Tag: police state

The Left Is Using Kids As A Trojan Horse For Total Online Surveillance

It is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. Anytime a Democrat politician looks into a television camera and declares a new policy is “for the kids,” history tells us it is time to do three things: grab your Bill of Rights, lock your wallet, and check your firearms.

The political left has mastered the art of semantic camouflage. Because leftists’ true intentions – total state control and the systematic dismantling of individual liberty – are entirely unpalatable to the average citizen, they must cloak their radical agendas in the warm blanket of public safety.

We are seeing this exact misdirection play out today across two seemingly different battlefronts: the push for Universal Background Checks (UBCs) on firearms, and the sudden, “bipartisan” stampede to pass online child safety legislation. Under the microscope, however, they share the exact same DNA. They were never about protecting children. They are about building lists to target political opponents. Period.

Currently making waves in Congress are the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in the Senate and the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS) in the House. On paper, the marketing pitch is flawless. Proponents claim these bills will shield innocent children from online predators, groomers, and illicit adult content.

At face value, it sounds reasonable. Who could possibly oppose protecting children?

The answer lies in the structural mechanics of the legislation. Just as gun control advocates use “safety” to pierce the veil of constitutional privacy, digital regulators are using children as human shields to bypass the First Amendment.

To understand the trap being set online, one must first look at the ongoing battle over Universal Background Checks. Under current federal law, licensed firearm dealers must maintain physical ATF Form 4473. Crucially, under the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA) and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) regulations, the federal government is strictly prohibited from centralizing these forms into a master database. If a firearm is used in a crime, investigators must work backward – from manufacturer to dealer to buyer. It is a localized, investigative process that protects law-abiding gun owners from mass government discovery.

Enter the left’s obsession with Universal Background Checks for private transfers. Proponents claim this keeps weapons out of the hands of criminals – ignoring the obvious reality that criminals, by definition, do not obtain weapons through legal channels.

The real objective is structural. A Universal Background Check law is completely unenforceable unless the state knows who owns every firearm in the country beforehand. The law has no teeth without a mandatory, centralized gun registry. It is the ultimate camel’s nose under the liberty tent.

This brings us back to the digital arena. Changing the law would mean de facto digital ID for every American. The database concept that makes UBCs so dangerous is the exact same mechanism driving KOSA and KIDS.

To enforce age restrictions online and block youth from specific platforms, websites cannot simply rely on the honor system. Platforms must mandate strict age verification. To prove your age, you must verify your legal identity. Proponents make it sound like it’s just the kids who must register.

However, they conveniently fail to mention the rest of the action. In order to prove they are not children, adults will be forced to upload government-issued identification simply to access standard political commentary, religious forums, or independent news sites. Platforms will choose the path of least resistance, implementing blanket identity checks to avoid massive federal fines. The immediate casualty of this regime will be political anonymity.

The author has personally witnessed this phenomenon, having friends in the UK with whom we’ve corresponded for many years. They have become extremely guarded in answering certain political-type questions in the past couple of years, basically avoiding commenting. And we all read now about British subjects being arrested for making comments in public or posting online viewpoints that oppose official positions.

Independent outlets like American Thinker rely heavily on robust, pseudonymous comment sections. Thousands of everyday Americans utilize digital pen names to engage in fierce partisan debates. They do not do this out of cowardice; they do it to protect their careers, their livelihoods, and their families from targeted harassment campaigns by the radical Left. KOSA and KIDS would mean the end of the dissident commenter.

If KOSA and KIDS become law, the era of the pseudonymous internet is dead. Email providers, forums, and social platforms will require positive legal identification just to open an account.

When you strip away the emotional appeals, the underlying architecture becomes clear:

  • Step 1: Force the population into centralized databases (whether via gun registries or digital IDs) under the guise of public safety.
  • Step 2: Eliminate the anonymity that allows for free, uninhibited political dissent.
  • Step 3: Weaponize those databases when political fortunes shift.

If progressive Marxists secure unchecked power over the administrative state and the judiciary, they will no longer need to hunt for dissidents. The compliance architecture currently being built in Washington will hand them a pre-verified list of their political opponents on a silver platter. And since they would have already emptied all the prisons, they’d have plenty of beds to hold us all.

Keep reading

GrapheneOS Wipe at Airport Leads to Federal Charge in Atlanta

The Justice Department is asking a federal court in Atlanta to treat a man’s erasure of his own phone as destruction of property, in the first known US prosecution built on a phone’s duress password.

