Tag: police state

Dismantling the Constitution: Police No Longer Have to Honor the Right to Remain Silent

We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of every constitutional principle that serves as a bulwark against government tyranny, overreach and abuse.

As usual, the latest assault comes from the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 6-3 ruling in Vega v. Tekoh, the Supreme Court took aim at the Miranda warnings, which require that police inform suspects that they have a right against self-incrimination when in police custody: namely, that they have a right to remain silent, to have an attorney present, and that anything they say and do can and will be used against them in a court of law.

Although the Supreme Court stopped short of overturning its 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, the conservative majority declared that individuals cannot hold police accountable for violating their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

By shielding police from lawsuits arising from their failure to Mirandize suspects, the Supreme Court has sent a message to police that they no longer have to respect a suspect’s right to remain silent.

In other words, concludes legal analyst Nick Sibilla, “the Supreme Court has effectively created a new legal immunity for cops accused of infringing on the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.”

Why is this important?

In totality, the rights enshrined in the Fifth Amendment speak to the Founders’ determination to protect the rights of the individual against a government with a natural inclination towards corruption, tyranny and thuggery.

The Founders were especially concerned with balancing the scales of justice in such a way that the innocent and the accused were not railroaded and browbeaten by government agents into coerced confessions, false convictions, or sham trials.

Indeed, so determined were the Founders to safeguard the rights of the innocent, even if it meant allowing a guilty person to go free, that Benjamin Franklin insisted, “It is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.”

Two hundred-plus years later, the Supreme Court (aided and abetted by the police state, Congress and Corporate America) has flipped that longstanding presumption of innocence on its head.

In our present suspect society, “we the people” are all presumed guilty until proven innocent.

With the Vega ruling, we have even fewer defenses for warding off government chicanery, abuse, threats and entrapment.

Keep reading

CIA software engineer, 33, is convicted over ‘single biggest leak of classified information in Agency’s history’: Gave WikiLeaks top secret intel on how U.S. spies on people abroad using internet-connected TVs and compromised smartphones

A former CIA software engineer accused of the largest leak of classified data in agency history was convicted on all charges.

Joshua Schulte, 33, was convicted Wednesday of leaking classified CIA information to WikiLeaks in 2017. He was found guilty in federal court on eight espionage charges and one obstruction charge over the so-called Vault 7 leak.

Schulte, who chose to defend himself at the New York City retrial, told jurors in his closing arguments that the CIA and FBI made him a scapegoat for the embarrassing public release the trove of secrets.

The leaked materials concerned software tools the Central Intelligence Agency used to surveil people outside the U.S., through such means as compromising smartphones and internet-connected TVs.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Schulte was motivated to leak the materials out of spite because he was unhappy with how management treated him.

Prior to his arrest, Schulte had helped create the hacking tools as a coder at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. 

Keep reading

San Francisco wants real-time access to private surveillance cameras

Lawmakers in San Francisco are deliberating on a law that would give the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) real-time access to private security cameras, like those in retail shops and even residential doorbells. The city’s Rules Committee is set to vote on the ordinance on July 18.

The draft ordinance is an amendment to the city’s 2019 surveillance ordinance, which requires the SFPD to get permission from elected officials and the general public before launching or using surveillance systems. Without the law, the SFPD could conduct surveillance without the knowledge of the public.

We obtained a copy of the draft for you here.

The law also prevents SFPD’s real-time access to surveillance videos from CCTVs and other cameras. Currently, the police are only allowed to get historical surveillance videos from privately-owned cameras for specific cases.

The proposed amendment was promoted by Mayor London Breed following a weekend of theft and burglaries last November in the Bay Area.

Keep reading

The Left Is Doing Its Best To Make Self-Defense A Crime

The same left-wing prosecutors who let rioting run rampant and let repeat offenders out on low bail also want to make it difficult for you to defend yourself.

We don’t yet know all the details about an apparent fatal stabbing of an agitated man by bodega clerk Jose Alba in New York City last week, but we do know that the clerk was quickly charged with murder and initially held at Rikers Island on $250,000 bail while video surveillance seems to indicate he likely acted in self-defense. Surveillance videos show the unnamed girlfriend of Austin Simon, the man Alba killed who had a history of felony arrests and was out on parole, becoming upset with Alba when her card was declined and threatening to “bring my n– down here and he gonna f-ck you up.”

Another video shows Simon walking behind the counter to Alba, shoving him, and getting in his face before Alba stood up and appeared to try to walk past Simon, at which point the two wrestled until Alba eventually stabbed the other man. “I don’t want a problem,” Alba told Simon when he walked in, according to the New York Post. Further footage appears to show the girlfriend pulling out a knife of her own and slashing Alba, although she has not been charged.

After outrage over Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decision to charge Alba, who has no prior criminal record, with murder, and his pursuit of such a high bail while Alba languished at Rikers, the bail amount was reduced — but the charges have so far not been dropped. In the meantime, GoFundMe deleted a fundraising page for Alba’s defense, in a move that has become common for the platform when its leaders don’t agree with a cause.

A fearless citizen with the will and means to defend himself is a threat to left-wing bureaucrats who want to boss him around — like they did when they knocked on doors sniffing out “unauthorized” religious services and gatherings during Covid lockdowns, or when they allowed lawless riots to hold cities hostage during the summer of 2020. Bragg’s decision to crack down on what appears to at least potentially be a strong case of self-defense may not have been an intentional ploy to criminalize self-protective autonomy, but it does follow a long string of actions and attitudes on the left that are hostile to the idea of a law-abiding citizen using a lethal weapon to protect himself and his property.

