Tag: police state

The Incremental Normalization Of Police Murderbots Probably Needs More Attention

One of the most under-discussed topics in the world right now is how governments have been incrementally pacing the public toward accepting the use of police robots that kill people.

The city of San Francisco has voted to legalize the use of killbots in specific emergency situations like active shooters and suicide bombers, with high-ranking officers making the call as to whether their use is warranted.

“Police in San Francisco will be allowed to deploy potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations,” The Guardian reports. “The controversial policy was approved after weeks of scrutiny and a heated debate among the city’s board of supervisors during their meeting on Tuesday.”

“The proposed policy does not lay out specifics for how the weapons can and cannot be equipped, leaving open the option to arm them,” The Guardian reports, adding that the current plan is to equip them with “explosive charges” rather than firearms.

We are seeing more and more expansions in the normalization of militarized police robots, to the point where there are now significant escalations from year to year. Last year I wrote a piece on the way police departments in the US and Canada have been normalizing the use of quadrupedal robots (disingenuously labeled “dogs” for PR purposes) for tasks like surveilling hostage situations and enforcing Covid restrictions. A few months later I had to write another one on this trend because arms manufacturers had begun designing firearms specifically to be mounted on those same quadruped bots. The year before during the 2020 George Floyd protests it was revealed that police had been using drones to surveil demonstrations in US cities, including the Predator drone normally used overseas by the US military.

Now the Oakland Police Department is pushing for the use of robots armed with shotguns. Police have already used a robot armed with a bomb to kill a suspect in Texas. Every year we’re seeing more steps toward the normalized ubiquitousness of unmanned weapons systems for domestic use in western civilization.

It makes sense that the US, whose police force is more heavily funded than almost any other nation’s military force, is leading this charge. As John and Nisha Whitehead explain for The Rutherford Institute, this ongoing expansion of police robot militarization tracks alongside the steadily increasing militarization of police forces in the US more generally; SWAT teams first appeared in California the 1960s, by 1980 the US was seeing 3,000 SWAT team-style raids per year, and by 2014 that number had soared to 80,000. It’s probably a lot higher now.

“These robots, often acquired by local police departments through federal grants and military surplus programs, signal a tipping point in the final shift from a Mayberry style of community policing to a technologically-driven version of law enforcement dominated by artificial intelligence, surveillance, and militarization,” write Whitehead and Whitehead, adding, “It’s only a matter of time before these killer robots intended for use as a last resort become as common as SWAT teams.”

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France Requires Heirloom Weapons to Be Turned In Across the Country

France has launched a weeklong campaign for collecting unregistered firearms and ammunition, mostly targeting old and heirloom pieces.

The French government announced its campaign, which ended on Dec. 2, for collecting and destroying old firearms—targeting the around 5 million such pieces that people in the country have. These firearms are mostly remnants from the two World Wars, as France was once the scene of many of the last century’s battles. Other weapons may be old hunting firearms that have not been in use for years.

People that want to keep such firearms will need to register them in the state registration system and undergo checks every year.

“We believe there are about 5 or 6 million weapons that are being kept in an irregular manner by our fellow citizens,” said Jean-Simon Merandat, head of the Interior Ministry’s Central Service for Arms and Explosives. “Eighty to ninety percent of these weapons are in their possession due to an inheritance.”

The campaign has collected at least 1.6 million munition pieces but only 65,000 firearms, the majority of which will be destroyed, and some may be preserved.

“We expect those with historic or cultural value to be spared destruction and brought to one or several museums,” Merandat added.

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Ye and the grim rise of Very Online Racism

There was me thinking that Ye couldn’t sink any lower. Boy, was I wrong. In his appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars show on Thursday, accompanied by racist dateless wonder Nick Fuentes, the artist formerly known as Kanye West plumbed new depths of bilious anti-Semitism, all while wearing a black mask-cum-balaclava.

His somewhat fashy head gear turned out to be appropriate, given what Ye would later come out with. He praised Hitler several times. ‘Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler’, he said. Hitler ‘seems like a cool guy’, West added, as he painted the greatest criminal of the 20th century as an underappreciated fashion icon and civil engineer.

West’s thin pretence for his Hitler loving – that he just ‘loves everyone’ – wore thin pretty quickly. ‘The Holocaust is not what happened’, he said, unprompted, at one point. At another, impersonating Benjamin Netanyahu, via the means of a toy fishing net (seriously), West rehearsed all of the most poisonous tropes: ‘We have the control of the history books, we have the control of the banks, and we have to go and kill people.’

