Tag: police state

New York Police to Use Drones to Monitor Backyard Labor Day Parties

New York police will use drones to monitor backyard Labor Day parties this weekend.

Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner made the announcement during a security briefing on J’ouvert, an annual Caribbean festival.

Daughtry’s plan to use police drones to monitor backyard barbecues got immediate backlash from civil liberties groups.

Why a Veteran-Owned Freeze-Dried Beef Company Unabashedly Embraces an America First Worldview

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics, according to AP. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

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Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

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Missouri Judge Denies Effort To Stop Recall of 62,000 Marijuana Products

A Missouri judge denied on Wednesday a marijuana company’s effort to stop the recall of 62,000 products containing the company’s THC concentrate that the state deemed a “potential threat to health and safety.”

The company, Delta Extraction, is a Robertsville-based licensed marijuana manufacturer that specializes in making THC distillate, a highly potent and pure form of THC used for things like vape pens, infused pre-rolled joints and edibles.

On August 2, the state regulating agency suspended Delta Extraction’s license after accusing the company of sourcing untested “marijuana or converted hemp from outside of a Missouri licensed cultivation facility.”

The state issued an administrative hold on the products days after and then a full product recall on August 14.

Delta Extraction argued in its August 16 motion for a temporary restraining order that the state’s actions were an “unlawful campaign to destroy Delta’s business through arbitrary, unjustified, and unexplained administrative actions targeting Delta’s products.”

Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker ruled Wednesday that the company did not have grounds to challenge the recall because it has not exhausted the administrative appeal process.

The day after the state suspended their license, Delta filed an appeal with the Administrative Hearing Commission. That decision is still pending.

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FBI Data on Active Shootings Is Misleading

Americans are constantly debating policing and gun control. But to discuss these issues, we have to depend on government crime data. Unfortunately, politics has infected the data handling of agencies such as the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control.

Last year, the CDC became the center of controversy when it removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website at the request of gun control organizations. For nearly a decade the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report showing that the annual number of people using guns to stop crime ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the upper figure at 2.5 million.

Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to CDC officials after a meeting last year that the 2.5 million number “has been used so often to stop [gun control] legislation.” The CDC’s estimates were subsequently taken down and now lists no numbers.

The FBI is also susceptible to political pressure. Up until January of 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I showed the bureau that many cases were missing and that others had been misidentified. Yet, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2022. The correct rate is almost eight times higher. And if we limit the discussion to places where permit holders were allowed to carry, the rate is eleven times higher.

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Federal Lawmakers Are Preparing To Reintroduce Legislation To Regulate Kratom Amid Pushback To FDA-Proposed Ban

As federal lawmakers prepare to reintroduce a bill to regulate kratom, a former Trump administration drug czar stressed the need to beat back “misinformation” from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has attempted to ban the substance in the U.S. and abroad.

Members of the American Kratom Association (AKA) said during a webinar Tuesday that they expect federal legislation to regulate the drug “will be filed shortly” in Congress and could be taken up later this session.

The text of the forthcoming bill “will be word-for-word the same” as congressional legislation introduced last session, said Mac Haddow, a senior fellow at AKA. The title, however, will be updated to the Kratom Consumer Protection Act, a nod to model legislation that AKA has been lobbying for at the state and federal levels.

Sponsors will include, on the Senate side, Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), who also sponsored last session’s bill, the Federal Clarity for Kratom Consumers Act. In the House, lead sponsors will be Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Jack Bergman (R-MI). Pocan sponsored last year’s bill in the House, while Bergman is a new addition.

The forthcoming legislation’s bipartisan sponsorship in each chamber—specifically pairing a “very liberal” elected official with a “very conservative” one—is designed to highlight “that this is not a partisan issue,” Haddow said. “This is about good policy.”

If the bill becomes law, it would require FDA to take further steps to evaluate the health and safety of kratom and would also prohibit the agency from regulating kratom products in a way that’s more restrictive than regulations for food or dietary supplements.

Neither chamber took action on the proposal last session, but AKA expects more traction—and more sponsors—on this year’s bill.

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IT’S LONG PAST TIME TO BAN PRETEXTUAL STOPS—TAKE IT FROM A PUBLIC DEFENDER

Dante, a man I represented as a public defender, didn’t expect to be pulled over as he and his friend, Kris, drove through Pittsburgh to play basketball at a park a handful of years ago. But as Kris rounded a bend, four undercover detectives jumped out from the side of the road and ordered Kris to stop. Kris kept two pistols in his car, which he legally purchased and had a license to carry.