Keep reading

State Threatens to Take Baby Over Homemade Goat Milk Formula

Warning to all parents who use a homemade baby formula recipe for their children instead of feeding them toxic, GMO laced commercial formula.

DON’T tell a conventionally minded doctor it is made with raw milk else your baby might end up in foster care!

This is the nightmare Alorah Gellerson of Brooklin, Maine is experiencing right now because she made the mistake of telling her doctor about the homemade goats milk formula she proudly and carefully makes for her healthy, happy, three-month-old son Carson.

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) quickly responded when the doctor reported Alorah and that’s when things got messy.

The state came in and threatened to take Carson away and put him in foster care unless Alorah followed DHHS orders to go and have the baby examined by a doctor.  Unbelievably, DHHS also mandated an overnight hospital stay and a switch back to store-bought GMO commercial formula.

Despite complying with every single DHHS demand, Gellerson, who receives state benefits, is still being harassed with threats of foster care for her son.  “I hope this all goes away. It’s been so terrible and hard on us. We’re just trying to live our lives and they keep bothering us. I just want it to be all over”, she said.

Keep reading

Woke California AG Tells Gun-Permitting Officials to Deny Applicants Based on Politics

After the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling in June, California’s attorney general encouraged law enforcement officials in the state to deny firearm carry permits to individuals with a history of “hatred and racism”—whether expressed in social media posts or elsewhere.

The problem is that in these politically polarized times, defining hatred and racism is problematic, leading to definitions that disfavor the beliefs of conservatives and others who don’t toe the “woke” or politically correct line, critics say. Allowing these concepts to be used in the gun-permitting process is a recipe for abuse and could lead to violations of gun-permit applicants’ Second and First Amendment rights, they say.

On June 23, the Supreme Court ruled in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, that New York state’s tough concealed carry gun permitting system was unconstitutional because it only granted public-carry licenses “when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense.”

The day after the Bruen ruling, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, sent a “legal alert” (pdf) to law enforcement officials, advising them that the state was dropping the requirement for gun license applicants to provide a “good cause” because the requirement is now “unconstitutional and unenforceable.”

But “the requirement that a public-carry license applicant provide proof of ‘good moral character’ remains constitutional” and should continue to be enforced.

A “good moral character” investigation “requires an independent determination,” Bonta wrote.

Keep reading

Rebranding Elitism: Calling The Liberal World Order For What It Is

They promised a world where under their expert management, the economy would function unfailingly, there would be peace in our time, and when the pandemic hit they had it all under control (anybody remember “Two weeks to flatten the curve?”). They even tease us with transhumanist visions of perpetual bliss in a metaverse and the abolition of death itself.

All we have to do in exchange for these trappings of an AI driven post-singularity bliss is cede our sovereignty and our individual free will. Sure, we get decide the little things for ourselves. iOS or Android. Pfizer or Moderna. But for really big issues, like “how will we ratchet down the living standards of every plebeian on Earth in order to deal with this debt bubble climate change, all of this has already been decided. You’ll get to choose how you want to follow the rules, not whether the rules are fair or even make any sense (it’s called “subsidiarity”).

But there’s a problem. A big one.

It threatens the bring down the elites and even the idea of globalism itself:

The problem that is none of their policies are working. In fact they’re actually causing even more damage to the global economy and unleashing greater havoc on the social fabric:

  • Supply chains are failing because of second-order effects of lockdowns.
  • Energy crises are unfolding due to delusional ESG narratives and platitudes.
  • The global economy is imploding because of a super-sized credit bubble and central bank interventions.

To top it all off, looking at the data coming out now it would not surprise me if we figure out that the vaccines are doing more damage than COVID ever did.

The elite response has included incessant rebranding, from “The Great Reset” and “Build Back Better”, to “Stakeholder Capitalism”, or so called “Woke Capitalism”, and then (the short lived and lame) “The Great Narrative”.

The “Liberal World Order” is the latest incarnation of this branding exercise. This is the new name for the hill the peasants are expected to die on…

Keep reading

Biden Administration is sued over DHS social media surveillance allegations

The Oversight Project, run by conservative think tank Heritage, has sued the Biden administration over surveillance of people through social media.

The lawsuit demands the release of documents related to the DHS’ contract with Babel Street, a Virginia-based company that provides surveillance and data mining technologies.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The DHS has a contract with Babel Street to provide Babel X, a tool that scrapes data from smartphone apps and online sources. According to a report on Heritage’s website, government agencies “can aggregate and search that data by any number of keywords and in many languages.”

Speaking to The Washington Post in 2017, the company’s founder Jeff Chapman said: “There are billions of smartphones on the planet. All you have to do is listen to them.”

Keep reading

Canada’s Heritage Minister panel: unregulated speech “erodes the foundations of democracy”

According to the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety appointed by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, “misleading political communications” should be regulated because unregulated political disinformation and discussion “erodes the foundations of democracy.”

Rodriguez has insisted multiple times that censorship bill, Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, would not regulate user-generated content.

“We made it very clear in the Online Streaming Act that this does not apply to what individual Canadians and creators post online,” said Rodriguez. “No users, no online creators will be regulated. Only the companies themselves will have new responsibilities.”

However, that claim has been contradicted by the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety that he appointed. Online platforms would have to regulate based on the speech of its users.

Keep reading