Jones, recently bankrupted over his claims that the Sandy Hook shooting was faked, somehow became the voice of reason, simply by being the only one present capable of explicitly criticising Hitler. He kept trying to give Ye a ladder to climb down, to no avail. ‘I’m in the Twilight Zone right now’, said an exasperated Jones. This is the man who thinks chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay.

The surreal nature of it all didn’t make it any less sickening. In Ye, we see a fusion of many of the most poisonous forms of anti-Semitism, expressed in almost faux naif form, from black-nationalist blather about black people being the real Jews to all the old tropes about Jewish media and Jewish banks. The comments under each and every viral clip reveal how much purchase this ancient racism has among various online cliques.

At the same time, there is something very modern about Ye’s almost giddy outbursts. Indeed, in his bizarre new partnership with Fuentes, a 24-year-old livestreamer who shot to infamy after the 2017 far-right Charlottesville rally, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right-adjacent shit-stirrer who was kicked off Twitter before it was cool, West has aligned himself with what we might call Very Online Racism – the poisonous phenomenon of racism as a form of trolling.

When it first emerged, what marked out the alt-right, the loose association of cunts who latched on to Trump’s election and whose company Ye appears increasingly to be keeping, was the sense that it was almost more interested in getting a reaction than achieving goals or power. So marginal are these freaks in actual, offline society that outrage has become their currency, their business model, their entire reason for existing – the thirst for ‘liberal tears’ overwhelming almost everything else.

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New Zealand admits it has direct access to Facebook takedown portal where it can flag content for censorship

New Zealand’s government has officially admitted that it has partner access to Facebook’s controversial content takedown portal.

This portal is designed specifically for government agencies to flag content to Facebook for censorship. According to The Intercept, which reported on the portal in October, government partners can also use the portal to “report disinformation directly” to Facebook.

And in a recent response to a New Zealand Official Information Act (OIA) request, which asked whether the government has partner access to Facebook’s takedown portal, the New Zealand government confirmed that the Department of Internal Affairs has access. While this was the only government department that was confirmed to have access to the portal, the OIA response also said “we cannot advise if any other government agency has access to the takedown portal.”

We obtained a copy of the OIA response for you here.

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New ATF Rule Could Turn Millions of Gun Owners into Felons, Literally Overnight

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is set to release its final rule on Braced firearms later this month.

In Analyzing the proposed rule, which was released June 2021, it appears that ATF has intentionally designed its Factoring Criteria for Rifled Barrel Weapons with Accessories Commonly Referred to as “Stabilizing Braces” to effect a complete ban of every pistol-braced firearm currently on the market.

Masquerading as a helpful rulemaking “to assist” gun owners and the firearms industry in complying with the law, in reality the proposed rule is designed with the obvious and specific intent to largely outlaw the use of stabilizing braces on firearms, threatening millions of current owners with imprisonment and putting a large segment of the gun industry out of business entirely.

To accomplish this goal, the proposed rule creates “Worksheet 4999,” which contains three sections of analysis, each more restrictive than the last, designed to ensure that virtually no stabilizing brace is eligible for use on a non-rifle firearm, and thereafter ensuring that most firearms do not qualify to even use an allowed stabilizing brace.

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IRS Warning Americans to Report $600 Transactions From Payment Processors or Risk Facing Audit

The Internal Revenue Service reminds taxpayers to report transactions of at least $600 made through payment networks like Venmo, Paypal, and Cash App as the agency seeks to obtain data regarding part-time employment and side gigs, a move that critics have termed government overreach.

In a recent explainer posted online, the IRS said that according to the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, any payment made after March 11, 2021, that exceeds $600 must be reported. The target of the new reporting rule is small business owners, and people working side hustles or part-time gigs for extra income. Earlier the reporting threshold was $20,000 and more than 200 transactions within a calendar year. But, the amended rule applies to a single transaction.

“You should receive Form 1099-K by January 31 if, in the prior calendar year, you received payments from all payment card transactions (e.g., debit, credit, or stored-value cards), and in settlement of third-party payment network transactions above the minimum reporting thresholds,” said the agency.

The reporting guidelines do not apply to noncommercial payments such rent, vacation, food, or one-time transactions like selling something online. The Form 1099-K will be sent by the payment platforms through which the transaction was done.

If a form is received by mistake, “contact the Payment Settlement Entity (PSE) listed on the Form 1099-K” or provide an explanation in the tax return, according to the agency.

