Tag: police state

DHS Says It Has ‘Zero Tolerance’ for Protesters’ ‘Verbal Assaults.’ Here’s What the Law Says.

Protests over poor living conditions for detainees at Delaney Hall immigration detention center erupted over the weekend, leading to the arrest of over 80 people, the Associated Press reported on Saturday. Some of the protesters arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are accused of assaulting law enforcement officers, obstruction, and threats. But questions remain about whether the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) enforcement policies violate the First Amendment and chill speech on the ongoing public debate over immigration policies.

The crackdown on protesters is not surprising given Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s statements during congressional hearings last week, in which he took a hard line against violent protesters. During a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on June 3, Mullin testified that he is “OK with protest,” so long as it is done “in a peaceful way, in a legal area.” However, Mullin asserted, he has “zero tolerance” for individuals who “verbally assault our officers,” “go after our vehicles,” or “assault our property.” “You assault one of our officers, we will find you. We will arrest you,” he continued. 

While Mullin is right that the destruction of government property and assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers are both federal crimes, there is no such thing as “verbally assaulting” an officer under the law, Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), tells Reason.

Under the First Amendment, individuals are free “to criticize, mock, or disparage law enforcement officers” who “have no greater right than anyone else to be shielded from offense or criticism,” Terr explains. “In fact, the Supreme Court has recognized that properly trained officers are expected to show even more restraint than the average citizen when confronted with provocative or challenging speech.” 

“The First Amendment’s broad protections are essential to preserving the public’s ability to criticize and hold accountable those entrusted with enforcing the law,” Terr says, which is why speech is generally protected “unless the speech falls into one of the narrow categories of unprotected expression.” 

One such category includes true threats, defined by the Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black (2003) as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”

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Nude Shrek Text to Ohio State Senator Reportedly Lands Blogger in Jail

Last week, The Columbus Dispatch reported that D.J. Byrnes—an Ohio blogger who runs a Statehouse gossip Substack called The Rooster—was arrested on a misdemeanor warrant at the Ohio Statehouse. Byrnes’ arrest, according to reporting by Signal Ohio, likely stems from a picture he texted to state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R–Kirtland) on May 6. The offending image? A “digitally altered version of Shrek, the ogre with a titular children’s movie franchise, with his penis exposed,” according to Signal Ohio. Police records did not identify Cirino by name, but the outlet confirmed he was the “recipient of the text messages based on the text messages themselves and other details within the police report.”

An affidavit with Byrnes’ arrest report described the ogre as “fully nude with an exposed and erect humanlike penis engaged in an act of masturbation,” according to the outlet. The text exchange also included a message calling Cirino “Young Mussolini.”

On May 8, Cirino reportedly emailed the Kirtland Police Department asking officers to file charges against Byrnes.

“Not only is the message harassing but the disgusting picture is pornographic in nature and not something I want to see on any of my devices,” said the email sent to Kirtland police.

After his arrest on June 1, Byrnes was booked into the Franklin County Jail, where he says he spent 23 hours in custody, according to a statement posted on The Rooster. The Columbus Dispatch reported that he was released on bond on June 2. Byrnes wrote that he would not comment on the specifics of the allegations, but he says he believes he will be found innocent in court. He was arrested on telecommunications harassment charges, according to Signal Ohio, and could face up to six months in jail.

In its analysis of the case, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a pro–free speech organization, cautioned that, “as in essentially all First Amendment cases, context and details matter.” Based on the available facts, however, the organization wrote that “Byrnes should not be facing telecommunications harassment charges.”

FIRE argues that Byrnes’ “shrexting” did not amount to obscenity because the image fails to pass the three-prong obscenity test set by Miller. v. California: Would the average person see the work as appealing “to the prurient interest”? Does it depict sexual conduct in a “patently offensive way” as defined by state laws? And finally, does the work lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”? The text was clearly a piece of “political mockery,” and it was not intended to “arouse anyone’s sexual interest,” FIRE wrote, meaning it fails the Miller test. The “handful of afternoon texts,” from what FIRE reviewed, did not constitute harassment either.

More details about Byrnes’ case may emerge when he appears in court, but if a public official did in fact direct the police department to arrest Byrnes because of his texts, that poses a clear threat to free speech. The Shrek image may be absurd, shocking, and hilarious (depending on your sense of humor), but being punished for exercising your free speech right to criticize and troll (or ogre) public officials is no laughing matter.

