Tag: police state

ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN skip DOJ whistleblower revealing ‘threat tag’ targeting parents at school board meetings

The media have largely ignored the explosive allegation made by a DOJ whistleblower about the counterterrorism targeting of outraged parents that appears to undercut sworn testimony from Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

On Tuesday, a whistleblower revealed the FBI created a “threat tag” to aid in tracking alleged threats against school board officials, teachers, and staff as part of its implementation of a controversial memo issued by Garland last month.

An Oct. 20 internal email from the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions, released Tuesday by House Republicans, instructed agents to apply the threat tag “EDUOFFICIALS” to all investigations and assessments of threats directed specifically at education officials.

“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” the email stated.

The email also directs FBI agents to consider whether the criminal activity being investigated is in violation of federal law and what the potential “motivation” is behind it. 

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After 20 Years of Failure, Kill the TSA

On this day in 2001, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was created in a demonstration that the Keystone Kops are always prepared to exploit a crisis. In the ensuing two decades, the TSA has proven itself skilled at harassing travelers and freaking out over pocketknives and water bottles while steadfastly failing at its assigned task of making air transportation any safer. The TSA, in short, is an awful example of government in action.

“On the morning of September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia,” the TSA summarizes in its official history. “The attacks resulted in the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, designed to prevent similar attacks in the future.”

The TSA launched with the passage of the Aviation and Transportation and Security Act on November 19, 2001. The new law nationalized passenger screening, which previously had been the responsibility of airlines. It’s not clear why anybody saw a need for the TSA, since it’s unlikely that a federal agency would have been any more successful than private contractors at predicting terrorists’ unprecedented use of aircraft as kamikaze weapons. It’s especially unlikely that the federal agency we actually got would have successfully diverted itself from confiscating play-doh to thwarting homicidal fanatics.

“The TSA is failing to defend us against the threat of terrorism,” security expert and frequent TSA critic Bruce Schneier pointed out in 2015. “The only reason they’ve been able to get away with the scam for so long is that there isn’t much of a threat of terrorism to defend against.”

“Terrorists are much rarer than we think, and launching a terrorist plot is much more difficult than we think,” Schneier added. “I understand this conclusion is counterintuitive, and contrary to the fearmongering we hear every day from our political leaders. But it’s what the data shows.”

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Police caught using online spy tool to plot “pre-crimes”

Tech startup Voyager Labs helps law enforcement agencies use what you post on social media and who you interact with to predict whether you have or “plan to” commit a crime. It is one of a growing number of companies that claim they can use social media analysis to help predict and solve crimes and has opened many questions about privacy.

Non-profit organization Brennan Center obtained documents through freedom of information requests that revealed the strategies Voyager uses violate the first amendment protections. For instance, the software uses posts about Islam and social media usernames indicating Arab pride as signs of potential inclination towards extremism. But they can also be used to target any group.

Additionally, according to the documents, obtained by The Guardian, the company uses questionable processes to access data on social media, and even enables law enforcement officers to infiltrate groups and private accounts using fake personas.

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The Church of State: Taxonomy of a New Religion

Darkness descends over civilization and freedom. It flows not from any external threat but from within the human heart. We are beings capable of happiness and flourishing, but sometimes we push our fears and anxieties into the shadows. There they fester. And from those deep psychological bowers, fear and anxiety reemerge transformed. 

To live right now, then, is to live in paradox. Despite conditions of relative peace and abundance, a psychosocial pathology has taken hold. It manifests itself as something like a replacement religion. Where people once turned to their temples and communities for reassurance, more turn now to political authority. Merchants of fear magnify the significance of certain human problems, which obscures complicated truths and feeds the dogmas of this new faith. Adherents believe they are on the side of the angels, but their faith threatens to bring about a new Dark Age. Why? Because more and more people in the grip of this religion are willing to use illiberal means.

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How Many Guns Does the IRS Have?

President Joe Biden and Democrats who support his multi-trillion dollar “Build Back Better” spending agenda want to empower the IRS with even more resources. 

According to the Heritage Foundation, the bill would increase the IRS budget by 70 percent. 

“House Democrats’ massive tax-and-spending package would reward the unpopular tax-collecting agency by increasing its current budget by more than 70%. Over the next 10 years, the bill would add $88 billion of new funding for the IRS, including $45 billion dedicated to enforcement, $27 billion for operations support, $5 billion for new business systems, $4 billion to administer green energy initiatives, and $4 billion to administer child tax credits,” Heritage analyzes. “Meanwhile, it dedicates less than $2 billion for taxpayer services.”

“Between the huge sums aimed directly at enforcement activities and operations support, expect a large majority of the $88 billion of new IRS funding to directly or indirectly support things like asset monitoring, audits, taxpayer investigations, and legal actions against taxpayers,” they continue. 

“On the issue of enforcement actives and operations support,” Americans for Tax Reform is reminding taxpayers the IRS already has substantial authority and power. This includes ownership of thousands of guns and agents who can be deployed to use them. 

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How Many Zombie Agencies Does Government Need?

How many federal agencies do we pay for?  I bet you think, as I once did, that a quick internet search would tell.  But researching for an essay a couple of years ago, I found numbers varying from 78 to 158, and websites saying the exact number was impossible to determine. 

Looking at the USA.gov website recently, I discovered a tab for Federal Agencies A to Z (actually there are none past W).  Scrolling around the list for two days, subtracting duplicate listings, like Useless Policy, Office of and Office of Useless Policy, I counted 456 (and a few more as I checked some links while drafting this essay). 

The large number of agencies was my first, but not my only surprise.  Each agency’s listing had a field for government branch, mostly filled with Executive, some Legislative, some Judicial.  But sometimes that field contained: Independent, Quasi, or None.  How can we have parts of government that are not part of a branch of our government?

It amused me that some agency names made it easy to guess when they were created.  Delinquency was a focus in the 1930s; nuclear threats, 1950s; civil rights, 1960s; cyberterrorism, after 2001.

This just started with to know how many federal agencies we have.  But discovering there are agencies decades past their freshness date, begs to be explored. This essay is a just cursory view.

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