Tag: police state

UK steps up war on whistleblower journalism with new National Security Act

Under a repressive new act, British nationals could face prison for undermining London’s national security line. Intended to destroy WikiLeaks and others exposing war crimes, the law is a direct threat to critical national security journalism.

It was the afternoon of May 17 2023 and I had just arrived at London’s Luton Airport. I was on my way to the city of my birth to visit my family. Before landing, the pilot instructed all passengers to have their passports ready for inspection immediately upon disembarking the plane. Just then, I noticed a six-strong squad of stone-faced plainclothes British counter-terror officers waited on the tarmac, intensely studying the identification documents of all travelers.

As soon as the cops identified me, I was ordered to accompany them into the airport terminal without explanation. There, I was introduced to two officials whose names I could not learn, who subsequently referred to each other using nondescript callsigns. I was invited to be digitally strip searched, and subjected to an interrogation in which I had no right to silence, no right to refuse to answer questions, and no right to withhold pin numbers for my digital devices or sim cards. If I asserted any rights to privacy, I faced arrest and up to 48 hours in police custody. 

I chose to comply. And so it was that over the next five hours, I sat with a couple of anonymous counter-terror cops in an airless, windowless, excruciatingly hot back room. They fingerprinted me, took invasive DNA swabs, and probed every conceivable aspect of my private and professional life, friend and family connections, and educational background. They wanted to know why I write, say and think the things I do, the specifics of how I’m paid for my investigative journalism, and to which bank account.

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Boise Police search Idaho Harm Reduction Project locations

The Idaho Press is reporting that the Boise Police have severed search warrants at both Idaho Harm Reduction Project locations in Boise and in Caldwell.

A spokesperson for the department told the Idaho Press report that the search warrants are part of an ongoing investigation into the distribution of drug paraphernalia.

The Idaho Harm Reduction Project “Works to serve the drug using community of Idaho, as well as the general public by creating safe communities through evidence based programming, education, needle exchange, and appropriate needle disposal,” according to their website.

The Idaho Harm Reduction Project provides harm reduction supplies like sterile injection equipment, sharps disposals, and Narcan, among other things. They also provide training on the use and administration of Narcan, a drug that can stop an Opioid overdose from killing a drug user if administered timely.

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Government Funds AI Tools For Whole-Of-Internet Surveillance And Censorship

Ifeel scared. Very scared.

Internet-wide surveillance and censorship, enabled by the unimaginably vast computational power of artificial intelligence (AI), is here.

This is not a futuristic dystopia. It’s happening now.

Government agencies are working with universities and nonprofits to use AI tools to surveil and censor content on the Internet.

This is not political or partisan. This is not about any particular opinion or idea.

What’s happening is that a tool powerful enough to surveil everything that’s said and done on the Internet (or large portions of it) is becoming available to the government to monitor all of us, all the time. And, based on that monitoring, the government – and any organization or company the government partners with – can then use the same tool to suppress, silence, and shut down whatever speech it doesn’t like.

But that’s not all. Using the same tool, the government and its public-private, “non-governmental” partners (think, for example: the World Health Organization, or Monsanto) can also shut down any activity that is linked to the Internet. Banking, buying, selling, teaching, learning, entertaining, connecting to each other – if the government-controlled AI does not like what you (or your kids!) say in a tweet or an email, it can shut down all of that for you.

Yes, we’ve seen this on a very local and politicized scale with, for example, the Canadian truckers.

But if we thought this type of activity could not, or would not, happen on a national (or even scarier – global) scale, we need to wake up right now and realize it’s happening, and it might not be stoppable.

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Woman Threatened With Prosecution For Putting Gender Critical Notices On Her OWN FRONT DOOR

A 68-year-old woman in London has been threatened with fines by her local council after she put up posters expressing gender critical opinions on her own property.

The pensioner was served with a Community Protection Notice (CPN) and threatened with a £2,500 fine by Hammersmith and Fulham Council after just eight complaints, including someone claiming the material is ‘transphobic’.

The Daily Mail reports that Una-Jane Winfield, who felt “a duty to speak out,” pinned an A4 sized photograph of a women displaying scars from breast removal surgery, next to an advert for the book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce  of the campaign group Sex Matters.

The report notes that the council ordered Mrs Winfield to remove the material, which she refuses to do. She will go to court next month to challenge the CPN.

She also says “The police came to have a look at my door on two separate occasions.”