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Signal, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN threaten to exit Canada if metadata surveillance law passes

Another day, another government attempt to force tech companies to build backdoors. This time, Canada is proposing legislation that would require companies to retain certain metadata and provide law enforcement with access to it. Predictably, many tech players have sharply criticized the proposal, with some saying they would rather leave the Canadian market than comply.

The latest version of Canada’s Bill C-22 would require digital services such as internet service providers, messaging platforms, email providers, and potentially hardware companies to retain up to one year of user metadata. In addition, tech companies would have to implement mechanisms that allow authorities to obtain “lawful access” to that information for criminal investigations. Critics argue the proposal amounts to another government-mandated backdoor.

During his testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Signal executive Udbhav Tiwari said Bill C-22 would turn everyday digital tools into a surveillance network. He argued that requiring companies to retain metadata about users’ communications runs counter to Signal’s privacy practices.

A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo also confirmed that the company would remove its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 passes. NordVPN and other VPN providers have made similar statements.

Apple and Google have also joined industry warnings that the legislation could force them to weaken encryption. Last year, Apple successfully opposed a similar proposal in the United Kingdom that would have required it to build a backdoor into iCloud. The incident was the latest in a series of conflicts between the Cupertino-based company and government regulators over security and user privacy.

The primary concern is that malicious actors would inevitably discover and exploit any digital backdoor, regardless of whether it was designed exclusively for law enforcement or domestic government agencies. OpenMedia, which has described C-22 as an attempt to create a surveillance state, pointed to a late-2024 incident in which Chinese state-backed hackers compromised government-mandated police wiretap systems to steal sensitive data from AT&T, Verizon, Lumen Technologies, and other telecom providers.

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Starmer Calls for Spyware on All Phones

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer strode onto a stage at London Tech Week and handed Apple, Google and friends a three-month ultimatum with all the menace of a substitute teacher confiscating phones at the door. Build us controls that stop children from taking, sharing, or viewing nude images, switch them on by default across every phone and tablet already humming away in the nation’s pockets, and look sharp about it.

“This government will not stand by while children are put at risk online,” he announced, before adding the line every tech executive in the room heard as a polite threat.

“Today I am calling on the tech companies to introduce device-level controls to prevent children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images. And if they don’t act, we will.”

Stirring stuff. Nobody wants children harmed, and saying so out loud is the cheapest applause line in British politics.

The trouble is the two innocent-looking words tucked into the speech like a wasp in a picnic basket, the words “device-level.”

Here is what “device-level” means once you peel off the cuddly branding. To catch one naughty photo on your phone, something has to inspect every photo on your phone. All of them.

It is software that leans over your shoulder the instant you raise your camera, squints at whatever you are making, and decides whether you may keep it or it gets reported to authorities.

Engineers named this trick years ago, client-side scanning, and even Apple, a company that would happily sell you the air inside its packaging, built a version of it in 2021 and then sprinted away from the idea the moment people worked out what it did to private messaging.

The worst part is what it does to encryption. End-to-end encryption is meant to mean nobody in the middle can read your stuff, not the app, not your internet provider, not a bored government with a search warrant fetish.

Client-side scanning waltzes around all of that by reading your photo on your own device first, before the encryption clicks shut. The lock on the front door stays bolted. There is just a man with a clipboard standing in your hallway, jotting notes before you turn the key. The math survives. The privacy, meanwhile, is dead.

Step back and admire how casually people are treating this. A government politely asking every phone maker to install a tiny invigilator inside the camera lens, marking your snapshots as they form, would have been thrown out of a Black Mirror writers’ room a decade ago for being too on the nose.

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UK Encryption Backdoor Could Hit US Data, Jordan Warns

Britain has refused to let a US technology company brief Congress about a secret order to weaken encryption and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is treating that refusal as a problem in its own right.

Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on Friday warning that Britain may be using encryption powers to reach the private data of US citizens.

The underlying dispute is not new. For more than a year, the UK’s use of secret “technical capability notices” under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 has strained relations with Washington, ever since reports that Britain ordered Apple to open up encrypted iCloud data. What is new is the wall Jordan says he keeps hitting when he tries to learn more.

He met Sir Christian Turner, the British ambassador to the United States, in March, after a US company asked to brief members of Congress about one of these notices, something that would require Mahmood’s sign-off.

The ambassador suggested it could happen. Mahmood then refused.

“This denial is inconsistent with our understanding from Ambassador Turner and raises serious concerns about shared cooperation on these sensitive matters, particularly as Congress exercises its important oversight responsibilities,” Jordan wrote, the Telegraph reported, adding that it cast doubt on the “trust and effective partnership between our two countries.”

