Tag: police state

Congress’s Failure Is Liberty’s Gain

Congress accidentally protected the American people’s liberty this week when it failed to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign citizens. However, it has been “interpreted” by the FISA court to allow US intelligence agencies to wiretap conversations between a US citizen and a foreign target of Section 702 surveillance. The intelligence agencies can then conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans who communicate with that American.

Section 702 has been promoted to the American people by promising that the warrantless wiretapping it authorizes would be used to protect Americans from terrorism. However, Section 702 warrantless surveillance is used for investigations of non-terrorist crimes like drug war crimes and is shared with the FBI.

An additional threat to privacy is contained in Section 622 of this year’s Intelligence Authorization Act. This new provision requires the president to share with Israel intelligence related to “cybersecurity threats, terrorism, sanctions evasion, plans and intentions of state and nonstate actors, adversarial technology proliferation, missile threats, unmanned aerial systems, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, air and space domain awareness, and other aerial threats.” Requiring the president to share intelligence with a foreign government is unprecedented and arguably violates the president’s constitutional authority as commander-in-chief. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who is the sponsor of this bill, is the type of military hawk who usually supports giving the president absolute power in foreign and military affairs, even when the president’s actions are blatantly unconstitutional.

There is nothing in Section 622 prohibiting US intelligence agencies from giving Israel intelligence information regarding American citizens collected via warrantless wiretapping. This provision may lead to increased surveillance of Americans who are working to end to US government’s uncritical support for Israel on the grounds that they may pose a security threat to the United States or Israel.

One reason Congress did not extend Section 702 last week was controversy over President Trump’s nomination of Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte as interim director of national intelligence. Some Democrats, and Republicans, objected to Pulte’s lack of experience in national security and intelligence. A reason Democrats opposed Pulte’s nomination is concern he will use the position to target the president’s political enemies similar to the way he Pulte used his current job to launch high-profile federal investigations into foes of President Trump like Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

President Trump and some of his aides and supporters claim they were targeted for unconstitutional surveillance as part of the “Russiagate” investigation. Also, several members of Congress have been targeted for warrantless surveillance. Yet President Trump and a bipartisan majority in Congress still support the surveillance state.

According to a declassified report, US intelligence agencies failed to implement reforms to minimize the collection and use of US citizens’ information. The agencies promised to make these reforms following Edward Snowden’s revelations of the extent of warrantless surveillance of US citizens.

The only way to protect the American people’s liberty is to dismantle the surveillance state and stop trading real liberty for phantom security. True security comes from replacing militarism and authoritarianism with liberty and peace.

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Starmer’s Social Media Ban, the Reinvention of the Surveillance State

Here is a fun fact to keep in your back pocket the next time a politician appears on the morning TV sofas to explain that the government’s new face-scanning and digital ID regime is really, deep down, about protecting your children.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, spent the first half of his career as a human rights lawyer and the second half running the Crown Prosecution Service.

He has argued for the individual against the state and he has aimed the full weight of the state at the individual. He has, in other words, seen this particular movie from both seats.

So when he tells you he has stumbled, blinking and innocent, into the most comprehensive surveillance apparatus in British peacetime history, do not extend him the courtesy of believing it. He spent twenty years learning precisely what these powers do to a person. He is not building this in his sleep.

And what he is building is a country in which you must ask permission to exist online. Not ask the platform. Ask the state. Before you read, post, store a photo, or send a message, you are expected to step up to the booth, show your papers, and prove you are a citizen the government has pre-approved.

The default setting of a free society, that you are left alone until you give the state a reason, is being flipped on its head. The new arrangement is that you are a suspect with a phone until you prove otherwise, and you prove it constantly, because proving it has been welded onto the act of going online and speaking at all.

That is the whole game. Everything else is set dressing.

Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?

You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport.

The face scan is sold to you as the polite option, the velvet rope. It is, in fact, the funnel and, at the bottom of the funnel, sits the national identity check that three million people already told this government, in no uncertain terms, to scrap.

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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.

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A Requiem for Privacy

When President Donald Trump appointed an obviously unqualified friend, a home builder executive, to be acting director of national intelligence, he inadvertently triggered attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The director of national intelligence is the head of the umbrella agency that gathers intelligence from the 17 federal spying agencies and from that data prepares and delivers the president’s daily briefing. Sec. 702, which permits warrantless spying, expires this month.

