Tag: police state

Judge Denies Immunity to Texas Cops in Meme Arrest Case

A federal judge has refused to throw out the civil rights lawsuit filed by a Texas journalist arrested over a satirical Facebook meme and declined to grant qualified immunity to the sheriff and investigator who put him in jail.

Chief US District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled on July 20 that Kolton Krottinger’s suit can move forward against Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds and former deputy James Luckie.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

O’Connor wrote that Krottinger “sufficiently alleged that Luckie and Sheriff Deeds violated his clearly established rights to be free from arrest without probable cause, malicious prosecution, and First Amendment Retaliation.”

The ruling keeps alive claims of First Amendment retaliation, unlawful arrest, malicious prosecution, and Fourth Amendment violations.

Qualified immunity shields officers from suit unless they broke rights already clearly established in law, and it ends most cases of this kind before they reach discovery. O’Connor found that Krottinger cleared that bar.

Krottinger, a 36-year-old Navy veteran, runs several Hood County news pages on Facebook and a nonprofit, Anxiety Solutions of America, that operates a 21-acre ranch for veterans and first responders. Governor Greg Abbott named him an honorary admiral of the Texas Navy in January 2025.

His arrest traces to a satire image posted to a satirical page called Hood County Sheepdogs during a Granbury school board race. The meme made it look as though Tina Brown, a regular speaker at county commissioners’ meetings, had endorsed a candidate she actually opposed. Brown reported the post on October 6, saying she had not made it.

C.J. Grisham, a First Amendment attorney representing Krottinger, said the meme was meant “to poke fun at the two people who can’t stand each other…endorsing that person. That’s the joke of it.”

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“USA Isn’t A PiggyBank For Europe”: Trump Launches Section 301 Probe Into EU Over Big Tech Fines

Trump Says US Begins Section 301 Investigation on Europe 

President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the US will launch a Section 301 investigation into the European Union for “robbing American companies, in turn, the American Taxpayer.” 

Trump said Brussels is using America as a “PIGGYBANK” by fining Big Tech companies billions and billions of dollars.

Trump listed the technology companies that have been fined a combined billions of dollars:

After having fined Apple, for no reason at all, 15 Billion Dollars, Meta, 3 Billion Dollars, Amazon 2.5 Billion Dollars, and many others, we have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another 1 Billion Dollars, without explanation. This brings the Google total to over 18 Billion Dollars!

Trump continued:

This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it’s not going to continue during the Trump Administration.

He added:

The United States of America is not a “PIGGYBANK” for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!

Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that we will immediately initiate a 301 Investigation into the practice of “ROBBING” American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer.

The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about.

The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substantial TARIFF to be placed on them at the earliest possible moment.

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India Cuts Mobile Internet in Delhi Amid Cockroach Protests

The Indian government answered a week of youth protests in the capital by ordering the mobile networks around them switched off.

Telecom operators cut mobile data across much of central Delhi on Thursday at the government’s instruction. Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone-Idea, the carriers that run India’s networks, complied.

The blackout took digital payments down with it. Vendors, shopkeepers, and restaurants were left unable to take money.

It was the widest mobile blackout in the capital since the farmers’ protests of 2021.

The demonstrators want Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan gone. They protest under the banner of the Cockroach movement, a name lifted from a chief justice who reportedly likened young Indians to “cockroaches” and “parasites.”

Their grievance is the leak of the NEET-UG medical entrance exam, which forced roughly two million students to take it again. The leaks have been linked to several student suicides.

“We will not leave this place until Dharmendra Pradhan resigns,” Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka said.

Police met a march to Parliament on Monday with tear gas and batons, and protesters answered with stones. At least 178 people, including security personnel, were injured.

The same exam scandal has now produced two communications shutdowns.

The government banned Telegram across India in June, cutting off more than 150 million users, after claiming cheating rings used the app during the leak. It reached for Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, the power it holds to block platforms.

