Tag: police state

Connecticut To Double Limit on Weed Purchases

Connecticut’s cannabis regulatory agency announced last week that it is increasing the amount of cannabis that can be bought in a single transaction by doubling the state’s limit on recreational marijuana purchases. Under the new regulations approved by the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection (DCP), adult-use cannabis consumers will be permitted to purchase up to a half-ounce (about 14 grams) of cannabis flower or its equivalent beginning next month. 

The limit on purchases of medical marijuana has not been changed. It remains at 5 ounces of cannabis flower or the equivalent monthly, with no limits on purchases in a single transaction.

The DCP noted in a statement that the decision to increase the limit on adult-use cannabis purchases was made based on an ongoing analysis of supply and demand in Connecticut’s regulated cannabis market. The agency also said that the limit will continue to be reviewed over time, adding that the caps are in place to help ensure an adequate supply of cannabis for both adult-use consumers and medical marijuana patients.

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How Vexatious Government Demands Can Lead Your Bank To Refuse To Do Business with You

Dealing with big businesses whose services you need to conduct the basics of everyday economic life can be frustrating when those businesses make seemingly arbitrary decisions that cripple your ability to function in a modern economy. In general, the incentives of businesses are to, well, do business with customers.

It’s not surprising, then, that a recent New York Times story giving infuriating details of innocent Americans being cut off by their banks reveals that the real cause of the banks’ seemingly arbitrary behavior is government rules designed to make sure it knows everything it can about citizens’ banking business, to discourage big cash transactions, and to ensure businesses the government disapproves of have as difficult a time as possible without being explicitly banned.

As the Times puts it, when citizens suddenly find their banks exiling them, it’s because “a vast security apparatus has kicked into gear, starting with regulators in Washington and trickling down to bank security managers and branch staff eyeballing customers.”

The Times story highlights specific aggravating stories of Americans losing their banking and credit card services over such nonsense as regularly having cash deposits that are near, but below, the government’s legally mandated $10,000 limit that triggers filing special paperwork with the feds (despite those same businesses also frequently going over that limit and filing the necessary paperwork when they do); for getting direct deposit income from a cannabis company; for receiving frequent cash wires from your parents in Nigeria to help with your rent; for making frequent cash withdrawals in the multiple thousands to pay a contractor who wanted cash; for having a past criminal conviction for using counterfeit money; and for using a bank account to move money among a small private community loan pool for those less able to access the normal loan market.

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Revealed: How The DHS’ Stanford “Disinformation” Group Censored 2020 Election-Related Online Speech

Fresh revelations have been loaded into the canon of public discourse around censorship, ready for primed debates on free speech and censorship in light of disturbing findings.

As per a report from the House Judiciary Committee, it appears that speech around US election integrity was potentially compromised before the 2020 polls. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials are implicated in the birth of a “disinformation” team at Stanford University. The ominously titled “Election Integrity Partnership,” based on newly uncovered emails and inside communications, apparently colluded with the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to monitor and pressure the scrubbing of the digital landscape of certain online speeches alongside big tech cohorts.

The collaboration’s alleged censorship maneuver was revealed by a founding partner of the EIP, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. It was here in an email, dated 31 July 2020, that the EIP’s origin at the behest of DHS/CISA was acknowledged by Graham Brookie, Senior Director of the lab, who stated they were involved in a continuous discussion surrounding “disinfo.”

Notably, the inquest further concluded that the EIP’s operations were biased, leading to the censure of factual content, humorous commentary and political beliefs. Claiming a significant tilt towards the Democrats, the report accused the censors of brushing information under the rug while assuming the role of arbiters of truth. This led to Republican leaders, conservative media and even satire sites like The Babylon Bee getting unfairly flagged for “misinformation.”

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Sharp Rise in Facial Recognition Use by Scottish Police, UK Protest Footage Scanned

The police in Scotland have tripled the use of retrospective facial recognition over the last five years jumping from just under 1,300 in 2018 to nearly 4,000 in 2022.

The rising trend has continued during 2023 with more than 2,000 searches carried out in the first four months of the year, according to data obtained by a freedom of information request by UK investigative journalism organizations Liberty Investigates and The Ferret.

The trend has been rising in other parts of the country. In 2014, the total number of searches using retrospective facial recognition by all police forces in the UK amounted to just 3,360. By 2022, that number jumped to 85,158, according to UK Home Office data.

The Scottish police ranks fourth in the use of the technology in the UK. The leader is the London Metropolitan Police which accounted for 30 percent or 27,677 searches last year.

The UK police have been using retrospective facial recognition to match faces captured with CCTV cameras with millions of images stored in the Police National Database. The practice has proved controversial as the database still contains many images of people who were released without charge.

Police in Scotland operate a distinct policy from other UK forces, only uploading custody images to the database once an individual has been charged with a crime and removing images of those found innocent after 6 months.

Facial recognition use by the police has been a target of criticism from some lawmakers, non-governmental organizations and policy experts.

