Tag: police state

Farage Referred for Potential Prosecution over Manchester Airport Comments: Report

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has been referred for potential prosecution over his public critiques of the British justice system amid the controversial Manchester Airport trial.

On Friday, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said that it would not be seeking a third re-trial against Muhammad Amaad, 26, and Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, 21, over the alleged assault of Police Constable Zachary Marsden at Manchester Airport in July 2024, after two juries failed to come to a verdict. Amaaz was previously convicted of assaulting two female officers during the same incident, however.

The altercation initially sparked uproar after selectively edited footage was leaked to the press of PC Marsden apparently kicking one of the accused in the head. Further footage was later published, appearing to show a police woman having her nose broken during the incident, undercutting the initial public narrative, which had sparked unrest in the local Islamic community.

After months of public pressure, including Reform UK hiring attorneys to launch a private prosecution against the two brothers, the CPS charged Amaad and Amaaz over the incident.

However, the nearly five months taken before any prosecution, and the contrasting swift and unrelenting crackdown against the riots following the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance party in Southport, sparked accusations of unequal justice.

Among those making the critique were Nigel Farage, who said at the time that there was a “system of two-tier policing, under two-tier justice, under two-tier Keir.”

“You only have to look at the reluctance to prosecute those violent thugs in Manchester Airport who beat up the police officers,” he added. “It took months and months for any prosecution to be brought, and I suspect the reason that it happened is because Reform said if they didn’t, we would take out our own private prosecution.”

For such public comments, Judge Neil Flewitt KC referred Mr Farage to Attorney General Lord Hermer for potential criminal prosecution, claiming the statements may have amounted to contempt of court.

“I took the view that the observation made by Nigel Farage was potentially a contempt of court as it implied the guilt of the defendants,” Judge Flewitt wrote, according to The Telegraph.

“As Nigel Farage is a well-known politician with a considerable following and whose public utterances attract a lot of attention, I decided to refer the matter to the Attorney General so that he could consider whether there should be a prosecution for contempt of court.”

However, the judge said that he did not believe that the Reform chief’s comments would “adversely affect the fairness of the trial”.

Responding to reports of the prosecution referral, Mr Farage said on Friday: “It’s quite clear that our judiciary is in an even worse state than I imagined. The politicisation of the courts will end under a Reform government.”

Reform UK shadow Home Secretary Zia Yusuf accused Judge Flewitt of presiding over a “historic miscarriage of justice” in the Manchester Airport trial and said that a Reform government would remove “this unfit judge from office”.

The judge said in his written judgment that Mr Farage’s intervention, “however unwelcome, would not adversely affect the fairness of the trial”.

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Repeat Speeders In Washington Could Soon Have Cars Electronically Restricted

Washington state has approved a new law targeting drivers with serious speeding violations by requiring them to use speed-limiting technology before regaining limited driving privileges, according to Slashgear. 

The measure, House Bill 1596 — also called the BEAM Act — was created in response to a fatal 2024 crash that killed Boyd Buster Brown, Eloise Wilcoxson, Andrea Smith Hudson, and Matilda Wilcoxson.

Beginning in January 2029, drivers whose licenses were suspended for reckless driving or excessive speeding will need to install an “intelligent speed assistance” device in their vehicles to qualify for a restricted license. Using GPS tracking, the system monitors a vehicle’s speed and prevents drivers from exceeding a programmed limit. The law allows only three manual overrides each month.

The bill classifies excessive speeding as driving at least 10 mph over the limit in areas posted at 40 mph or below, or 20 mph over the limit on faster roads. Washington is one of several states moving toward stricter enforcement measures for repeat dangerous drivers, following similar efforts in places like New York.

The article notes that the law also carries financial obligations. Unless a driver qualifies for assistance, they must pay for the installation, removal, and leasing of the device, along with a $21 monthly fee. That money will help fund a state program designed to assist lower-income drivers with the costs.

Tampering with the device is treated as a serious offense. Anyone caught removing, disabling, or altering the system without a legitimate repair or safety reason could face a gross misdemeanor charge, which may include up to one year in jail and fines reaching $5,000.

As more states experiment with new traffic enforcement strategies — including variable speed limits and automated monitoring systems — Washington’s approach reflects a growing push to reduce dangerous speeding through technology rather than traditional enforcement alone.

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Thomas and Alito Take a Regrettable Position in a Qualified Immunity Case

Qualified immunity is a judge-made doctrine that routinely shields bad cops from facing civil lawsuits over their abusive and unconstitutional behavior. All too often, a federal judge will hear a case in which a clear constitutional violation occurred, only to then shield the offending officer anyway from facing civil liability over the blatant misconduct. It’s a legal doctrine that deserves to be abolished.