“Thankfully they understood that expression of gender-critical views is protected under the law. But the council has ignored the police,” Winfield adds.

She continues, “In a letter I was told my ‘persistent and continuing conduct’ was having a ‘detrimental effect on the public and the LGBT community’.”

The council claims that the image in question is “provocative and graphic,” and features “nudity prominently displayed on a very busy public section of walkway in plain view.”

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University mistakenly leaks names and phone numbers of virgin female students in Kazakhstan

It has been revealed that one of Kazakhstan‘s largest universities mistakenly leaked the personal information of female students who were virgins.

The names, ages, phone numbers, tax codes, and virginity status of women studying at Al-Farabi Kazakhstan National University in the capital, Almaty, were somehow released and quickly disseminated by other students via social media chat groups.

According to AKIpress, a nurse at the institution’s medical center sent a list of female students who had not undergone fluorography via WhatsApp to the dean of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. The data somehow also ended up on other WhatsApp groups on campus.

“A nurse from Smart Health University City LLP, which provides medical services to the university, sent documents with a list of third- and fourth-year students to the specialist of the dean’s office on February 6 to ensure that they undergo a fluorography,” the university wrote in a statement, “however, in addition to the names of the students, the documents also contained personal medical information.”

The university added that “an appeal was sent to the Almaty city prosecutor’s office with a request to take action on this fact on February 14,” and that it is “considering terminating the contract with Smart Health University City LLP.”

Before long, Kazakhstan’s minister of science and higher education, Sayasat Nurbek, stepped in and said he had “taken control of the issue,” adding, “those responsible will face punishment under our current legislation.”

“The transfer of personal data, especially of a medical nature, is a violation,” he noted.

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Are The Feds Buying Gun Data On Private Citizens Without A Warrant? 

The Biden Administration has shown time and time again how they weaponize federal law enforcement agencies against gun owners.

A recent report by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security highlighted how several DHS component agencies, including the Secret Service, bought Americans’ phone location data without a court order.

Several other agencies, including the IRS, FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, also admitted to using data brokers to sidestep American’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Under normal circumstances, a Judge would need to issue a warrant to collect this kind of data, but in this case, private companies act as a middleman between your data and the government by scraping anywhere that personal data is publicly available. Government lawyers have decided that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to Americans’ personal data — if the government buys it from data brokers.

Using the same quasi-legal methods used to obtain phone location data, federal law enforcement agencies may have already targeted gun owners by purchasing email lists and data sets that contain location, name, and other personal information from data brokers.

Several sites promote their extensive list of “Shooting Fanatics,” “Concealed carry licensed gun owners,” and even “New York City Gun Owners”! These lists are perfect targets for an administration focused on attacking the individual right to keep and bear arms.

With these lists, the Biden Administration’s law enforcement agencies could purchase and misuse the personal information of millions of gun owners without a single warrant or court order.

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American Express, Visa, Mastercard move ahead with code to track gun store purchases in California

Major credit card companies are moving to make a merchant code available for firearm and ammunition retailers in order to comply with a new California law that will allow banks to potentially track suspicious gun purchases and report them to law enforcement, CBS News has learned.

Retailers are assigned merchant codes based on the types of goods they sell, and the codes allow banks and credit card companies to detect purchase patterns. Currently gun shops are lumped in with other types of retailers, such as sporting goods stores. 

Mastercard, Visa and American Express initially agreed to implement a standalone code for firearm sellers, but later paused their work on it after receiving blowback from Second Amendment advocates concerned tracking gun purchases would infringe on the rights of legal gun owners.

Gun control activists hope the code, approved by an international organization in 2022, can be used as a tool to help identify suspect purchases and, consequently, stop gun crime, including mass shootings. Proponents say a code for firearms merchants would allow banks and credit unions to alert law enforcement of potentially suspicious purchasing patterns in the same way they already flag other types of transactions, such as those that suggest identity theft or terrorist financing. 

While a merchant code for standalone firearm and ammunition sellers would yield data that shows a transaction was made at a gun store, the credit card companies say the code would not provide details about the customer or insight into individual items that were purchased.

At least seven Republican-controlled state legislatures have banned the code while nine other legislatures are considering similar legislation. However, deep blue California passed a law requiring retailers that primarily sell firearms to adopt it by May 2025.  

Last month, executives from Mastercard, Visa and American Express each wrote to congressional Democrats assuring them the code would be available to retailers in California by that deadline, according to documents obtained by CBS News. 