The leak came from inside the exam system. India’s own testing agency said “there is no such paper available outside the secured examination chain,” and the channels blamed for it were selling access to material that did not exist.

The insiders who produced the leak are the subject of a police investigation.

Pradhan has not resigned, and the networks in central Delhi stayed dark.

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India Orders GitHub to Block BitChat

India’s Cyber Crime Coordination Centre last night ordered GitHub to disable access to BitChat, the peer-to-peer messaging app backed by Jack Dorsey. The order, Notice No. 11072601011432, went out at 11:16 pm under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, read with Rule 3(1)(d) of the IT Rules, 2021.

It named three repositories, including the Android application and its release files, and gave GitHub three hours to take them down. It warned that failure would cost the platform its safe harbor and open it to criminal prosecution.

The government did not publish the order. The public learned of it from a post by Jack Dorsey, whose team develops BitChat, who wrote that “the government of India does not like technologies like BitChat and wants it taken down.”

BitChat is open source and uncensorable, and is one of Reclaim The Net’s recommended messaging apps for situations where the internet may be cut off. It carries messages from phone to phone over Bluetooth, hopping between nearby devices, with “no internet, servers, phone numbers, or accounts.” It keeps working when the mobile network does not.

Around this protest, the government, getting increasingly brazen with its blocking orders, has switched the mobile network off. Since July 17 the Ministry of Home Affairs has suspended mobile internet around Jantar Mantar in New Delhi about five times.

The most recent suspension ran from 4 pm to midnight on July 23, inside a 1.5-kilometer radius that takes in Janpath and part of Connaught Place. People at the site reported signal jammers, and walking two kilometers before a phone found a signal.

Inside that radius, a student separated from her group during a detention sweep could not send a message to say where she was.

The protesters are students. Tens of thousands have camped at Jantar Mantar since June, demanding accountability for the leak of the NEET medical entrance exam and the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Their march to Parliament was refused. Metro stations near the site were closed.

When the shutdowns cut the network, protesters turned to BitChat and other Bluetooth mesh apps to reach each other inside the dead zone.

The order did not name a single message sent on BitChat. It just objected to what the app can do. In the agency’s words, BitChat “significantly impedes lawful interception, attribution, and investigation,” and could be used during “public disorder, riots, terrorism, organized crime, or internet shutdowns.”

The order lists internet shutdowns among the dangers. The government has imposed one at Jantar Mantar. BitChat kept working inside it.

The order used Section 79(3)(b) to demand the block. In 2015, in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, the Supreme Court held that Section 79(3)(b) lets the government require a takedown only through a court order, or a notice confined to the grounds in Article 19(2) of the Constitution.

India has a separate law for blocking an app, Section 69A, which requires a hearing and reasons set down in writing. The order against GitHub used neither. It went out through the Home Ministry’s Sahyog portal, the channel Indian High Courts are now hearing constitutional challenges against.

The order says the repositories hold information prohibited under law. It names none. It points instead to what the app is “capable of” enabling.

It reaches into criminal law as well. Alongside Section 43 of the IT Act, a civil compensation provision, it invokes conspiracy and abetment under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023, against a platform that hosts code.

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The Fourth Amendment Is Being Liquidated by Subscription

The black pole does not look like tyranny.

That is the point.

It looks like street furniture. A small black camera. A solar panel. A utility box. Nothing dramatic. No uniformed officer standing beside it. No marked police vehicle. No flashing lights. No warrant presented to the driver. In many communities, there was barely any public debate before it appeared.

Yet the device photographs nearly every vehicle that passes. It reads the license plate, records the time and location, identifies the make, model and color, and may catalogue distinctive features such as bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, scratches and damage. That information is uploaded into a cloud platform where police can search for vehicles across time and geography. [1]

The government once needed detectives, informants, stakeouts and court orders to follow someone across a city.

Now it can type a plate number into a privately operated dashboard.

Flock Safety calls this public safety.

A more accurate description is a privately administered ledger of American movement.