He asked Mahmood to “review this matter and grant the US company’s request to speak with Congress about an alleged technical capability notice,” which he said would “honour the representation made by the ambassador during our meeting and uphold the spirit of transparency and cooperation that is the foundation of our shared security relationship.”

The secrecy Jordan ran into is built into how these orders work and it is worth keeping in view.

The UK may be building “backdoors into their encrypted services,” he wrote.

A backdoor is a deliberately built flaw, a master key, or a hidden bypass that lets an intelligence agency read encrypted data without the user ever knowing. It defeats end-to-end encryption, the design that normally keeps a message readable only to the person who sent it and the person who received it.

A company served with a notice cannot tell its customers, the press, or apparently even a foreign legislature, without the express permission of the Home Secretary.

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Federal Marijuana Prosecutions Hit Another Record Low In 2025 As State Legalization Expands, Government Report Shows

Federal marijuana trafficking cases fell to another record-low in 2025, with a new report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) revealing a continued trend amid the expanding state-level reform movement that has given consumers more places to buy legal cannabis.

A recently published USSC fact sheet on drug prosecution trends shows just 383 federal cannabis trafficking cases in the last fiscal year. That marks a decline from the 471 cases reported in 2024.

More broadly, USSC said, marijuana trafficking prosecutions have dropped 62 percent from fiscal year 2021 to 2025.

Shifting federal priorities, which seem to have coincided with state-level marijuana reform efforts, have gradually pushed cannabis near the bottom of the list of drug trafficking cases.

The 383 cases from last year stands in stark contrast to the nearly 3,500 cannabis trafficking cases that were reported in 2015. Just two years before that, in 2013, the marijuana prosecutions amounted to approximately 5,000.

Colorado and Washington State became the first two states to approve recreational marijuana legalization in 2012.

Methamphetamine trafficking cases have dominated the list over the past decade, the USSC document published last month shows. In 2024, cases targeting fentanyl took over as the second most common drug trafficking target, followed by crack cocaine and powder cocaine. The number of heroin trafficking cases (356) was marginally lower than marijuana last year.

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Toronto’s meter maids are ripping off taxpayers for $6 million/year

Rebel News recently returned to the scene of the crime. But there’s a twist to this true crime story: the criminals aren’t gangbangers, but rather, members of law enforcement!

Astute viewers of Rebel News might recall that earlier this month, we paid a visit to the headquarters of the central division of Toronto Parking Enforcement in north Toronto.

The reason for our house call: we were told by an insider that parking enforcement officers were engaging in time theft. Which is to say, they are supposed to work 10 hours per shift, but they are only putting in eight hours (or less).

Teaming up with Jay Bannister of Mad Lab Press, we documented the morning shift starting duty at 6 a.m. They are supposed to be working until 4 p.m. But no: at around 1:30 p.m., the meter maids began returning to HQ.

This time, banditry works out to almost $6 million in theft.

Our insiders say it has been going on for years now, meaning the City of Toronto (a.k.a. the taxpayer) has been hoodwinked out of tens of millions of dollars!

And yes, we caught them red-handed coming back to HQ early. Surely, yet another P.R. black eye for the Toronto Police Service.

So, what happened in the aftermath?

You’re not going to believe it…

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UK Deputy PM Says Equality Before Law Doesn’t Mean Treating All Ethnic Groups the ‘Same’ After Nowak Killing

British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy has said that not all ethnic groups should be treated the same by police in the wake of the murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who died in police handcuffs after officers refused to believe he had been stabbed by a Sikh man.

Lammy, who also serves as the left-wing Labour Party government’s Justice Secretary, said that while the “starting point” should be equality before the law, it is not always appropriate to be treated “the same”, noting the disproportionate arrest rates of certain ethnic minority groups, such as Roma travellers [Gypsies] and black Britons.

“We are all equal before the law. So that is not the starting point, but it is the case. Recognising that in our country it is still the case that on arrest, prosecution, and conviction, I’m afraid in our prisons, ethnic minorities are disproportionately [represented] in the criminal justice system. So context can matter, but it cannot eclipse violence or the fact that we need our police to act to mitigate and deal with crimes in our communities, whatever the color of your skin or background,” he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Saturday.

The BBC presenter put to Lammy the guidance from the National Police Chiefs’ Council on its anti-racism policy, which states: “Our commitment to racial equity means producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups… It does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’ (racial equality).”