“The applicable standalone merchants in California primarily engaged in the sale of firearms will be required to utilize the code,” wrote Mastercard executive Tucker Foote.

The letters from credit card executives reflect the tricky political waters the companies find themselves in. 

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Epstein Victims File Lawsuit Against the US Government, Claim FBI Enabled His Sex Trafficking

A dozen victims of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein have filed a lawsuit against the US government, alleging that the FBI enabled his sex trafficking operation to continue for over two decades.

The victims, whose names are not public, allege the FBI had received tips about Epstein’s behavior as far back as 1996 but did nothing with the information.

The Hill reports, “A probe finally began in 2006, the suit says, but ended once Epstein pleaded guilty to a soliciting prostitution charge in Florida and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The suit claims the FBI continued to ignore tips until Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in 2019. He killed himself in prison months later.”

“As a direct and proximate cause of the FBI’s negligence, plaintiffs would not have been continued to be sex trafficked, abused, raped, tortured and threatened,” the complaint states, according to the report. “Jane Does 1-12 bring this lawsuit to get to the bottom — once and for all — of the FBI’s role in Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking ring.”

The lawsuit additionally claims the FBI had evidence of his continued crimes but refused to investigate further.

“During the FBI investigation, the FBI was complicit in permitting Epstein and co-conspirators to continue to victimize Jane Does 1-12 and other young women,” the lawsuit alleges. “The FBI had photographs, videos and interviews and hard evidence of child prostitution and failed to timely investigate and arrest Epstein in deviation from the FBI protocols.”

“The FBI had a non-discretionary obligation, governed by established policies, procedures, rules, and protocols, to handle and investigate tips concerning potential and ongoing underage child erotica, rape, sex with minors, and sex trafficking in a reasonable manner and to act against Epstein and to prevent him from committing repeated crimes,” the complaint continued.

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Florida Deputy Resigns After Mistaking Acorn for Gunshot and Opening Fire on Own Patrol Car with Suspect Inside: “Shot’s Fired… I’m Hit!”

A deputy from the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office, identified as Jesse Hernandez, has resigned following an internal investigation into an officer-involved shooting incident that took place on November 12 in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

The bizarre incident began when Hernandez and his colleague, Sgt. Beth Roberts, discharged several rounds into a patrol car, mistakenly believing they were under fire after an acorn fell onto the vehicle, simulating the sound of a suppressed gunshot, the Northwest Florida Daily reported.

The incident unfolded when deputies were responding to a disturbance involving a suspect, Marquis Jackson, 22, who was later detained and placed inside the patrol car.

Miraculously, the suspect, secured inside the car, was unharmed despite the barrage of bullets. No weapon found in his possession. The only casualty of this incident? The acorn and the deputy’s career.

Sheriff Eric Aden, in a statement, confirmed Hernandez’s resignation and noted that although he was found to have violated policy, neither deputy faced criminal charges.

Sgt. Roberts, who joined in the impromptu shootout, was cleared of any wrongdoing, as she was acting in defense of her partner.

“The internal investigation by Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office Professional Standards ultimately determined his use of force during a call on November 12th was not objectively reasonable. A policy violation regarding excessive use of control to resistance was sustained,” according to Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office.

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Girlfriend charged with murder of former Texas judge who died of fentanyl overdose

Authorities in Texas have arrested the 35-year-old girlfriend of a former judge for allegedly supplying him with fentanyl that led to his overdose death late last year. Kami Ludwig was taken into custody on Monday and charged with the murder of 47-year-old former Associate Tarrant County Judge William Shane Nolen.

The murder charge is the result of a novel interpretation of a new law that Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June 2023 and went into effect on Sept. 1, 2023, classifying the supplying of fentanyl that results in death as murder. The law was enacted to combat the thousands of Texans who die annually from fentanyl poisoning, but appeared to primarily target drug dealers who distribute the deadly substance.

According to a news release from the Grapevine Police Department, officers at about 4:45 a.m. on Nov. 20, 2023, responded to a call regarding a deceased male — later identified as Nolen — at a residence located in the 4100 block of Mapleridge Drive. Ludwig placed the initial 911 call and identified herself to the dispatcher as Nolen’s girlfriend.

Upon arriving at the scene, first responders said they found Nolen deceased in his bedroom “with signs consistent with an opioid overdose.” Authorities on the scene said they also recovered “several” additional pills from inside the home.

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