further explanation.”

That one word? Hide the kids, cover the dog’s eyes, and then I’ll tell you.

To the question of what he would remove from the Earth in order to make it a better place, Tobia Sloth answered: “Islam.”

Nyheder notes, with admirable understatement, that Sloth’s “answer has struck many a chord – both in Denmark and in the USA, where Norse Projects has a large customer base.” In other words, the usual suspects are beside themselves with spittle-flecked rage, and “they criticize the company for being built on a racist foundation.”

Racist? What? Islam is not a race, and there are Muslims (and jihadis) of all races. But “racism” is the primary, if not the only, sin that a human being can commit, as far as the left is concerned, and so pretty much anything the left dislikes these days counts as “racism.”

You don’t like getting blown up or having some guy screaming “Allahu akbar” stab you at random on the street? Then you’re a racist. You don’t like the idea of making women cover their hair and in some cases even their faces, even in the most stifling heat, on pain of being beaten if they don’t? Yep: racist. You’re not a fan of institutionalizing discrimination against and harassment of people who hold a different religious faith from your own? You’re practically Bull Connor.

And so now Tobia Sloth is looking at the very real prospect of professional ruin: “The criticism has already caused Tobia Sloth to apologise, but it is not certain that the apology is enough to save the company’s reputation, assesses a branding expert.” When the woke mob gets enraged at you, it stays enraged until it extracts its pound of flesh. “Although Tobia Sloth’s comment was quickly deleted from Linkedin, it has gotten people both in Denmark and internationally to the keys with massive criticism of Norse Projects and its founder.”

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