While the detectives claimed that they stopped Kris’s car due to an expired inspection sticker, this was no ordinary traffic stop. In truth, these detectives wanted an excuse to pull over two young Black men, search them, and rifle through their car. Once the detectives noticed the pistols – one of which had slipped to the passenger’s side floorboard when Kris stopped short – they ordered both men out of the car at gunpoint.

The detectives searched Kris and Dante before handcuffing them and forcing them to sit on the curb. Although the officers confirmed that Kris legally owned both pistols and had no evidence—besides proximity—that Dante possessed the gun, the police arrested Dante anyway. Dante couldn’t legally possess a firearm due to the juvenile equivalent of a criminal conviction years earlier—and the detectives claimed that simply being near two legally purchased firearms was enough evidence to arrest him. Dante was charged with felony gun possession, jeopardizing his job, education, and livelihood.

This type of ugly scenario plays out thousands of times nationwide every day. This policing tactic is commonly known as a “pretextual” traffic stop, in which officers stop motorists for minor traffic violations in the hopes of turning up evidence of other potential crimes. According to multiple studies, these stops rarely turn up anything illegal and often fail to reduce crime Instead, they mostly inflict trauma and violence, both physical and emotional.

Despite these facts, the Supreme Court has ruled that pretextual stops are legal, provided an officer identifies an actual traffic violation.

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Saudi Arabia: Man Sentenced to Death for Tweets

A Saudi court has sentenced a man to death based solely on his Twitter, and YouTube activity, Human Rights Watch said today. Saudi authorities should quash the verdict, which is an escalation of the Saudi government’s crackdown on freedom of expression and peaceful political dissent in the country.

On July 10, 2023, the Specialized Criminal Court, Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism tribunal, convicted Muhammad al-Ghamdi, 54, a retired Saudi teacher, of several criminal offenses related solely to his peaceful expression online. The court sentenced him to death, using his tweets, retweets, and YouTube activity as the evidence against him.

“Repression in Saudi Arabia has reached a terrifying new stage when a court can hand down the death penalty for nothing more than peaceful tweets,” said Joey Shea, Saudi Arabia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Saudi authorities have escalated their campaign against all dissent to mind-boggling levels and should reject this travesty of justice.”

Saudi security forces arrested al-Ghamdi in front of his wife and children on June 11, 2022, outside his home in the al-Nawwariyyah neighborhood of Mecca, people with knowledge of the case told Human Rights Watch. They took him to al-Dhahban Prison, north of Jeddah, where he was held in solitary confinement for four months. His family was unable to contact him during this period and he did not have access to a lawyer. The authorities later transferred al-Ghamdi to the al-Ha’ir Prison in Riyadh.

Saudi interrogators questioned him about tweets and political opinions and asked his opinions about individuals imprisoned for exercising their right to free expression. Al-Ghamdi did not have a lawyer for nearly a year and once he finally did obtain legal representation, he was only able to speak with the lawyer immediately in advance of court sessions.

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FBI HOOVERING UP DNA AT A PACE THAT RIVALS CHINA, HOLDS 21 MILLION SAMPLES AND COUNTING

THE FBI HAS amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles — equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population — according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept.

The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. “The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” the appeal for an increase says.

In an April 2023 statement submitted to Congress to explain the budget request, FBI Director Christopher Wray cited several factors that had “significantly expanded the DNA processing requirements of the FBI.” He said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample volume” — and expected that number to swell to about 120,000 a month, totaling about 1.5 million new DNA samples a year. (The FBI declined to comment.)

The staggering increases are raising questions among civil liberties advocates.

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We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

This last point is particularly disturbing.

Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

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Louisiana Man Arrested By SWAT Team For Facebook Joke About COVID-19 Wins Case

In a pivotal defense of free speech and online expression, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has rendered a verdict upholding Waylon Bailey’s right to jest about COVID-19 and zombies on social media. The Louisiana resident, previously arrested under the cloud of an anti-terrorism law for his humorous Facebook post, now sees the tide of justice turn in his favor.

We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.

Waylon Bailey’s playful jab at the pandemic combined with a cinematic reference to the Brad Pitt-led movie “World War Z,” whimsically warning that the local sheriff’s office was tasked with shooting the “infected.”

Instead of discerning the evident satire, the local sheriff’s deputies responded with a disproportionate use of force. Without obtaining a warrant, the authorities dispatched a SWAT team to Bailey’s residence, arresting him with guns drawn in his own garage.

While the ludicrous charge against Bailey was soon dismissed upon a prosecutor’s intervention, the subsequent civil-rights lawsuit encountered unexpected setbacks. Astonishingly, the district court not only granted the arresting deputy qualified immunity but also dismissed Bailey’s First Amendment right to jest.

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