Trump prefers to receive his briefings directly from the CIA and its foreign colleagues, leaving the DNI as an appendage with little to do. Nevertheless, the DNI employs hundreds of spies and analysts, and most of them have national security clearances that permit them to view the nation’s most closely guarded secrets and to invade anyone’s privacy.

Section 702 of FISA theoretically permits federal agents to spy without warrants or suspicion on foreign persons. In reality, it is used as a fig leaf to spy on Americans.

A few years ago, Department of Justice lawyers persuaded the FISA court secretly to permit the National Security Agency — America’s domestic spies — to spy on Americans with whom foreign persons communicate; even suspicionless Americans whose communications with foreigners are benign; even Americans removed by six degrees from conversations with foreigners.

Before 9/11, no one in law enforcement was permitted access to data obtained outside the restraints imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Those restraints prohibit searches and seizures — in the modern parlance, surveillance and data acquisition — without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, sworn to under oath. And the warrant itself must specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Since 9/11, the wall between surveillance and law enforcement has collapsed even though the feds still maintain that the Fourth Amendment only regulates law enforcement and not surveillance. This wild proposition is defied by the plain language of the amendment, which protects all persons from all government, and by the history of the colonists dealing with British government agents executing general warrants issued by a secret court in London.

Those warrants permitted the bearers to arrest whomever they wished, to search wherever they chose and to seize whatever they found. Under the pretext of looking for evidence of crimes, like failing to comply with the Stamp Act, these agents were truly looking for what the king considered subversive, like a draft of the Declaration of Independence.

James Madison and his colleagues who drafted the Fourth Amendment surely knew that history and shared the near universal colonial revulsion at general warrants. Hence the requirements in the amendment for probable cause of crime sworn to before the warrant-issuing judge, and specificity in the warrant itself.

All of this was crafted to outlaw general warrants, and protect all persons in America from warrantless government assaults and invasions of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

Now, back to FISA. FISA was crafted in reaction to President Richard Nixon’s use of the CIA and FBI for warrantless domestic surveillance purposes. This was spying on Americans — opponents of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s political opponents — which as we all now know came crashing down on Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

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France’s Own Hack Is the Best Argument Against Its War on Encryption

Brussels and a run of European governments, France loud among them, have spent the past few years treating strong encryption as a problem to be solved.

The argument behind proposals like Chat Control is that the state needs a way to scan private messages to keep people safe and that it can be trusted to hold that kind of access without abusing it or losing control of it.

But France just handed that argument an awkward rebuttal. Tchap, the messenger the French government built for its own civil servants, got breached.

France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, detected the compromise on June 7, and DINUM, the digital affairs directorate that runs the platform, blocked the account involved and published an incident notice.

The intrusion broke neither the encryption nor the servers. Someone hijacked a legitimate user account, which is all an attacker needs when any one credential is a key to the same building.

That detail is the part the backdoor crowd keeps refusing to absorb. The encryption on Tchap did its job. DINUM says private conversations stay end-to-end encrypted even when an account is impersonated and that the attacker could reach only the unencrypted public chat rooms any authenticated user is able to find.

Security researchers were quick to note what that reassurance skips over. An attacker wearing a real user’s identity can see whatever that account sees in the moment, private rooms included.

A government backdoor is exactly that, an access path bolted on beside working encryption and France just demonstrated it cannot keep one of those paths shut for a single weekend.

DINUM has notified CNIL, the French data protection regulator, because personal information may have surfaced in whatever the attacker viewed. The directorate described its handling of the intrusion in a press release.

“At this stage, the account originating the malicious requests has been identified. It was immediately blocked to remove the attacker’s persistent access and allow for a thorough analysis of the data they were able to access. The investigation continues, including the study of event logs, to identify the conversations that the attacker was able to access and the nature of the exfiltrated data,” DINUM said.

The directorate also pushed responsibility back toward its own users, reminding them where the safe lines were supposed to be.

“A message has been sent to all Tchap users reminding them that a public chat room can be found and joined by any user and that its content is not encrypted. In accordance with Tchap’s terms of service, no personal, sensitive, or confidential information should be exchanged in public chat rooms: such exchanges should be reserved for private chat rooms.”

