Tag: police state

Capitol review to recommend adding more fencing, 1,000 officers: report

A review of Capitol security after the Jan. 6 riots is going to recommend adding more fencing around the building, as well as more than 1,000 Capitol Police officers, two sources with direct knowledge of the findings told CNN.

The draft proposal of recommendations comes just over a month after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tapped retired Lt. General Russel Honoré to review security around the Capitol in the wake of a mob of former President Trump’s supporters laying siege to the building in an attempt to prevent the certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory.

At the time, Pelosi said Honoré’s review was to focus on “security infrastructure, interagency processes and procedures, and command and control.”

The additional 1,000 personnel, which could cost nearly $100 million, would include roughly 350 officers and expanded staffing in regional offices for when lawmakers are at home, one of the sources told CNN.

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Florida city fines woman more than $100K for parking incorrectly in her own driveway

Sandy Martinez and the Institute for Justice announced the lawsuit in a news conference Thursday, notifying the public that Martinez had been slapped with over a year’s worth of daily fines for the minor offense of parking her car partially on her front lawn in violation of town codes, WPTV-TV reported.

According to Section 6-30 of the Code of Ordinances of the Town of Lantana, “all off-street parking spaces, including driveways but not including parking spaces located in swale areas as permitted by section 17-34, shall be asphalt, concrete or block and shall be hard surfaced and in good repair in compliance with town codes.”

Martinez reportedly lives with her mother, her sister, and her three children — two of whom are now adults. Given the fact that, in total, the household contains four drivers, it is often the case that four vehicles need to be squeezed into the driveway as best they can. That predicament resulted in one of the four vehicles being parked partially on grass.

Martinez claimed that after she was first cited for the violation, she called the city, but an inspector never came to her residence. Then, more than a year later, she learned that she had been fined $250 a day for 407 days for the offense, totaling $101,750. On top of that, the city fined Martinez $65,000 more in fines for cosmetic violations, such as cracks in the driveway and a broken fence.

“I’ve been living here for 17 years now and I’m being fined over $160,000 for parking on my own property,” Martinez said during the press conference.

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So Long as You Carry a Cellphone, the Government Can Track You

Cell phones are convenient devices, handily connecting us with loved ones, paying bills, accessing information—and treacherously reporting on our every move. Worse, even after the Supreme Court weighed in, many government agencies still insist that they have the right to pull up that tracking data to see our whereabouts. It’s increasingly apparent that, if you have your phone in your pocket, you may as well have a GPS beacon strapped to your ankle. If you want anonymity from the government, leave the gadget at home.

That point was illustrated in the wake of the Capitol riot, when the authorities pulled cell phone records to see who was present.

“In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were identified at the crime scene,” The Intercept reported this week. “Investigators have also relied on data ‘dumps’ from cellphone towers in the area to provide a map of who was there, allowing them to trace call records — but not content — from the phones.”

The data collected by people’s phones and the apps they use, often compiled by marketing firms, is amazingly detailed. An individual “outraged by the events of Jan. 6” supplied data on participants in the day’s events to The New York Times, whose writers were thoroughly creeped out by the information.

“While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance,” Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson wrote.

Marketing databases have become a favorite resource for government agencies, which purchase the information as an attempted end-run around Fourth Amendment protections. The theory has been that, since the data is “voluntarily” provided to a third party there’s no privacy from the government required.

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Israel adopts law allowing names of unvaccinated to be shared

Israel’s parliament passed a law Wednesday allowing the government to share the identities of people not vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities, raising privacy concerns for those opting out of inoculation.

The measure, which passed with 30 votes for and 13 against, gives local governments, the director general of the education ministry and some in the welfare ministry the right to receive the names, addresses and phone numbers of unvaccinated citizens.

The objective of the measure — valid for three months or until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over — is “to enable these bodies to encourage people to vaccinate by personally addressing them”, a parliament statement said.

Israel, a country of nine million people, has administered the two recommended jabs of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus to roughly a third of its population.

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Police Consider Placing Flowers On Car Windshields “Suspicious Activity”

America’s law enforcement never ceases to amaze and frustrate me.

A recent story about placing flowers on a windshield might have you wanting to scream into a pillow in disgust.

Channel 10 WBNS wrote, that an Ohio woman who received over $300 in roses from her fiancé for Valentine’s Day was worried that all her flowers would go to waste.

“I think (my fiancé) ended up saying that he spent over $300 in just roses,” Brittaney Strupe said. “He was just going to throw them outside or in the trash, so I told him, instead of wasting, we should pass it on.”

So her sister, daughter and Brittaney decided “to spread some love, by placing roses on vehicles.”

Her daughter Kiara suggested putting roses on people’s windshields in a Walmart parking lot.

“We should just go to Walmart, thinking like, oh yeah, this will be a good idea, people are going to come out and think it’s awesome, and that didn’t happen,” Kiara Strupe said.

So what happened you ask?

The “If You See Something Say Something,” American snitch culture happened of course.

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California Bill Requires ‘Gender Neutral’ Stores, Fines Retailers $1000 For Having Separate ‘Boy’ And ‘Girl’ Toy Departments

California’s Assembly is slated to consider a new bill requiring department store childrens’ sections to be largely “gender-neutral” in order to combat “prejudice” and “judgment” against gender non-conforming children.

“Large retailers that sell toys, clothes, and other children’s items in California would have to devote floor space to merchandise marketed to both boys and girls under a new bill,” Politico reported earlier this week. “Stores would be able to sell the same products they do now as long as they maintain some areas where shoppers can find all toys or clothes, regardless of gender-based marketing, under CA AB2826 (19R) from Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell). It would apply to department stores with 500 or more employees beginning in 2023.”

Lowe told Politico that the idea for the bill, which he also introduced last year to little effect, came from one of his staffers, who claims her daughter wanted an item in the “boys” section but felt slighted because she felt the toy was designated for a male child.

“This is an issue of children being able to express themselves without bias,” Lowe told the outlet.

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