Tag: police state

Supreme Court gives victims of malicious prosecutors new weapon

People who are victimized by malicious prosecutions in America’s court systems have been given a new weapon – confirmation that they no longer have to “prove” their innocence by using the court system’s own documentation.

The Supreme Court in a 6-3 ruling in Thompson v. Clark has found that individuals have a Fourth Amendment right to hold police accountable for maliciously arresting and charging them without probable cause.

“At a time when the courts routinely shield police from accountability for misconduct, this ruling is at least an encouraging glimmer in the gloom,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, which joined a friend-of-the-court brief in the case.

“For too long, Americans have been treated as if they have no rights at all when it comes to encounters with police. This is an overdue reminder that freedom is not secondary to security, and the rights of the citizenry are no less important than the authority of the government,” he said.

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Milwaukee County Children’s Court Judge Brett Blomme charged with 7 counts of child pornography

A Milwaukee County Children’s Court judge was charged Wednesday with seven counts of possessing child pornography that showed the abuse of young boys.

Brett Blomme, 38, was arrested Tuesday and spent the night at the Dane County Jail. He made his initial appearance in Dane County on Wednesday afternoon, where a court commissioner set a signature bond, with the conditions Blomme not use social media or file sharing services, or have unsupervised contact with children, except for his own. By 4 p.m. he had been released.

Each of the counts carries a minimum mandatory sentence of three years and as much as 15 years in prison plus 10 years of supervised release.

The criminal complaint charges that Blomme uploaded as many as 27 images and videos of children being sexually abused last fall, using the messaging app Kik. The uploads charged in the complaint occurred from a home he and his husband own in Cottage Grove, in Dane County. 

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Buttigieg floats ‘monthly transportation payment’ that ‘covers everything’ to replace car payments

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg suggested that transitioning to a “monthly transportation payment” from monthly car payments could be in America’s future.

Buttigieg also said a “monthly mobility dividend” could lie further out in the future.

“What I mean by that is if we’re looking way out into the future, where we have things like, let’s imagine distributed energy generation where you have resources at your house, whether it’s a dramatically more efficient, even solar panels and wind resources,” Buttigieg said Wednesday at an event hosted by the liberal think tank New America.

“From your home, you can put more into the transportation system than you get out of it through things like energy, so that you would participate in creating so much value that you’d actually get a net dividend on it, instead of paying into it on a net basis,” he added. “Now, that’s pretty far out.”

A “more intermediate goal” in the U.S. would be transitioning from monthly car payments to a “monthly transportation payment that’s quite a bit less than a car payment that covers everything,” said Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020.

“We’re actually seeing certain glimmers of this now,” he said. “So some of the rideshare companies, for example, are starting to look at mobility as a service where you have some kind of interface, and it’s neutral on whether you’re on one of their bikes, or in one of their rideshare things or just on public transit, or some combination thereof, or it even leads to a train ticket or something.

“All you do is you tell your smartphone, you know, ‘Hey Siri, book me from the street corner I’m standing at to my cousin’s house in Louisville,’ and then Siri figures it out, and you pay once, and it may or may not be a single seat ride, but off you go. That’s a vision, I think, that’s well within our lifetimes, if not within our grasp.” 

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AMERICAN PHONE-TRACKING FIRM DEMO’D SURVEILLANCE POWERS BY SPYING ON CIA AND NSA

IN THE MONTHS leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.

Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there’s a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading. Once your location is beamed to an advertiser, there is currently no law in the United States prohibiting the further sale and resale of that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which are free to sell it to their private sector and governmental clientele. For anyone interested in tracking the daily lives of others, the digital advertising industry is taking care of the grunt work day in and day out — all a third party need do is buy access.

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Police are Still Weaponizing Copyright to Prevent Transparency

YouTube and other social media websites have strict rules on playing copyrighted content. Police have been using that to prevent embarrassing videos from being posted on the platforms.

Residents in Santa Ana, California were woken up by blasting music around 11pm on April 4, a Monday. But the music was not a bass bumping rap song or a heavy metal piece with screaming vocals, it was “We Don’t Talk about Bruno” from the animated Disney film “Encanto.” And it was not being played by a teenage house party or an inconsiderate driver with a loud sound system, but a police vehicle.