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Britain Goes Full ‘Airstrip One’

In George Orwell’s 1984, Great Britain was just a province of Oceania named “Airstrip One” as a none-too-subtle nod to the U.K.’s role as host to the heavy bombers of U.S. Eighth Air Force during World War II.

Four decades past the real 1984, and there’s still no Oceania. But Britain looks more and more like Airstrip One as Parliament considers a bill opening up everyone’s smartphone to government supervision — and jail time for tech execs who don’t submit.

You had to figure this was probably coming, right?

Right.

Reclaim the Net reports that “Ministers are reportedly drafting a law that would force Apple, Google, and the rest to make it impossible for a child to send, receive, view, or share a single nude image, with the executives who refuse facing up to five years in prison.”

That might sound all well and good, but as usual, For the Children™ is little more than the government’s justification for total surveillance.

“You cannot block every naked picture someone might stumble across without inspecting every picture, every message, every video call, every streamed film, on every device, all the time,” Reclaim noted, with nudity serving as “the excuse and the unbroken view into your phone is the actual prize.”

The industry term is “client-side scanning,” which sounds much nicer than “a government mandated app that looks at everything on your phone all the time.”

And even that sounds better than “Big Brother is Watching You,” which is exactly what it is.

As already required by Britain’s Online Safety Act, Apple and Google forcibly install age verification on every iPhone and Android device in the UK via app store updates.

No, it can’t be uninstalled.

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Ohio police chief arrested in Florida after grand jury hands down 70-count child sex indictment

An Ohio police chief is facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars after being slapped with a 70-count indictment for alleged sex crimes involving a child.

Bethel Police Chief Chad Essert, 44, was taken into custody without incident Tuesday night in Seminole, Florida, by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. 

A Clermont County grand jury indicted the Blanchester, Ohio, resident on 56 counts of sexual battery and 14 counts of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor — all third-degree felonies.

If convicted of all charges, Essert faces a maximum penalty of 280 years in prison.

The allegations stem from offenses that authorities claim occurred between 2005 and 2010, while Essert was an instructor at the “Young Marines” and a teacher at Scarlet Oaks Career

Officials said the alleged victim was a student of Essert’s and that the crimes took place across multiple locations in Clermont and Hamilton counties.

“It takes tremendous courage for a victim to come forward, especially when the accused wears a badge and holds a position of authority,” Clermont County Sheriff Chris Stratton said following the indictment.

“Today’s indictment demonstrates that no one is above the law. Every victim deserves to be heard, and every allegation will be thoroughly investigated and pursued in accordance with the law.”

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Ontario Court grants TDF Amish client leave to appeal Quarantine Act convictions

The Democracy Fund (TDF) is pleased with the Ontario Court of Justice’s decision granting leave to appeal in a Quarantine Act ticket case.

The client, a member of the Amish community from southern Ontario, allegedly failed to complete the ArriveCan app or PCR testing when crossing the border. He received a $6,500 ticket but never received notice of a trial date or conviction. When the ticket went unpaid, the municipality sent it to collections, complicating his ability to get loans for the farming equipment he uses to farm his land and feed his family. TDF sought to have the ticket reopened, but the court refused – an outcome inconsistent with TDF’s other Amish ticket reopening cases.

TDF’s legal defence of the Amish challenges convictions totalling over $300,000 dollars issued under the Quarantine Act for alleged non-compliance with ArriveCAN app and PCR testing requirements during Canada’s COVID-19 border measures.

The Amish have a religious prohibition on any modern technology, including smartphones, computers, and software applications. This makes interacting with the modern world difficult. TDF’s Amish clients were convicted in absentia; they received no meaningful notice of the tickets or court dates.

TDF Director of Litigation Adam Blake-Gallipeau, who has represented multiple Amish families throughout these proceedings, stated:

“We are cautiously optimistic that once the Ontario Court of Justice reviews this decision, it will reverse the lower court’s ruling. Canadian courts should understand the Amish community’s traditional way of life within the broader context of religious freedom. The Amish live simply according to their Biblical principles, provide for their families through subsistence farming, and lack the means to pay the massive fines that threaten the existence of their communities. We intend to impress upon the Court the serious issues at stake, including inadequate notice and the inconsistent treatment of nearly identical reopening applications. We’re hopeful that these convictions will be overturned on appeal.”

