Tag: police state

“Ghost Guns”: The Government Desperately Wants to Ban 3D Printed Guns

HR 4225 was introduced to the House Committee on the Judiciary on June 29 of this year by Representative Ted Deutsch (D-FL). A few short days later, an identical bill, S.2319, was introduced by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) in the Senate. 

Officially, S.2319 is referred to as the 3D Printed Gun Safety Act of 2021.

They’re ready to take gun control to a whole new level with this.

But you may know it as its mainstream media coined term: The Ghost Gun Ban

According to the US government, the stated intention of S.2319 is “to amend chapter 44 of title 18, United States Code, to prohibit the distribution of 3D printer plans for the printing of firearms, and for other purposes.” After the bill was introduced, 27 Senators throughout the US – all Democrat (with the exception of stated Independent, Bernie Sanders) – jumped on board to sign it.

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Man Jailed on $50K Bond, Facing 7 Years for Accidentally Underpaying for a Soda by 43 Cents

When Joseph Sobolewski got thirsty last month, he saw a sign in a nearby convenience store that was advertising two 20-ounce Mountain Dew bottles for $3. Sobolewksi only wanted one bottle, so he grabbed it, threw down two $1 bills — thinking he’d left a tip — and walked out of the store. Now he’s facing 7 years in prison over it.

Because Sobolewski didn’t realize that the sale price only applied to the two-bottle deal, instead of leaving a tip like he thought, he was actually short. A single bottle costs $2.29 and with tax applied, he was actually $0.43 short.

Instead of simply realizing the error and chalking it up to a harmless mistake, the store called the police — over 43 cents. According to police, the store clerk followed Sobolewski out of the store and told him that $2.00 was not enough, but when he did the math for a $1.50 soda, it was more than enough, so he drove off.

How it escalated to the next level of police involvement is unclear as the clerk told police that Sobelewski “threw $2 onto the checkout counter.” And, by his math, he actually tipped the clerk.

When police caught up to Sobolewski, instead of simply asking him for two quarters to pay his tab, they arrested him on felony theft charges and locked him in a cage because the store clerk wanted him to be punished. According to Pennsylvania State police spokeswoman Megan Ammerman, troopers “cannot decide to not charge someone for a criminal case, only victims of certain crimes can decline charges. If we are called to an incident involving a crime we follow and enforce the PA Crimes Code.”

After he was arrested and thrown in a cage, to top it off, they set his bail at a $50,000 cash-only bond, meaning he will sit in that cage until his trial in November as he is unable to pay for it.

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Internet ‘freedom’ at its lowest in 11 years: study

The internet is an increasingly unwelcome place for many. A new study suggests that online “freedom” is in decline — for two very different reasons, depending on who you ask.

The annual report by Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group, said this year is the 11th consecutive to see a global internet freedom decline.

The “Freedom on the Net” report rates countries on a 100-point scale, with the bottom considered least free. This year, scores internationally range from as low as 10 points in China to 96 points in Iceland. Scores 71 and above are designated “free,” while scores below 40 are “not free”; everything in the middle is considered “partly free.”

Considerations made in scoring include the extent to which free speech is legally protected, the proliferation of misinformation and hate speech and whether government authorities were known to target individual users, such as in India or Hungary where journalists and activists have been hit with state-supported spyware.

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SHADOWDRAGON: INSIDE THE SOCIAL MEDIA SURVEILLANCE SOFTWARE THAT CAN WATCH YOUR EVERY MOVE

A MICHIGAN STATE POLICE CONTRACT, obtained by The Intercept, sheds new light on the growing use of little-known surveillance software that helps law enforcement agencies and corporations watch people’s social media and other website activity.

The software, put out by a Wyoming company called ShadowDragon, allows police to suck in data from social media and other internet sources, including Amazon, dating apps, and the dark web, so they can identify persons of interest and map out their networks during investigations. By providing powerful searches of more than 120 different online platforms and a decade’s worth of archives, the company claims to speed up profiling work from months to minutes. ShadowDragon even claims its software can automatically adjust its monitoring and help predict violence and unrest. Michigan police acquired the software through a contract with another obscure online policing company named Kaseware for an “MSP Enterprise Criminal Intelligence System.”

The inner workings of the product are generally not known to the public. The contract, and materials published by the companies online, allow a deeper explanation of how this surveillance works, provided below.

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Academia Is Establishing A Permanent Surveillance Bureaucracy That Will Soon Govern The Rest Of The Country

Having now received a tsunami of messages from people across the US (and a few internationally) about the surveillance regimes being permanently installed at their educational institutions — in contravention of earlier assurances that the current academic year would mark a long-awaited “return to normalcy,” thanks to the onset of mass vaccination — there are a few conclusions to draw.

First: unless and until COVID “cases” are abandoned as a metric by which policy action is presumptively dictated, these institutions are destined to continue flailing from irrational measure to irrational measure for the foreseeable future. Just turn your gaze over to one of America’s most hallowed pedagogical grounds: As of September 17, Columbia University has newly forbidden students from hosting guests, visiting residence halls other than their own, and gathering with more than ten people. The stated rationale for these restrictions? Administrators have extrapolated from the “contact tracing” data they’ve compulsorily seized that a recent increase in viral transmission is attributable to “students socializing unmasked at gatherings in residence halls and at off-campus apartments, bars, and restaurants.” (Socializing at apartments, bars, and restaurants in the middle of Manhattan — gee, I can’t imagine anything more heinous.)

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Cop Arrested After Shooting at a ‘Puppy’, Killing Innocent Sleeping Woman Instead

As readers of the Free Thought Project know, police killing or attempting to kill dogs is an all too common occurrence — happening so often that it is caught on video much of the time. Also, as the following tragic case our of Arlington, TX illustrates, all too often, police will attempt to kill a dog — miss the dog — and shoot and kill an innocent person instead.

A Texas grand jury indicted a police officer this week after he was seen on video trying to kill a dog and killing an innocent woman instead.

Arlington police officer Ravi Singh was charged on Wednesday with criminally negligent homicide for killing Maggie Brooks, 30, the daughter of an Arlington fire captain.

“It’s a puppy. This is a grown man afraid of a puppy. Who is the paid professional in this encounter? Every child, every mailman, every runner, jogger, bicyclist has dealt with a dog running at them and no one ends up dead. Why do you go to deadly force immediately?” Brooks’ father, Troy Brooks, said.

Brooks explained to FOX4 that he thought the charges should have been more severe given the ridiculous nature of his daughter’s death.

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