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COUNTERTERROR DIRECTOR USED HAMAS ATTACK TO JUSTIFY MASS SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM RENEWAL

DURING A SENATE briefing last week, a federal counterterrorism official cited the October 7 Hamas attack while urging Congress to reauthorize a sprawling and controversial surveillance program repeatedly used to spy on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

“As evidenced by the events of the past month, the terrorist threat landscape is highly dynamic and our country must preserve [counterterrorism] fundamentals to ensure constant vigilance,” said Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, after making repeat references to Hamas’s attack on Israel.

She pointed to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the U.S. government to gather vast amounts of intelligence — including about U.S. citizens — under the broad category of foreign intelligence information, without first seeking a warrant.

Section 702 “provides key indications and warning on terrorist plans and intentions, supports international terrorist disruptions, enables critical intelligence support to, for instance, border security, and gives us strategic insight into foreign terrorists and their networks overseas,” Abizaid said. “I respectfully urge Congress to reauthorize this vital authority.”

The controversial program is set to expire at the end of the year, and lawmakers sympathetic to the intelligence community are scrambling to protect it, as some members of Congress like Sen. Ron Wyden push for reforms that restrain the government’s surveillance abilities. According to Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, plans are underway to prepare a stopgap measure to preserve Section 702 of FISA as a long-term reauthorization containing reforms is hammered out. 

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Alabama’s next death penalty atrocity: The execution of Casey McWhorter

30 years after a murder committed by three teenage boys, Alabama plans to execute one of them, Casey McWhorter, who was just three months past his 18th birthday at the time of the crime. (McWhorter’s co-defendants were 15 and 16, respectively.)

Any argument in favor of executing McWhorter is undercut by the illogical, unbending brutality of a bright-line legal rule established by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the Court held the 8th and 14th Amendments prohibit the execution of defendants younger than age 18, but, not the execution of juveniles like McWhorter whom — mentally and emotionally — under any reasonable interpretation, were children at the time of their crime(s). This is because of Roper’s legal fiction that childhood rigidly ends at 18 years of age — on the nose — and not a day, or as in McWhorter’s case, 3 months, older. Describing that period in his life to a reporter recently, McWhorter said: “I had issues in my head that I didn’t know how to work out.”

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House Drops Bombshell Report Revealing Much Deeper Fed Collusion With ‘Free Speech Police’ Than Previously Known

In the runup to the 2020 election, cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security and Stanford University decided they had discovered a major problem. 

The issue was not compromised voter rolls or corrupted election tallies but a “gap” in the government’s authority to clamp down on what it considered misinformation and disinformation – a gap identified by DHS officials and interns on loan to the agency from the Stanford Internet Observatory. Given what SIO research manager Renee DiResta described as the “unclear legal authorities” and “very real First Amendment questions” regarding this gap, the parties hatched a plan to form a public-private partnership that would provide DHS with an avenue to surreptitiously censor speech. 

The collaboration between DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the Stanford outfit would quickly expand into a robust operation whose full extent is only now becoming clear. RealClearInvestigations has obtained from House investigators records revealing in previously undisclosed detail the nature and mechanics of the operation – the SIO-led Election Integrity Partnership.  

They show at a granular level the thousands of tweets and Facebook posts on topics from mail-in voting to aberrant election results – arguably core protected speech – that the public-private partnership flagged to social media platforms for censorship, much of which the platforms would suppress. 

The evidence shows EIP – sometimes alongside CISA – pressuring platforms to target speech that included statements by then-President Trump; opinions about election integrity rooted in government records and even think-tank white papers; and speculative tweets from statesmen and everyday citizens alike. RCI details notable instances here. 

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Former Loveland Police officer arrested in sexual assault on teen girl

The Loveland Police Department and the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office announced Monday that a now-former Loveland Police officer was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault.

Loveland Police Chief Timothy Doran said Dylan Miller was arrested after a 15-year-old girl came forward last month, alleging that he sexually assaulted her in July.

The girl told investigators she had initially been contacted by Miller during a traffic stop earlier in the year, police said. The victim said she next saw Miller in July when she and a friend were at North Lake Park after hours. Miller, who was on duty at the time, contacted the girl and her friend, telling her friend to leave, police said.

The victim’s friend left after Miller told him to, and she told investigators that Miller took her to a secluded area at the park and sexually assaulted her, Larimer County Sheriff John Feyen said.

“The respect that I have at this moment for this young woman and her family to come forward and make this known to us is beyond measure,” Feyen said. 

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U.S. Park Police officer unintentionally fatally shoots fellow officer at Virginia gathering

An off-duty U.S. Park Police officer unintentionally shot and killed another off-duty officer over the weekend in Virginia while pulling a trigger on a gun he thought was unloaded, police said.

Alexander Roy, 25, was charged with involuntary manslaughter for killing 22-year-old Jesse Brown Hernandez while they were at a gathering in an apartment in McLean, Virginia, about 10 miles west of Washington, D.C.

Police were called to the scene shortly after midnight on Sunday.

Two others, including another U.S. Park Police officer, were also at the gathering. Police said alcohol is believed to be a factor in the shooting. Roy is being held at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center on no bond.

Hernandez was found dead with a gunshot wound to the upper body. The investigation is ongoing and the Fairfax County Police Department is asking anyone with information about the incident to contact them.

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