Samuel Tunick faces one count under Title 18, Section 2232(a), a statute covering the destruction of property to stop the government from taking it. Prosecutors say he handed Customs and Border Protection officers a passcode that deleted the contents of his Google Pixel instead of unlocking it. His lawyers appeared before the court for the first time on Monday, arguing that officers ran a custodial interrogation without Miranda warnings, denied him a lawyer, and searched him unlawfully. They want everything obtained from the encounter suppressed.

CBP pulled Tunick into secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson on January 24, 2025, as he returned from the Dominican Republic. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer and an FBI special agent had coordinated with CBP in advance to question and search him on arrival. The account comes from the defense filing, which draws on the government’s own reports. Officers from CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team opened by telling him they were “looking for people who are pedophiles.”

Officers never read Tunick his Miranda rights. He said early in the interview that he did not want to keep talking without a lawyer, then asked to call one repeatedly. Questioning continued. One officer told him his refusal to talk gave them authority to go through his phone. When he asked again about his attorney, an officer told him customs and immigration work was a different matter, “and we have search authority, we don’t need a warrant.”

Tunick eventually provided a password for his phone and his e-reader. The screen “went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart,” according to the government’s report. Officers seized the devices anyway and told him they would be returned after thirty days. A third officer took him to another room for a pat-down that was not recorded. A DHS agent then told him he was free to leave once the other agents were finished with him.

The government’s reports contain no indication that anyone suspected Tunick of carrying illegal images, his lawyers wrote. The reports record an interest in his association with Defend the Atlanta Forest, the movement opposing the clearing of the South River Forest for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Opponents call the 85-acre, $115 million police facility Cop City. Federal documents label the movement an “Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremist Group.” Tunick has not been charged with any offense connected to it.

Eleventh Circuit precedent favors the government. Its 2018 ruling in United States v. Touset permits forensic searches of electronic devices at the border with no warrant, no probable cause, and no individualized suspicion. Tunick’s lawyers cite decisions from the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits going the other way, including a Fourth Circuit holding that warrantless border searches of devices cannot be used to hunt for evidence of domestic crime. They also argue that surrendering a passcode is testimonial, relying on a 2012 Eleventh Circuit decision that decrypting and producing the contents of a hard drive triggers Fifth Amendment protection.

Courts allow suspicionless border searches to keep contraband out of the country. The accusation here is that data left a phone rather than entered the United States, and digital files move across borders over the internet anyway. A ruling on the motion is not expected before the end of October.

GrapheneOS, the hardened Android build that replaces the stock software on Pixel devices, lets an owner set a second PIN or password that irreversibly wipes the device and any installed eSIMs when entered at a credential prompt. No confirmation dialog appears, and nothing distinguishes it from a normal unlock.

Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Runa Sandvik, founder of the security firm Granitt, both said they had seen no comparable prosecution. Sandvik said she had discussed the scenario with activists and journalists for years and advised travelers to leave sensitive data off devices they carry across borders rather than count on wiping it. Christophe Boutry told the Guardian the prosecution “sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default.”

Matthew Dodge, an assistant federal public defender on Tunick’s legal team, said the statute is rarely seen in an indictment. Tunick was arrested about ten months after the airport stop. His crowdfunding page says he was pulled over for a purported tail light fault and cuffed by FBI and DHS officers when he stepped out of the car. He has pleaded not guilty. The single-count indictment  accuses him of acting to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel to impair the government’s lawful authority to take it, in violation of Title 18 of what the document calls the “Untied States Code.”

Keep reading

America’s Local Police Are Becoming Intelligence Agencies

One of the most revealing investigations this week did not come from Washington. It came from Forbes, which uncovered how an Israeli surveillance company is quietly marketing intelligence-grade technology directly to American police departments. The story is not about another patrol vehicle or upgraded communications equipment. It is about bringing tools originally developed for intelligence and national security operations onto the streets of the United States.

According to Forbes, Texas has purchased four specially equipped Chevrolet Tahoes from Israeli surveillance firm Cognyte in a deal worth roughly $4.5 million. Hidden inside these vehicles is a system known as FalcoNet that functions as a cellular interception platform. The technology imitates legitimate cellphone towers, causing nearby mobile phones to connect to the police vehicle instead of the carrier’s network. Once connected, investigators can identify devices, determine their locations, and gather other cellular information. Forbes also reports that the same technology can be carried in a backpack or mounted on helicopters, allowing surveillance to expand far beyond a single vehicle.

Cognyte is not an ordinary technology company. It was spun off from Verint Systems and built much of its reputation supplying intelligence, counterterrorism, and surveillance capabilities to governments around the world. The company has longstanding roots in Israel’s security sector, where these technologies were developed for national security and intelligence collection. Today those same capabilities are being marketed to sheriffs’ departments, state police agencies, and local law enforcement across America. That should concern anyone who still believes there is a meaningful distinction between intelligence agencies and neighborhood policing.