Failure to report transactions on Form 1099-K could trigger an audit by the IRS since the agency receives a copy of the form.

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What’s missing from the Twitter files: The truth about the FBI

Elon Musk half-delivered on his promise to tell all about Twitter’s censorship of The New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. What was missing were details of specific warnings we know the FBI made to Twitter about a Russian “hack and leak operation” involving Hunter during their weekly meetings with top executives of the social media giant in the days and weeks before The Post published its exclusive bombshell.

We know that FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan testified Tuesday in a lawsuit against the Biden administration brought by Republican attorneys that he organized those weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook in San Francisco for as many as seven Washington-based FBI agents in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter’s then-head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth has stated in a sworn declaration that he was told during those meetings to expect “hack-and-leak operations” by state actors involving Hunter Biden.

Twitter cited its new “hacked materials” policy on October 14, 2020, when it locked The Post’s account for two weeks and censored our story revealing an email from Hunter’s Ukrainian benefactor thanking him for meeting with his father, the then-VP, in Washington, DC. The email was not “hacked material”; it came from Hunter’s laptop, which was the legal possession of Delaware computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac. The Post published an image of the Dec. 2019 subpoena issued to Mac Isaac for the laptop which Hunter had abandoned at his store eight months earlier.

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Check out this new software tool the government is sponsoring to use friends and family members to “correct” social media posts

Have you ever been on social media and had a weird moment of déjà vu? You post something, and then fifty people come back at you with identical talking points.

Maybe they’re all brainwashed mainstream media consumers, or maybe it’s just bots.

But thanks to a government-sponsored Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust app being developed by the Hacks/Hackers team and the University of Washington, soon we’ll get the best of both worlds where everyone will be able to respond to social media posts just like a brainwashed bot.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a grant to the group to develop the app to fight “misinformation.”

The app will allow you to enter the social media post of a suspected conservative or free-speech advocate, and then the app will tell you why they’re wrong and how to appropriately respond.

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FBI Director pushes for “lawful access” to encrypted messages

FBI Director Christopher Wray last month spoke before the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and, among the many topics dedicated to “threats to the homeland,” he addressed that of encryption.

His remarks on this are carried by the FBI website under the heading, “Lawful Access.” Wray opens by saying that the agency is a strong advocate of “wide and consistent” encryption use.

The FBI chief goes on with platitudes, and not particularly sincere ones (considering his statements that followed): protecting online data and privacy is a top priority, and encryption a key element.

But…

“Encryption without lawful access, though, does have a negative effect on law enforcement’s ability to protect the public,” Wray says, and thus continues the FBI’s long-since established stance that strong encryption prevents law enforcement from performing their duties.

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This Couple Died by Suicide After the DEA Shut Down Their Pain Doctor

It was a Tuesday in early November when federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration paid a visit to the office of Dr. David Bockoff, a chronic pain specialist in Beverly Hills. It wasn’t a Hollywood-style raid—there were no shots fired or flash-bang grenades deployed—but the agents left behind a slip of paper that, according to those close to the doctor’s patients, had consequences just as deadly as any shootout.

On Nov. 1, the DEA suspended Bockoff’s ability to prescribe controlled substances, including powerful opioids such as fentanyl. While illicit fentanyl smuggled across the border by Mexican cartels has fueled a record surge in overdoses in recent years, doctors still use the pharmaceutical version during surgeries and for soothing the most severe types of pain. But amid efforts to shut down so-called “pill mills” and other illegal operations, advocates for pain patients say the DEA has gone too far, overcorrecting to the point that people with legitimate needs are blocked from obtaining the medication they need to live without suffering. 

One of Bockoff’s patients who relied on fentanyl was Danny Elliott, a 61-year-old native of Warner Robins, Georgia. In March 1991, Elliott was nearly electrocuted to death when a water pump he was using to drain a flooded basement malfunctioned, sending high-voltage shocks through his body for nearly 15 minutes until his father intervened to save his life. Elliott was never the same after the accident, which left him with debilitating, migraine-like headaches. Once a class president and basketball star in high school, he found himself spending days on end in a darkened bedroom, unable to bear sunlight or the sound of the outdoors. 

“I have these sensations like my brain is loose inside my skull,” Elliott told me in 2019, when I first interviewed him for the VICE News podcast series Painkiller. “If I turn my head too quickly, left or right, it feels like my brain sloshes around. Literally my eyes burn deep into my skull. My eyes hurt so bad that it hurts to blink.”

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