Police responded to a stolen vehicle call in the neighborhood when an observer who runs the YouTube channel Santa Ana Audits started recording the activity. That’s when officers started blasting the Disney owned track, in an apparent attempt to prevent the video from being posted on YouTube and Instagram. Thanks to those platform’s algorithmic copyright enforcement, any video that includes a copyrighted song is susceptible to being removed. Its channel owners are also subject to warnings and even getting banned from the platform.

Unfortunately for Santa Ana Police, they happened to be in the neighborhood of city councilman David Penaloza who, like many of his neighbors, was awakened by the ruckus caused by the city’s police department.

Penaloza came outside and confronted the officer, who admitted that what he was doing was intended to prevent the video captured by Santa Ana Audits making its way onto YouTube.

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Fate of missing American Zelensky critic revealed

Chilean-American blogger Gonzalo Lira, who went missing in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov a week ago, has appeared online on Friday, revealing that he had been held by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU).

“I’m in Kharkov. I’m OK. I just want to say that I’m back online.” Lira said in short video chat with journalist Alex Christoforou on The Duran’s YouTube channel.

 “I was picked up by the SBU on Friday, April 15,” the blogger revealed.

Speaking about his condition, the 54-year-old said that he was “fine physically,” but “a little rattled” and “a little bit discombobulated.” Lira made it clear that he was forbidden from revealing any details about what had happened to him in detention.

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Houston Says Businesses Must Install Surveillance Cameras and Cops Can View Footage Without a Warrant

Houston mandates spying outside bars and other businesses. Officials in Houston, Texas, have voted to require an array of businesses—including bars, convenience stores, and strip clubs—to install surveillance cameras and make footage from them readily available to police. The dystopian move is a transparently unconstitutional attempt by city leaders to circumvent Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

To access video from the cameras, police officers will not need a warrant.

The rules apply to all Houston bars, convenience stores, game rooms, nightclubs, or sexually-oriented businesses.

Owners of these establishments must install (on their own dime) surveillance cameras in outdoor areas “providing video coverage from the exterior of the building to the property line.” Businesses must keep these cameras running 24 hours a day, and store camera footage for at least 30 days.

If surveillance footage is requested by the Houston Police Department, businesses must turn it over within 72 hours. Failure to comply would mean fines of $500 per day.

The Houston City Council approved this privacy-killing measure on Wednesday by a vote of 15–1.

“Their vote demonstrated a willingness to push aside constitutional protections and subject Houstonians to overbroad police searches,” said Savannah Kumar of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “But a city cannot override the Constitution. We are here to help you protect your rights. If the police come knocking on your door, tell them to get a warrant, whether it’s your home or your business.”

The measure is set to take effect in 90 days.

“In addition to trampling on the Fourth Amendment rights of business owners, Houston’s new law also infringes on property rights,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Jared McClain. “This ordinance unfairly saddles certain businesses with thousands of dollars in new expenses to install high-definition surveillance cameras and to archive their footage so it’s available for police on demand.”

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Police Investigation of Horrifying Child Porn Ring, Leads Back to One of Their Own

Last month, the Daytona Beach Police Department’s Advanced Technology and Cybercrime’s (ATAC) unit launched an investigation after receiving a tip about a child porn distribution ring that was being run on a social media app. After doing some digging, Daytona cops made a disturbing discovery — the perpetrator distributing images of child sexual abuse on the app — was one of their own.

This week, Officer Brandon Fox, 22, was arrested and charged with 7 counts of possession and distribution of child pornography. According to police, they received information regarding an individual sharing child pornography via a social media app that included images and videos of sexual acts involving children under 10.

During the investigation, police tracked the horrifying images and videos back to Fox. Investigators then executed a search warrant at his residence and noted that additional charges may be filed as they continue their investigation.

After discovering that Fox was the culprit, a judge issued an arrest warrant on the seven counts and Fox was brought in without incident. He is currently being held in the Volusia County Jail on a $70,000 bond.

According to police, Fox had been with the department for two years. He was fired immediately after his arrest.

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