There was a time when police investigated crimes after they occurred. Increasingly, departments are investing in systems designed to gather enormous quantities of information before anyone has been accused of committing anything. Cellphone interception systems, automated license plate readers, facial recognition software, artificial intelligence, drones, predictive policing algorithms, and massive databases are steadily becoming standard equipment.

Keep reading

Canada’s New “Hate” Law Is Already at People’s Doors

Royal assent came in June, the law landed in July, and by the end of the month somebody was standing on a porch asking about a post from three years ago.

Government officials in Canada are contacting people at their homes over social media posts written months or years ago, according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF).

The legal advocacy group says the reports began arriving after Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, cleared Parliament. The law received royal assent on June 18 and came into force on July 18, expanding Canada’s “hate speech” offenses, raising penalties, and eliminating defenses that had limited prosecutions for what the state calls hate-related expression.

“We are receiving reports that some Canadians are being contacted at their homes by government officials about social media posts made months or even years ago,” the JCCF wrote. “These reports come after the passage of Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, which expands Canada’s hate speech laws by creating new offences, increasing penalties, and removing certain legal safeguards that previously limited prosecutions for hate-related expression.”

Keep reading

Police Are Deploying 60 MPH Autonomous Drones to Read Your License Plate from the Sky

If you thought Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) were deeply invasive when they were just mounted to neighborhood stop signs and hidden inside speed trailers, you might want to look up.

The company that built a massive, interconnected surveillance net across American roadways has officially taken its technology airborne. As highlighted in a viral X post by Josh Walkos, Flock is rolling out “Flock Alpha”—a highly advanced, autonomous police drone designed to track vehicles and suspects from the sky.

Walkos perfectly captured the escalating nature of the tech in his post: “Remember when everyone was told Flock was ‘just reading license plates’? Anyway, here’s Flock Alpha, the autonomous drone.”

The “Drone as a First Responder” Play

Flock isn’t just selling a standard quadcopter; they are aggressively pushing a concept known as “Drone as First Responder” (DFR). Following a strategic partnership with aviation software company Aerodome, Flock integrated its existing street-level surveillance web directly into an autonomous aerial platform.

The specs on the Flock Alpha are undeniably impressive—and for privacy advocates, entirely terrifying.

When a 911 call, a gunshot audio sensor, or a street-level ALPR camera triggers an alert, an officer can deploy the Alpha drone directly from their smartphone. The drone launches itself from a weatherproof docking station and can reach the scene at speeds up to 60 MPH. According to Flock’s promotional materials, the drone arrives first on the scene 78% of the time, long before patrol cars can navigate traffic.

Keep reading

“Don’t Flock Me”: Massie Readies Bill To Yank Federal Cash From Cities And Police Departments Running Flock Cameras

On Saturday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced he’ll soon sponsor “a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments” that deploy Flock-style cameras to surveil law-abiding citizens. He attached a Gadsden flag parody: a coiled rattlesnake wrapped around an automated license plate reader on a pole, over the words “don’t flock me.”

Rather than regulating or litigating the cameras, Massie’s bill would cut off federal funding to every city and police department that installs them. Flock’s business model runs on local government contracts across roughly 6,000 communities, so a funding-withholding bill aims directly at its customer base.

Third Strike In A Week

Massie’s bill is the third Republican move against Flock in a matter of days.

On July 21, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) filed H.R. 9800, the Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which would bar federal agencies from purchasing, funding, or accessing automated license plate readers – Flock is named explicitly – along with biometric tracking tech covering fingerprints, iris, voice, and gait. Any data a federal agency obtained would have to be deleted within 30 days and would be inadmissible in court. Burchett’s pitch: “We gotta ban these dadgum things.”

Earlier this month, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) tried to attach an amendment restricting the readers in committee. It failed, and Perry responded that the fight wasn’t over: “STOP THE FLOCK.”

In April, Massie teamed with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) on the Surveillance Accountability Act, which would require a probable-cause warrant before federal or local agencies surveil Americans, ban warrantless facial recognition in public spaces, block the government from buying its way around the Fourth Amendment via third-party data brokers, and make individual federal employees personally suable for violations. Boebert’s framing: the government is building a “digital footprint of your entire life” without a warrant or probable cause.