Occasionally, however, the officer will lose one of these cases, and qualified immunity will be denied. That’s what happened last year in Hart v. Grand Rapids, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit actually let a federal civil rights lawsuit proceed against a Michigan police officer whose use of deadly force against a protester was officially reprimanded by his own superiors because of how the officer’s actions violated the department’s training and procedures.

That officer subsequently appealed his loss to the U.S. Supreme Court, which finally turned him down earlier this week, thereby leaving the 6th Circuit’s denial of qualified immunity undisturbed. The civil rights suit against the officer will now move forward in federal court, a welcome result. To be clear, the officer may still prevail in the end, but at least his alleged victim will now get the chance to seek redress for a credible constitutional rights violation.

What makes this case especially notable, in addition to the all-too-rare denial of qualified immunity, is the fact that two members of the Supreme Court went out of their way to let us know just how eager they were to rule in the offending officer’s favor.

In the view of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the officer in this case was fully entitled to receive qualified immunity and to be shielded from facing civil suit. If it were up to Thomas and Alito, the 6th Circuit’s judgment against the officer would have been summarily reversed.

I am sometimes asked which members of the Supreme Court are the most reliably libertarian on various legal matters, such as criminal justice. After clarifying that nobody on the current Supreme Court is a truly consistent legal libertarian on anything, I typically say something to the effect that Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch usually tend to give libertarians the most reasons to cheer on matters of criminal justice.

This case presents us with the flip side of that coin. When viewed from a libertarian legal perspective, Thomas and Alito tend to stand out as the worst on criminal justice issues. In far too many cases, Thomas and Alito have exhibited a kind of overriding deference to law enforcement that undermines the Bill of Rights and thwarts government accountability. Their actions this week continue that unfortunate trend.

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Aww Look At The Cute Dancing Robot Police State Surveillance Dog…

Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs are being deployed at designated World Cup venues in the US to perform perimeter security inspections, prompting concerns over the advance of surveillance tech.

The company has stated that the machines “will be used to assist security personnel with investigating things like suspicious packages or other potentially hazardous materials.”

These four-legged fiends are set to roam, and even dance (oh how cute) around AT&T Stadium in Dallas and other FIFA sites ahead of the 2026 tournament, sending live feeds back to human teams with their 360-degree cameras, thermal sensors, acoustic pickups, and AI anomaly detection.

“The robots do not have facial recognition capabilities,” a Boston Dynamics spokesperson told WFAA, insisting they spot unauthorized people in restricted zones without utilising facial scans for now, after a viral TikTok video made the claim.

Hyundai, the South Korean owner of Boston Dynamics and major FIFA sponsor, added the bots “will support on-site security operations, helping contribute to a safer tournament environment.”

But peel back the puppy-like head tilts and choreographed spins and you see the real rollout: tireless mechanical sentries normalizing constant surveillance on American soil. They look fun today at the soccer spectacle expecting half a million visitors. Tomorrow the same platforms patrol streets, malls, and events nationwide, always watching, always recording.

This isn’t some isolated gimmick. It’s fast becoming commonplace in cities such as Atlanta, where robot security dogs prowl apartment complexes and parking lots issuing verbal commands to citizens.

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A Nation of Suspects

Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now know that the federal government spies on innocent Americans without suspicion and without warrants.

The spying seems to fall into several categories. The National Security Agency, which is in the Department of Defense, employs about 60,000 domestic spies. These are the folks who want us to believe that they go through the trouble of making applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to spy on foreigners.

Actually, from time to time they do go to this court, but their travels there — where judges are frisked upon entering and leaving the courthouse by the NSA agents who appear before them — serve as fig leaves for their massive warrantless spying on Americans. The FISA Court is unconstitutional because it issues warrants based on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, rather than on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires.

The courts have ruled consistently since the 1960s that spying — surveillance, as the feds call it — is a search, and the capture of data from a surveillance is a seizure.

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons in America — not just Americans — from warrantless searches and seizures of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” There are some well-recognized exceptions to this constitutional baseline, such as evidence that will quickly vanish or be seriously degraded, but those exceptions do not apply here as the NSA captures in real time all keystrokes on all digital devices and all fiber optic data transmitted into, out of and within the United States.

The judges of the FISA Court surely know that the Department of Justice lawyers and NSA agents who appear before them are going through a charade, and the court has been made a part of it. The charade is the pretense that all spying is done pursuant to the warrants that FISA Court judges issue. Former NSA agents have revealed publicly that this is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, the lowered standard from probable cause of crime to probable cause of communicating to a foreign person was crafted by Congress — in another of its many moments heedless of the Constitution. After a few years of this, the FISA Court began to issue warrants for spying on the Americans who communicate with foreigners, out to the sixth degree. A sixth grader can do the math, as this leads to hundreds of millions of Americans whose communications are captured.