This is not merely a story about one overly ambitious technology company. Flock is the case study, but the real subject is the creation of a public-private surveillance regime in which corporations collect the data, venture capital finances the infrastructure, local governments purchase access, federal agencies find side doors into the system, and ordinary citizens are told that none of this is particularly concerning because they were technically visible while driving on a public road.

The state did not formally repeal the Fourth Amendment.

It outsourced its erosion.

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An Explosion of Surveillance Towers is Coming to U.S. Borders, Costing Over $1 Billion

A new report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to nearly triple the number of surveillance towers along U.S. borders, from the current 830 to 2,300 by 2034.

DHS expects to expend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for this dangerous expansion of a surveillance network indiscriminately trained on towns, school playgrounds, backyards, and vehicles—threatening the privacy and civil liberties of everyone in the border regions.

The towers are planned as part of DHS component Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Integrated Surveillance Tower (IST) program, which captures images of people and vehicles. The IST program operates autonomous surveillance towers, consisting of autonomous surveillance towers, consisting of AI-based systems using radar, thermal infrared and optical systems to track targets over long distances; integrated fixed towers, optimized for surveilling foot traffic and vehicles; and remote video surveillance systems, which can often be found very close to the border fence in Arizona, including residential neighborhoods where cameras are capable of spying on homes on both sides of the border. (For a description and photos of these technologies, see EFF’s updated guide to surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico Border.)

DHS expects to purchase more long-range autonomous towers and to upgrade existing towers with autonomous capabilities. The $1 billion comes from the so-called One Big Beautiful Act—a massive tax and spending law that President Trump signed in 2025, the report says.

The explosive expansion of border surveillance is a digital dumpster fire for human rights and civil liberties. It’s not just surveillance towers; drones, aerostats, surveillance vehicles, ground sensors, game cameras, and license plate readers are also part of the vast taxpayer-funded infrastructure that threatens all those who live, work, or seek refuge in the borderlands. This technology isn’t exclusive to U.S. federal agencies: it’s also deployed by state and local law enforcement, and even by governments on the Mexican side.

Since 2022, EFF has studied and mapped surveillance technology along the U.S.-Mexico border using public records research, open-source intelligence, and fact-finding trips, and created a handy interactive map to provide researchers and journalists with the tools they need to analyze the impact of U.S. border security policy. We have also documented the different types of surveillance technology in a zine, “Surveillance Technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border.” We updated the publication earlier this year to help people identify the machinery of homeland security by adding more models of surveillance towers, newly deployed military tech, and a gallery of disguised trail cams and automated license plate readers.

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IRS Threatens to Seize Tennessee Man’s Farm Over Interest Charged on Accidental Refund That He IMMEDIATELY Tried to Return

The IRS is threatening to seize a Tennessee man’s farm after charging him interest on a refund it accidentally sent him in 2022.

Wilson Perry Kirby, 76, received an accidental $20,000 refund from the IRS on May 10, 2022, and he immediately tried to return the unspent money through his accountant.

More than four years later and Kirby is still fighting the IRS!

The IRS is withholding Kirby’s $1,800 refund from 2025 and is now threatening to seize his Coopertown farm over interest charges up to $4,300.

“I’ve tried the president, governor, mayor. They don’t mind asking you to vote for them, but when you need help you can’t get a hold of nobody,” Kirby told WTVF.

Kirby said he thought the matter was resolved earlier this year when he heard from Senator Marsha Blackburn.

“Well, they called me right before I went on television this last time and said it was settled, from Marsha Blackburn’s office,” Kirby said.

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Gestapo Tactics: German State Starts Banning AfD Candidates from Running for Office Because They Might Win

While the aging dictator of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega this week announced he was suspending elections indefinitely, Europe seems to be on a similar path – as Victor Orban’s Hungarian Fidesz Party was raided Wednesday and had their servers confiscated, and Romanian Presidential elections were anulled 2024. Now, Germany seems to have discovered a new strategy – as legacy parties are simply excluding candidates from the patriotic AfD party from elections.

