Tag: police state

Brits could lose passports for using drugs

Recreational drug users in the UK could soon be stripped of their passports or driving licenses under a series of new laws proposed by the Home Office on Monday.

In the document titled ‘SWIFT, CERTAIN, TOUGH New consequences for drug possession,’ the Home Office proposes introducing three tiers of punishments for possession of illegal drugs such as cocaine and cannabis. 

The penalties vary from being forced to pay for a drug awareness course to being issued with a hefty fine, and could even result in the loss of an offender’s passport and driving license.

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‘Mind-Reading’ Cap Keeps Men from Watching Porn in China Where the Content Is Illegal

Although porn is beyond normalized in the U.S.—whether for good or bad—it is, apparently, utterly illegal in China. To help aid in combating the spread of porn in the country, a team of scientists at Beijing Jiaotong University has developed a “mind-reading” cap that can read men’s minds and sound an alarm when they’re watching illicit content. Particularly “porn appraisers”—a.k.a. jian huang shi—whose job it is to rid the Chinese internet of the material.

The South China Morning Post reports that the device could “speed up the work” of these porn appraisers (which the outlet refers to literally as “censors”) by alerting them—with an alarm—as to when they’re seeing pornographic material. These appraisers—much like Facebook content reviewers, it seems—scan thousands upon thousands of images and videos every day on the look out for porn. The problem is sometimes they miss images: this cap is supposed to solve that problem.

According to the scientists, who published their research the Journal of Electronic Measurement and Instrumentation, the cap is able to pick up on a spike in brainwaves triggered by a wearer seeing explicit content. The researchers tested the cap on 15 male university students between the ages of 20 and 25 as they watched images flit one after another on a computer screen; sounding an “alarm” any time one of the wearer’s saw (somewhat) pornographic images amidst normal, acceptable ones.

“The prototype device proved that human-machine collaboration was feasible ‘for bad information detection,’” Xu Jianjun, director of the electrical engineering experiment center at Beijing Jiaotong University told the Post. As the news outlet notes, human eyes and brains still outperform machines—which utilize machine-learning algorithms—when detecting porn; at least some of the time, particularly when the images contain complex backgrounds.

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AMAZON ADMITS GIVING RING CAMERA FOOTAGE TO POLICE WITHOUT A WARRANT OR CONSENT

RING, AMAZON’S PERENNIALLY controversial and police-friendly surveillance subsidiary, has long defended its cozy relationship with law enforcement by pointing out that cops can only get access to a camera owner’s recordings with their express permission or a court order. But in response to recent questions from Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., the company stated that it has provided police with user footage 11 times this year alone without either.

Last month, Markey wrote to Amazon asking it to both clarify Ring’s ever-expanding relationship with American police, who’ve increasingly come to rely on the company’s growing residential surveillance dragnet, and to commit to a raft of policy reforms. In a July 1 response from Brian Huseman, Amazon vice president of public policy, the company declined to permanently agree to any of them, including “Never accept financial contributions from policing agencies,” “Never allow immigration enforcement agencies to request Ring recordings,” and “Never participate in police sting operations.”

Although Ring publicizes its policy of handing over camera footage only if the owner agrees — or if judge signs a search warrant — the company says it also reserves the right to supply police with footage in “emergencies,” defined broadly as “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.” Markey had also asked Amazon to clarify what exactly constitutes such an “emergency situation,” and how many times audiovisual surveillance data has been provided under such circumstances. Amazon declined to elaborate on how it defines these emergencies beyond “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury,” stating only that “Ring makes a good-faith determination whether the request meets the well-known standard.” Huseman noted that it has complied with 11 emergency requests this year alone but did not provide details as to what the cases or Ring’s “good-faith determination” entailed.

Ring spokesperson Mai Nguyen also declined to reveal the substance of these emergency requests or the company’s approval process.

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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.

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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. 

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