A second category of spying is employed by the DHS. The DHS — now a 250,000-person strong federal police department nowhere countenanced by the Constitution — has sophisticated software that can read fingerprints at 15 feet and irises at 15 inches. So, if you wave goodbye or good riddance to an ICE agent, and he holds up his mobile phone, and you are in the federal system for any benign reason, he has captured your bank, health, legal and commercial records on the spot. If he talks to you in your car and is within 15 inches of your face, he can capture the same data.

As if all this were not enough, the feds and local police use a device called a Stingray, which mimics the signal sent to all mobile devices as if the device were being used to communicate. But the communication is just one way, as the Stingray will tell the government where the person possessing the mobile device is at any given moment. This, too, is a seizure of private personal information — the contents of the computer chip in your mobile device — which the Fourth Amendment characterizes as an “effect.”

And then there is the FBI, which now uses zero-click software. This permits agents without warrants or even approval of their superiors to engage in computer hacking without having to trick the hacked victim into clicking on a link. Computer hacking is a felony.

All of this surveillance is unconstitutional, dangerous and commonplace. It consists in the use of surveillance and law enforcement tools without articulable suspicion.

For 600 years, articulable suspicion — the lowest evidentiary standard we have — has been the baseline for all government behavior that targets an individual. Articulable suspicion is the fact-based ability to state why a person — not a group — should be targeted and for what crime. This is the same standard that must be met when police stop someone in public.

Anything less than articulable suspicion is a fishing expedition; stated differently, a general warrant. General warrants — which were used by British agents on American colonists — permitted the agents to stop anyone, to search anywhere and to seize anything without articulable suspicion. The Fourth Amendment outlawed them.

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Fighting for Food Freedom: A Georgia Farmer’s Stand Against Bureaucratic Overreach

“I never set out to battle county government. I simply wanted to sell the food I grow—healthy, local produce and value-added goods—to my neighbors,” Georgia farmer Stephanie Jones shared with The Gateway Pundit.

Recently, The Gateway Pundit spoke with Stephanie Jones, owner of Jones Creek Farm, a small family farm in Liberty County, Georgia.

In an era when Americans are increasingly demanding transparency and control over what ends up on their plates, the farm-to-table movement has emerged as a powerful counter to our industrialized food system.

By supporting small farmers and cottage food businesses, communities gain access to fresher, more nutritious food while strengthening local economies and preserving agricultural traditions.

These direct connections between growers and consumers are vital—not only for economic resilience, but for restoring personal agency over the food we eat.

This push for greater food sovereignty sits at the heart of the growing MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, which seeks to reduce chronic disease by reforming agricultural policy, empowering small producers, and challenging the dominance of ultra-processed foods.

In this interview, this dedicated Georgia farmer shares her firsthand battle with local bureaucracy and her vision for a more resilient, community-centered food system.

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Australia: Victoria’s Labor government oversees police state raids against anti-war protesters

Victoria’s Labor government under Premier Jacinta Allan is spearheading an increasingly authoritarian offensive against basic democratic rights, deploying counter-terrorism police in pre-dawn raids on the homes of peaceful anti-genocide protesters.

These operations are part of a broader turn to police-state methods by Labor at state and federal level, as it deepens its participation in escalating imperialist violence internationally and imposes a historic assault on the social rights of the working class.

The immediate aim of the raids is to silence and punish those who oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the war on Iran. But their wider purpose is even more sinister: to create an atmosphere of fear, to send a message that anyone who publicly challenges the war drive or the destruction of social conditions can expect to be treated as a security threat, have their home invaded and their life turned upside down.

The most recent raid occurred at about 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday 12 May, when Victoria Police’s Security Investigation Unit (SIU)—a counter-terror squad—descended on the home of an individual known only as “Alex,” an anti-genocide protester who had been arrested at a rally against the visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in February.

In an interview with Sydney Criminal Lawyers, Alex said officers smashed open the bathroom door while she was on the toilet and grabbed her phone from her hand.

Alex was not charged, but was handed a notice compelling her to surrender her passwords, which she refused to do. The warrant cited potential offences under Victoria’s newly strengthened “hate” and “incitement” provisions—including “incitement on ground of protected attribute” and “threaten physical harm or property damage on ground of protected attribute”—yet police refused to say what specific words or actions supposedly justified a counter-terrorism raid.

“The SIU is a counterterrorism unit. One of their specialities is disruption. They want to disrupt people perceived as political enemies of the state. They’re also involved in preemptive policing and surveillance,” Alex said.

This was at least the third wave of such operations targeting Melbourne-based pro-Palestinian activists in as many months.

At about 7:00 a.m. on 17 April, roughly 50 Victoria Police officers raided four homes over a satirical guerrilla-theatre protest outside the US consulate on St Kilda Road, held on 26 March in opposition to the criminal US-Israeli war on Iran. The three performers—adopting the stage names Gina Minehard, Moregun Chase and Peta Philewrangler—poured oil and fake blood at the consulate entrance. 