Local elections are set to take place in the state of Lower Saxony, home of Volkswagen and surrounding the Free City of Hamburg, on Sept. 13, where the Alternative for Germany party is currently polling at about 20% behind Christian Democrats and Social Democrats at about 25% each. Nationally, the AfD is currently the strongest party in the polls at about 29%, and may even win a majority in the East German states of Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which elect new state parliaments and state governments in September.

So the failing legacy parties are resorting to ever more repressive measures. Along with the ever-present threat of Antifa violence, debanking, and media slander, efforts have been underway to ban the largest opposition party outright. Since the German secret political police have not been able to prove the AfD is a danger to democracy in court, these efforts by the ruling Social Democrats seem doomed to fail.

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Ga. police supervisor arrested after Flock audit, department says

Yet another metro Atlanta law enforcement member has been arrested for allegedly misusing the department’s Flock license plate reader system.

Paige Forte, a 30-year-old supervisor with the Conyers Police Department’s Real-Time Crime Center, allegedly used the system to search for her domestic partner’s car several times. The searches were flagged during an audit, according to police.

Rockdale County Jail records show Forte was arrested on Wednesday and charged with prohibited use of law enforcement-retained license plate data. The police department asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to complete its own criminal investigation.

In its own statement, the GBI said Forte allegedly accessed the system “for non-law enforcement purposes” more than 30 times between April and July this year.

Forte has been put on administrative leave following the outcome of the police department’s internal investigation.

“The integrity of our department depends on the public’s confidence that we use technology responsibly and within the law,” Conyers Police Chief Scott Freeman said in a statement. “No employee is above the law, and we will continue to hold ourselves to the highest standards of accountability.”

Several law enforcement officers in Georgia — including three Fayetteville police officers, three Cherokee County deputies, one DeKalb County deputy and one Greene County deputy — have recently been disciplined for allegedly using their departments’ Flock systems outside of official law enforcement activity.

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Our women’s rights billboard truck triggered a ‘hate crime’ investigation

Tonight on The Ezra Levant Show: police investigate our billboard truck over a hate crime complaint after it displayed a message defending women’s rights.

When a political message on a billboard truck is enough to trigger a hate-crime investigation, it raises serious questions about where public debate is heading.

In downtown Toronto, our Rebel News billboard truck carrying a message from the Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar) became the subject of a police investigation after a passerby complained about the advertisement.

The message was simple: women and girls deserve safety on the field, privacy and dignity in the locker room, and fairness on the podium.

The truck had been driving around Toronto for days, including during a busy downtown soccer event where the message was widely seen by passersby. But after driver Mark parked legally near St. Clair Avenue and briefly stepped away, everything changed.

When he returned and attempted to leave, an officer approached and told him the truck had to remain in place because it was being investigated for a hate crime.

Mark had not been parked illegally. He had not been accused of causing any disturbance. He was not asked for his licence or ID. He was simply told police needed to investigate a complaint about the message displayed on the truck.

A second and then third police vehicle arrived as officers dealt with the complainant, who had objected to the advertisement and claimed he felt “unsafe.”

When Rebel News reporters arrived and began filming, the complainant turned his camera toward them, questioned why they were recording him, and again told police he felt unsafe. Officers ultimately confirmed the journalists had every right to film in public.

After speaking with the complainant, police determined the billboard was a political statement, not a hate crime. No charges were laid, no ticket was issued, and Mark was allowed to drive away.

That is the real story: not just the complaint, but how quickly a political disagreement escalated into a police response.

The officers ultimately handled the situation properly. But the fact that a message about women’s safety and fairness was enough for someone to call police and trigger a hate-crime investigation should concern anyone who values free expression.

The truck will keep rolling. In fact, we will keep it on the road even longer as a reminder that free speech cannot depend on whether everyone agrees with the message.

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