The leftist government minister denied that this meant that there was not equality before the law, stating that “the complexity is [that] equality does not always necessarily mean the same” and that it is important to “understand that context can be different for different groups.”

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Andrew Left faces 20 years in prison — but having a correct opinion about a stock shouldn’t be a crime

This past Tuesday afternoon, I rang up Andrew Left, the high-profile short seller long known for meticulously documenting allegations of alleged corporate malfeasance and placing bets against companies like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, Shopify and Chinese real estate giant Evergrande.

“Hey Charlie, I’m at the airport,” Left said as he picked up. “I’m sitting down, having a vodka.”

Given what had transpired just hours earlier, it wasn’t hard to understand the sitting-down-having-a-vodka part. Late Monday night, after a two-week trial, Left was convicted in Los Angeles federal court of 13 counts of securities fraud.

Prosecutors alleged Left circulated his research on social media and financial TV to move a bunch of stocks and make a ton of money. That constituted market manipulation, they said, and got a jury to agree with them.

It sounds to me like what Wall Street does every day — people who “talk their book” — not to mention all the retail trolls you see on X trying to gin up interest in speculative stuff that loses money. Even so, Left now faces 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in ­August.

Truth be told, there’s something unsettling in what Left admits he did: Purposely pushing stock prices around to make a quick buck. Big firms have strict rules around trading off research, placing stocks on so-called restricted lists. Reporters like myself don’t buy individual stocks out of fear our reporting will get us jammed up because we can move prices.

Yes, the trading may look fishy, and this type of trading around ­research reports and public comments has been a legal gray area. Purposely moving stocks can be construed as stock manipulation. Fishy, though, isn’t something that’s supposed to land you in prison for 20 years.

Try telling that to a jury — as Left’s lawyers did. In one day of trading, Left could make more than most of those people earned in a lifetime. It didn’t help that Left made his bones as a short seller. Making money from pushing stocks down in value just doesn’t sit well with most people, even if it means exposing various abuses and is necessary for markets to function properly.

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UK Cop Fired For Questioning Islam In ‘Safe Space’

A Christian police community support officer lost his career after asking a Muslim colleague about jihad and Hamas atrocities during a diversity session that promised open discussion. At the same time, training drilled “white privilege” into police ranks.

Luke Salmons, a 46-year-old Christian father of two and respected PCSO with North Yorkshire Police, relates how he attended a mandatory training day on race, religion and culture. Trainers spent several minutes marching up and down the room chanting “Islam is a religion of peace” repeatedly. A Muslim sergeant then spoke about his faith and invited questions in what was presented as a “safe space” where “there was no such thing as a bad question.”

Salmons asked what the sergeant, as a peaceful Muslim, thought about the situation in Gaza and atrocities carried out by Hamas and other groups in the name of Islam. He also asked what jihad meant to him. The discussion was civil. The sergeant later invited Salmons for coffee to continue the conversation privately.

Salmons brought a book on the topic to work. Colleagues photographed it in his locker and reported him as a risk. An inspector then suspended him, declaring “I don’t like your beliefs.” Salmons noted the obvious double standard: no inspector would ever say that to a Muslim officer.

He was suspended on full pay for months, resigned under pressure in April 2025, and faced gross misconduct proceedings. Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, he appealed. Chief Constable Tim Forber overturned the dismissal before Salmons had even finished presenting his case. There was no apology and the episode devastated his family.

“I loved my job and I was good at it. I was well respected as a PCSO and my colleagues said they loved working with me and couldn’t understand what was happening. But an overzealous inspector took against me and that was the end of my career, even though I had done nothing wrong,” he related.

“It devastated me and my family. For months we lived in total uncertainty, with my reputation being shredded in secret. I resigned not because I had done anything wrong, but because the silence, the delay and the pressure became unbearable for my wife and daughters,” Salmons added.

This is the new reality inside parts of British policing: open discussion of uncomfortable facts about Islamist ideology is treated as career-ending wrongthink, while entire days are devoted to chanting slogans and centring one faith above others.

The same ideological pressures are visible in operational failures. In the Henry Nowak case, an 18-year-old white British student was stabbed five times. He told responding officers he had been stabbed and could not breathe. Instead of treating him as a medical emergency, officers handcuffed him after his attacker falsely claimed racism. The attacker was allowed to walk away. An inquest is examining whether the handcuffing contributed to Nowak’s death.

The police watchdog investigated itself and declared no wrongdoing.

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