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America the Unfree—Home of the Policed, Surveilled and Occupied

“I love the inflation.”—Donald Trump (June 2026)

“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”—Donald Trump (May 2026)

America has become an occupied nation.

Not by one invading army, but by many occupying powers: the police state, the surveillance state, the war state, the corporate state, the foreign influence machine, and a ruling class that treats the American people as little more than collateral damage in its pursuit of power, profit and control.

We have been policed, surveilled, taxed, indebted, manipulated, censored, tracked, searched, silenced and sold out.

Foreign powers are buying up our farmland, buying favor with the Trump family, weaseling their way into the White House, dictating national policy, and now—with the backing of the Trump administration and bipartisan support in Congress—one of America’s closest partners-in-crime may soon gain even greater access to U.S. intelligence and surveillance capabilities.

This is what we have come to.

The swamp under President Trump has taken on a decidedly foreign flavor: any nation with enough money, leverage or strategic value to enrich the Trump family can now get its hands on a piece of the American pie—all the while, the American people continue to struggle to survive Trump’s self-enrichment schemes, broken promises, endless wars, militarized streets and vanity projects.

We’re being sold to the highest bidders, and still nothing is being done to protect us.

Ordinary Americans are told there is not enough money to honor the government’s promises to them. Social Security’s retirement trust fund is now projected to run short in late 2032, at which point retirees could face an automatic 22 percent cut in scheduled benefits if Congress fails to act. Medicare’s hospital insurance fund is projected to run short the following year. Seniors, the disabled, working families and the poor are told to brace for sacrifice.

But there is always money for war.

There is always money for surveillance.

There is always money for police-state crackdowns, border militarization, private contractors, foreign aid, weapons systems, tax breaks for the wealthy, slush funds for political allies, and spectacles of imperial excess.

While Americans worry about groceries, rent, medical bills, job security, retirement and whether their children will inherit anything resembling freedom, the White House is being turned into a playground for power and celebrity. Trump’s June 14 birthday celebration is reportedly set to include a UFC fight on the White House lawn, with weigh-ins at the Lincoln Memorial, transforming public symbols of sacrifice, liberty and national memory into props for one man’s vanity show.

This, too, is occupation.

Not merely the occupation of land, but the occupation of the public imagination. The occupation of the people’s institutions. The occupation of the Constitution itself.

The contrast could not be more obscene.

On June 8, 1789, James Madison rose in the House of Representatives to introduce amendments to the Constitution that would become the Bill of Rights. Madison and the founding generation fought to bind the government down. They understood that written limits on government power were not optional. They were essential.

Today’s rulers are fighting to free the government from those restraints.

They want fewer limits on surveillance, police power, presidential immunity, war-making, foreign entanglements, secrecy, corruption, and the ability of the rich and powerful to buy their way into the machinery of government.

That is how far we have fallen.

From a Bill of Rights, we have descended into a bill of sale.

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Former U.S. Marine Who Advised VP JD Vance on Myanmar Detained by Myanmar Authorities

A former U.S. Marine officer and former head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar has been detained by Myanmar authorities.

Adam Castillo, who was traveling to Myanmar to promote his new book, “Finding Our Voice,” which critiques Myanmar’s Junta for human rights abuses, was detained as he re-entered the Southeast Asian nation.

The U.S. State Department has since been briefed on Castillo’s arrest but has not released a comment due to “privacy concerns.”

Per Reuters:

An American businessman who wrote a book about living through a military coup ‌in Myanmar was detained on his return to the Southeast Asian ‌nation on Thursday, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Adam Castillo, a former head ​of the American Chamber of Commerce in Myanmar who is based in Yangon where he runs a security firm, was stopped at an airport after traveling to the country, one of the people said.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said it was ‌aware of reports of ⁠the detention of an American in Myanmar but had no further comment “due to privacy concerns”.

A spokesperson for the military-backed government ⁠did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In July of last year, Castillo attended a meeting at Vice President JD Vance’s office to discuss U.S. relations with Myanmar.

In the meeting, Castillo suggested the United States “could play a peace-broker role in Myanmar and urged Washington to take a page out of China’s playbook by first brokering a bilateral self-governance deal between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA).

Castillo has been among several voices urging Washington to adopt strategic policies toward Myanmar, given the country’s status as the third-largest producer of rare earth minerals/metals.

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