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EU-Backed Appeals Center Accidentally Confirms the DSA Censorship Regime Is Unworkable

A body set up to make Europe’s content censorship regime work has accidentally documented why it doesn’t.

Appeals Centre Europe, an Ireland-certified dispute settlement outfit operating under the EU’s Digital Services Act, released its second transparency report this week.

The numbers it published describe a system failing in both directions at once, and they hand the case against laws like the DSA to anyone who wants it.

Let’s start with what the body found when it actually got to look at the disputed content. Across the year from April 2025 to March 2026, it disagreed with the platform’s call 59 percent of the time.

Break that down and the picture gets stranger. When users challenged content that platforms had deleted, the Appeals Centre sided with the user 52 percent of the time.

When users flagged content that the platforms had chosen to leave online, the body overturned that decision 63 percent of the time. The same companies are deleting things they shouldn’t and keeping up things the regime says they should remove, often in the same reporting period.

The machinery the DSA built to produce correct moderation outcomes is producing roughly a coin flip. Legitimate posts get censored. The body reviewing the censorship then has to tell the platform to put them back. More than half the time, when it can see the evidence, it concludes the platform got it wrong.

The Appeals Centre received more than 24,000 disputes over the year, with eligible cases arriving nine times faster in March 2026 than in April 2025.

That is the scale of disagreement a single dispute body is fielding from across the EU. It is also a fraction of the moderation decisions these platforms make every day, which run to millions.

The DSA’s underlying premise is that platforms can review this firehose of human expression and arrive at defensible, appealable judgments about each piece. The error rate on the small sample anyone actually checks suggests the premise was never sound.

Then there is the question of whether any of it gets enforced and here the report stops being merely damning.

Account suspensions are where the system collapses outright. The Appeals Centre received more than 14,000 suspension disputes.

It managed to fully review fewer than 150 of them, because platforms would not hand over the content needed to assess the bans.

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More License Plate Reader Mission Creep: School Residency Verification, Background Checks, and Noise Complaints

An EFF analysis of millions of searches of Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) data by police has uncovered a troubling pattern: in the absence of a warrant requirement to search ALPR databases, law enforcement agencies have moved beyond specific investigations to use these surveillance networks for virtually any whim.

Our findings suggest that the absence of a warrant requirement has fostered a culture of unrestricted access to sensitive location data, allowing agencies to leverage that data beyond the scope of specific criminal investigations.

As a refresher: Law enforcement agencies lease or purchase camera systems from Flock Safety and then mount them by the side of the road and at intersections to document every vehicle that passes, including the plate, make, model, color and distinguishing characteristics, along with the date, time and location of where it was seen.

Law enforcement’s talking points—often scripted by the company itself—trumpet their role in solving high-stakes crimes. But the data reveals a different story. What they’re not saying is that ALPRs are also frequently used for extremely low-level investigations, such as verifying whether a student lives within a particular school zone. In some cases, police have even used this tech to conduct employment background checks and investigations into loud music complaints. Recently, a motorcyclist was even targeted for simply holding a cell phone while riding.

The reach of this ALPR surveillance is amplified by the nature of the indiscriminate sharing these technologies encourage. Most agencies choose to share broadly, often as part of a nationwide pool, making it common for a single city’s system to be searched hundreds of thousands of times each month. By analyzing these “network audit logs,” privacy advocates and journalists have uncovered evidence of the technology being used to surveil protesters, abortion-seekers, immigrants, and even ethnic Roma populations.

While these high-profile abuses are shocking, the more mundane uses are also problematic, signaling a massive, unchecked mission creep that has turned an alleged “crime-fighting” tool into a universal tracker of everyone’s movements.

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Police Bodycam Footage Shows Moment Disabled Woman Flashes Arm Stump After Cop Accuses Her of Texting with Her “Right Hand”

Newly-released police bodycam footage shows the moment a disabled woman flashed her arm stump after a cop accused her of texting with her “right hand.”

A Palm Beach County officer pulled over Kathleen Thomas, 36, for distracted driving earlier this year.

The officer told Thomas that he pulled her over for “holding the phone with your right hand” while she was driving on North Dixie Highway.

Thomas immediately showed the officer her handless arm and flashed her stump.

“So I’m obviously not. So you wanna just call this a day?” Thomas said to the stunned officer.

The officer did not back down from his claims.

“I don’t want to call it a day. You had a hand up,” the officer said.

The officer continued to humiliate Thomas and asked her to put a “hand to God” to promise she wasn’t texting with her right hand.

“Hand to God,” Thomas said as she held up her stump.

“The other hand to God,” the officer said.

The officer issued Thomas a citation; however, the citation was later dismissed after Thomas challenged it in court.

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