Keep reading

Rotterdam Officially Creates A No-Go Zone — Dutch City Bans Nighttime Entry To De Esch Neighborhood After Years Of Migrant Gang Disorder

The city of Rotterdam has taken an extraordinary and, by its own admission, unprecedented step: imposing a nighttime exclusion zone on an entire residential neighborhood, making it a criminal offense to enter the De Esch district between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. without a demonstrable reason for being there. The order took effect Thursday evening and will run for three months before evaluation, according to Remix News and the Dutch public broadcaster NOS.

Under the new rule, anyone stopped in De Esch during nighttime hours who cannot explain their presence to police is liable for a fine and a criminal record. Residents, workers, visitors attending events or dining at local restaurants, and people visiting family homes are exempt. Everyone else — which in practice means the large groups of outsiders who have descended on the neighborhood after dark for nearly three years — is not.

The backstory is a familiar and depressing one across Dutch and Western European cities that have been slow to name what is happening. Locals told NOS and the regional broadcaster Rijnmond that since shortly after the Covid pandemic, outsiders — identified in Dutch press coverage as predominantly young men of migrant background — began gathering in De Esch on evenings and weekends in numbers that sometimes reached into the hundreds. Activities documented include street racing, drug use, horn honking, prostitution, intimidation of residents, littering, and aggressive responses to anyone who objected. One resident told Rijnmond she had stopped walking her dog alone at night because of the danger; her parents were nearly struck by cars being driven on the sidewalk.

Rotterdam Mayor Carola Schouten authorized the exclusion zone under existing public order powers. “Calm must return to De Esch, and residents must feel comfortable and safe. That is why I am using this power,” she said. Previous interventions — concrete barriers, increased police patrols, community outreach, direct talks with those causing the disruption — had all failed. The first night of the ban was described as immediately and dramatically quieter. “I slept wonderfully,” one resident told Rijnmond. “Now, the street is completely clean.”

Keep reading

Georgia Cops Keep Getting Arrested And Fired For Illegally Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People, But Surely Those 17 Bad Apples Aren’t Representative Of The Entire Bunch

“Another Georgia cop accused of misusing Flock data in growing trend,” the USA Today headline reads. If you remember now-former Braselton police chief Michael Steffman’s arrest on stalking charges last year, it would be understandable if you assumed CBS News meant a second Georgia officer had been arrested for misusing Flock’s license plate data to stalk their victims. There couldn’t be that many bad cops getting arrested in one state, right? Well, that depends on whether your definition of “not that many” because USA Today reports that at least 17 Georgia cops have been accused of Flock-stalking in just the last couple of months. 

Former Sergeant Kabiru Salawu lost the job he’d held with the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office since 2009, after he was arrested over allegations that he engaged in “unauthorized use of the agency’s Flock Safety technology.” Salawu currently faces a felony charge for violating his oath of office, but in Georgia, misuse of license plate data is charged as a misdemeanor. For now, the sheriff’s office hasn’t released any information on how it caught Salawu, nor have they explained what he’s accused of using Flock’s system to do.

According to CBS News, Salawu’s arrest brings the total number of law enforcement officers accused of abusing their access to the private surveillance system that tracks everyone everywhere all the time, even if you don’t drive a car or have a license plate visible, to 10 “in recent weeks.” Not months or years. Weeks. As internal audits continue, don’t be surprised to see those numbers rise in the coming weeks, either. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, and if internal audits turned up enough evidence to charge 17 officers over the last several months, it stands to reason that ongoing investigations will turn up evidence of even more abuses within the Georgia law enforcement community.

Keep reading

Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed

While Flock claims its system tracks vehicles, not people, the documented record of police chiefs stalking ex-partners through Flock shows otherwise. When the most experienced, highest-ranking officers in law enforcement, the people most responsible for enforcing the rules, demonstrate ongoing abuses, the answer is the same courts have given for each generation of powerful tracking technology: require a warrant first.

The police chief of Holiday Hills, Illinois, and a part-time officer at Prairie Grove Police Department, was arrested June 18, 2026, and charged with two counts of official misconduct, a Class 3 felony.

Prosecutors alleged he used Prairie Grove’s Flock license plate reader system and the Illinois State Police LEADS database to track six people he knew personally.

Three of those people were women the chief had been in romantic relationships with, according to prosecutors at his arraignment. He also tracked an ex-boyfriend of one of those women, running that man’s plate 140 times over several months, a figure the protective order petition put at 178, with 86 of those searches conducted while off duty.

Keep reading

“Why I’m Writing This Anonymously And What That Says About Free Speech In Britain”

Ann Widdecombe’s murder has reopened a question that surfaces from time to time: should politicians with ‘unfashionable’ views get extra protection? The investigation continues, so I won’t comment on that, but the fact that the question is even being asked in response to a 78 year-old woman being killed in her own home tells you something regardless of how the investigation concludes. We have been here before. Jo Cox in 2016. David Amess in 2021. A pattern is forming, whatever the final facts of this particular case turn out to be.

