Tag: police state

Meme Police: DHS Scanning Employees’ Social Media for ‘Conspiracy Theories,’ ‘Extremism’

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a report recommending an increased focus on scanning the social media accounts of its employees in order to detect “extremism.”

Among the examples of “extremism” cited by DHS are: a belief that fraud occurred in the 2020 election, and objections to current coronavirus policies.

From the DHS report, obtained by Reclaim The Net:

A March 2021 unclassified threat assessment prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Department of Justice, and DHS, noted that domestic violent extremists “who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” The assessment pointed to newer “sociopolitical developments such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence” that “will almost certainly spur some [domestic violent extremists] [sic] to try to engage in violence this year.”

The report shows increased DHS concern with rooting out “extremists” within its own ranks, including through monitoring the social media accounts of employees.

Keep reading

Top Cop Busted By Vigilante Group for Attempting to Have Sex With a Little Boy

Across the country brave individuals provide a much needed service to society by launching undercover stings to ensnare child predators. These vigilante groups pose as children online and allow the predators to do all the talking as not to entrap them before scheduling a meeting and exposing the pedophiles.

The template for these encounters usually involves the alleged pedophile showing up to meet who they think is a child, and meeting the pedophile hunter instead. This is the same method employed by the highly popular show To Catch a Predator. 

The group People vs. Preds is one of the most successful of these organizations and has a record of dozens of confrontations in just the last few months — highlighting the serious problem of online predators attempting to meet children. One of the alleged predators to be ensnared by their tactics is making headlines this week as his job consisted of locking up people, for the very crimes he was caught committing.

Their latest pedophile take down was a top level official with the San Diego Sheriff’s Department who has been there for 25 years. Sergeant Luis Rios was communicating with PVP for months, according to the outlet, as they pretended to be an under age boy. The online sting came to a head on Friday as PVP confronted Rios in a parking lot as he waited to meet the boy.

That boy never came, however, as he doesn’t exist and was merely a fake persona created and used to catch this child predator. As the video below shows, Rios is caught completely off guard and denies being himself.

He says he is in the parking lot waiting on McDonald’s while he was actually waiting to meet a little boy for sex. As the cameraman continues to question Rios, the top cop decides that he’s had enough and speeds off as the cameraman chases after him.

After the video was posted over the weekend, the sheriff’s department was forced to respond saying they “took immediate action” after the allegations surfaced by placing him on administrative assignment.

Keep reading

Feds admit breaking law with delay in case against alleged Jan. 6 rioter

Federal prosecutors admitted Monday to losing track of one jailed defendant in the storming of the Capitol and conceded that the indictment against him should be dismissed, but they urged a judge to permit the charges to be refiled because of the seriousness of his alleged attack on police during the Jan. 6 riot.

In a highly unusual court filing, lawyers from the U.S. Attorney’s Office said the handling of the case against Texas resident Lucas Denney violated his rights under the Speedy Trial Act. Prosecutors said errors and oversights led to Denney sitting in a Virginia jail for weeks last month as he awaited his first court appearance in Washington, D.C.

“There was nothing intentional or nefarious about the delay. It was an isolated incident, unlikely to happen again, and the time frame —while undoubtedly regrettable — is nevertheless not significantly egregious to warrant dismissal with prejudice,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Rozzoni wrote.

But during a chaotic afternoon hearing held by videoconference before U.S. District Judge Randy Moss, defense attorneys for Denney dropped their earlier bid to dismiss the case and instead sought to have him plead guilty before prosecutors could add more charges to a single-count indictment a grand jury returned last week.

The move seemed to take prosecutors and the judge by surprise, since defendants almost never plead guiltyat a federal court arraignment on a grand jury indictment.

“This, obviously, is nothing I was prepared to decide today,” said Moss, an appointee of Barack Obama.

Keep reading

Audit reveals FBI rule-breaking in probes involving politicians, religious groups, media

FBI agents violated agency rules at least 747 times in 18 months while conducting investigations involving politicians, candidates, religious groups, news media and others, according to a 2019 FBI audit obtained by The Washington Times. 

The internal review revealed a ratio of slightly more than two “compliance errors” per sensitive investigative matter reviewed by FBI auditors. These errors included agents’ failure to obtain approval from senior FBI officials to start an investigation, failure to document a necessary legal review before opening an investigation and failure to tell prosecutors what they were doing.

Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick Eddington uncovered the audit in litigation his organization brought against the FBI for access to government records. He said the audit reveals how far “off-the-chain” FBI field offices have strayed.

Keep reading

DHS increases efforts to identify “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” on social media

Last Spring, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas ordered an internal review to identify how to best detect, prevent, and respond to threats related to domestic violent extremism within the department.

A component of this was based on online activity. “DVE [domestic violent extremist] attackers often radicalize independently by consuming violent extremist material online and mobilize without direction from a violent extremist organization, making detection and disruption difficult,” the unclassified initial report stated.

The report (obtained here) said that extremists, “exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials that contribute to radicalization and mobilization to violence.”

One of the recommendations is to increase “efforts to better identify and evaluate mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) with a homeland security nexus, including false or misleading conspiracy theories spread on social media and other online platforms that endorse violence.”

While not directly stated, it was inferred that the DHS was in some way monitoring online activity. Obviously, some privacy and free speech concerns were raised.

And now, this month, the DHS has released a report with the findings of the review.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

Keep reading

Cops in America Have So Much Militarized Gear, They are Sending It to Ukraine

There is no question that police in the land of the free have become the Standing Army that the founders warned us about. Armed to the teeth with tactical gear fit for the battlefield in Afghanistan, American cops are prepared for war domestically. In fact, they are over prepared, and they have so much military gear that they are now sending their surplus to be used in Ukraine to battle the Russians.

“Many of our Department of Defense (DOD) and State Department contacts have asked the law enforcement community for equipment to help the Ukrainian people push back against this violence and protect their citizens,” Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman said on Twitter — noting that his department is sending hundreds of ballistics helmets to Ukraine.

Hoffman is one of many sheriffs and law enforcement personnel sending their equipment to Ukraine to be used in war against Russia.

As VICE News reports, the Colorado Department of Public Safety said it was donating more than 80 sets of body armor and 750 helmets, and that it was accepting donations from other law enforcement agencies in the state.

“This is equipment that we are no longer able to use because it is beyond life cycle, or in some cases it may have been replaced or upgraded by some equipment that maybe better fits our needs or is safer,” Colorado DPS spokesperson Patricia Billinger told local station KARE9.

In true American political fashion, however, this move is not free from corrupt practices.

Though much of this equipment is at the end of its life cycle Hoffman said that the Pentagon is attempting to “supply more than 50,000 helmets and law enforcement supplies in the coming weeks” from a weapons manufacturer in his town — a claim the Pentagon denies.

Keep reading

The Foilies 2022

Each year during Sunshine Week (March 13-19), The Foilies serve up tongue-in-cheek “awards” for government agencies and assorted institutions that stand in the way of access to information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock combine forces to collect horror stories about Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state-level public records requests from journalists and transparency advocates across the United States and beyond. Our goal is to identify the most surreal document redactions, the most aggravating copy fees, the most outrageous retaliation attempts, and all the other ridicule-worthy attacks on the public’s right to know.

And every year since 2015, as we’re about to crown these dubious winners, something new comes to light that makes us consider stopping the presses.

As we were writing up this year’s faux awards, news broke that officials from the National Archives and Records Administration had to lug away boxes upon boxes of Trump administration records from Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s private resort. At best, it was an inappropriate move; at worst, a potential violation of laws governing the retention of presidential records and the handling of classified materials. And while Politico had reported that when Trump was still in the White House, he liked to tear up documents, we also just learned from journalist Maggie Haberman’s new book that staff claimed to find toilets clogged up with paper scraps, which were potentially torn-up government records. Trump has dismissed the allegations, of course. 

This was all too deliciously ironic considering how much Trump had raged about his opponent (and 2016 Foilies winner) Hillary Clinton’s practice of storing State Department communications on a private server. Is storing potentially classified correspondence on a personal email system any worse than hoarding top secret documents at a golf club? Is “acid washing” records, as Trump accused Clinton, any less farcical than flushing them down the john? 

Ultimately, we decided not to give Trump his seventh Foilie. Technically, he isn’t eligible: his presidential records won’t be subject to FOIA until he’s been out of office for five years (releasing classified records could take years, or decades, if ever).

Instead, we’re sticking with our original 16 winners, from federal agencies to small-town police departments to a couple of corporations, who are all shameworthy in their own rights and, at least metaphorically, have no problem tossing government transparency in the crapper.

Keep reading