The debate this triggers is usually framed narrowly: what security do MPs need? I want to push it wider: what if politicians are not actually the group most exposed? They have protection officers, party machinery and a public profile that makes an attack on them a national story. I have none of that. Neither does anyone else who simply has an opinion and a job to protect.

I recently listened to Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, who argued that Britain may be entering a period of increasing internal conflict in which political violence becomes more likely.

Whether or not one accepts his analysis, it’s difficult to ignore the growing sense that our public discourse has become more hostile and less forgiving.

If expressing political disagreement increasingly carries the risk of intimidation or worse, the answer cannot simply be to provide more security for an ever-expanding list of public figures.

That treats the symptom rather than the disease.

The view from nowhere and a nobody in particular

I consider myself an ordinary person.

Thirty-plus years ago I would have considered myself slightly Left-leaning. I liked to think of myself as one of the good guys.

But somewhere in the last three decades the Overton window slid sideways, and views I’ve quietly held throughout – that mass immigration, legal and illegal, hasn’t obviously benefited the culture I grew up in, that free speech should mean everyone’s speech, including the people I disagree with – are now filed under ‘Right-wing’.

I don’t think I’m unusual. Look at the Brexit vote, which for many people was as much about sovereignty and control over immigration as it was about Brussels. Look at any poll on migration levels. There is a large, ordinary, non-extreme constituency that holds views broadly like mine. And a good number of them, I suspect, keep quiet for the same reason I’m staying anonymous here: weighing up whether speaking out is worth the risk. Silence can easily be mistaken for consensus, and I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Which raises a question I’ve had to sit with while writing this: am I a coward? Publishing anonymously, after all, is a way of having the argument without paying for it. But I don’t think cowardice is really what’s on display here. A coward stays silent. What I’m doing is closer to something else entirely: deciding that saying this at all matters more than saying it under my own name, while still not being willing to bet my livelihood on it. If that’s cowardice, then I suspect it’s shared by a very large, very quiet number of people who hold perfectly mainstream opinions and have simply done the same calculations that I have. That, in itself, might be the more troubling finding than anything else in this piece.

Fear arrives before the crackdown

This is the part I think gets missed in the security debate. We talk about authoritarianism as something that happens to you: a knock on the door, a lost job, a police caution for a tweet. But before any of that, there’s the version that happens inside your own head. You draft the post and delete it. You bite your tongue at the dinner table. You calculate what a client, a neighbour, or a local WhatsApp group might do with an honest opinion, and you decide it isn’t worth finding out.

That calculation isn’t paranoid. The variables feeding it are laid out in article after article in the Daily Sceptic. Prevent’s own material cites “cultural nationalism”, defined as the belief that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by specific ethnic and cultural groups, as a sub-category of extreme Right-wing ideology. Two-tier policing is underpinned by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Anti-Racism Commitment, which states that policing should not be “colour blind”, a principle many officers and members of the public have read as licence to treat people differently according to race. It is perhaps no coincidence that public trust in these institutions has been falling sharply. Gallup found that Britons’ confidence in the courts dropped 12 points in a single year to 57%, while confidence in local police fell 11 points to 64%, the largest year-on-year declines on record for either measure. When the referee looks like it’s picking sides, people stop trusting the game.

Campaigners have logged tens of thousands of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ a year, the great majority of them originating from something someone posted online. And after events like the Southport riots, an entire category of people were branded ‘far-Right thugs’ as a matter of editorial habit. None of this needs to end in a prosecution for it to work. Its function is to make you flinch before you speak, not after. And it’s working: a YouGov poll found that 57% of Britons admit to sometimes holding back their views for fear of a negative reaction, and research published earlier this year found the same pattern setting in even among teenagers, with around one in five saying they hide their political opinions at school to avoid being ‘cancelled’. Self-censorship of this kind isn’t a fringe habit. It’s now closer to a majority experience.

Nothing dramatic has happened to me. Nobody has knocked on my door. I have not been arrested, cautioned or sacked. I have simply chosen, before any of that could happen, to leave my name off this piece. That is precisely the point. Fear doesn’t need to become reality to change behaviour. The anticipation of it is enough.

That’s the self-censorship no one puts a number on, and I think it’s doing more to shrink public debate than any single policy or piece of legislation. Its success isn’t measured by how many people it punishes, but by how many quietly change their behaviour hoping never to be punished at all.

Keep reading