Tag: police state

California Content Law Design Code Faces Free Speech Clash

Efforts to implement California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code continue to face resistance from both the tech industry and digital civil liberties groups, who argue that the law’s restrictions violate constitutional protections and would compel sweeping surveillance and censorship online.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which represents companies including Google, Amazon, Meta, and eBay, recently filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case NetChoice v. Bonta.

Stephanie Joyce, the group’s senior vice president and director of its litigation center, condemned the legislation in blunt terms: “The Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what lawful content readers can see, and it extends that protection regardless of the reader’s age.

Though well-intentioned, California’s internet age restriction law is unconstitutional, and the court of appeals should affirm the decision to block it.”

The case marks the second time this legal clash has reached the Ninth Circuit. Previously, the court blocked only a portion of the law and returned the rest for further review.

Now, with renewed scrutiny, the court could determine whether the entire statute fails to withstand constitutional challenge.

NetChoice, an industry coalition that includes many of the same members as the CCIA, has led the charge against a wave of so-called “age assurance” laws.

These policies would require digital platforms to verify the ages of users and potentially restrict minors’ access to content deemed unsuitable. But free speech advocates warn the consequences would be broader and more dangerous than legislators admit.

Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) have also weighed in with their own amicus brief, arguing that the law’s age estimation mandates undermine essential First Amendment rights. “CDT and EFF’s brief argues that the appeals court should uphold the injunctions solely on the basis of its overbroad, unconstitutional age verification requirement because that requirement is not severable from other provisions and should doom the entire statute.” The brief warns that such mandates not only chill access to lawful speech but also erode online anonymity and place users’ personal data at risk.

They also emphasize that minors’ ability to engage freely online is a critical part of their development and civic participation. “Social media helps minors develop their own ideas, learn to express themselves, and engage productively with others in our democratic public sphere,” the brief states.

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Trump’s Pick For Traffic Safety Agency Will ‘Double Down’ On Marijuana-Impaired Driving Warnings As More States Legalize

President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead a key federal traffic safety agency says he’s prepared to “double down” on increasing awareness about the risk of marijuana-impaired driving in partnership with the White House.

During a Senate committee hearing, the nominee to serve as administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Jonathan Morrison, was pressed on the need to develop technology to detect impairment from THC and also educate the public about the issue.

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO), who has long focused on promoting public safety around cannabis and driving, noted at the hearing that while there’s a national standard for assessing alcohol impairment, “currently, there is no uniform national standard to measure marijuana impairment.”

“Creating a national standard marijuana impairment is going to ease the burden of law enforcement, prosecutions, help clarify legal requirements for states and, without question, save countless lives,” the senator said.

The NHTSA nominee agreed and added that he feels “there isn’t necessarily public consciousness that when people are using marijuana, that it has an impairing effect on their ability to drive a vehicle.”

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FBI Director Kash Patel EXPOSES Obama-Clinton Grand Conspiracy with Larry Kudlow — CONFIRMS Russiagate, FISA Court Abuses, and Mar-a-Lago Raid Was a Political Hit Job

FBI Director Kash Patel joined Larry Kudlow in a bombshell interview this week, and it’s ten minutes every American needs to see.

On Larry Kudlow’s show, FBI Director Kash Patel unleashed a series of bombshells that confirm what millions of Americans have long suspected: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the masterminds behind the phony Russiagate hoax and the illegal invasion of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

Now, Patel has confirmed it on national television, Obama and Hillary Clinton were at the very top of the conspiracy.

Kudlow pressed Patel on how the FBI could justify invading the private home of a former president, something unprecedented in American history.

Patel laid it out plainly: Russiagate, the FISA Court abuses, and the Mar-a-Lago raid were all connected. A “political operation,” not a legitimate investigation.

Kudlow also asked Patel point-blank if Obama and Hillary were the architects of this grand conspiracy.

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Citizen Lab Director Warns Cyber Industry About US Authoritarian Descent

Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, one of the most prominent organizations investigating government spyware abuses, is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community and asking them to step up and join the fight against authoritarianism. 

On Wednesday, Deibert will deliver a keynote at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, one of the largest gatherings of information security professionals of the year. 

Ahead of his talk, Deibert told TechCrunch that he plans to speak about what he describes as a “descent into a kind of fusion of tech and fascism,” and the role that the Big Tech platforms are playing, and “propelling forward a really frightening type of collective insecurity that isn’t typically addressed by this crowd, this community, as a cybersecurity problem.”

Deibert described the recent political events in the United States as a “dramatic descent into authoritarianism,” but one that the cybersecurity community can help defend against.

“I think alarm bells need to be rung for this community that, at the very least, they should be aware of what’s going on and hopefully they can not contribute to it, if not help reverse it,” Deibert told TechCrunch.

Historically, at least in the United States, the cybersecurity industry has put politics — to a certain extent — to the side. More recently, however, politics has fully entered the world of cybersecurity. 

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into former CISA director Chris Krebs, who had publicly rebuffed Trump’s false claims about election fraud by declaring the 2020 election secure. Trump later fired Krebs by tweet. The investigation ordered by Trump months after his 2024 reelection forced Krebs to step down from SentinelOne and vow to fight back.

In response, Jen Easterly, another former CISA director and Krebs’ successor, called on the cybersecurity community to get involved and speak out.

“If we stay silent when experienced, mission-driven leaders are sidelined or sanctioned, we risk something greater than discomfort; we risk diminishing the very institutions we are here to protect,” Easterly wrote in a post on LinkedIn. 

Easterly was herself a victim of political pressure from the Trump administration when her offer to join West Point was rescinded in late July.

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Court Upholds Nearly $1 Million Fine Against Restaurant That Ignored Pandemic Indoor Dining Ban

A Washington state restaurant that ignored a 2020 state COVID-19 pandemic order must pay a fine of $936,000 – $18,000 per day, for each day it remained in operation while the state’s emergency order banning indoor dining was in place, an appeals court has ruled.

The ban, imposed in late 2020 by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), went into effect following a jump in cases and hospitalizations (unaudited!). In response, the owners of Stuffy’s II restaurant, Bud and Glenda Duling, ignored the order – resulting in the financial punishment. 

The fine was levied by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries – which the Dulings say they cannot pay. Meanwhile, the Board of Industrial Insurance Appeals did not have their back, refusing to weigh in after saying they don’t have the authority to deal with constitutional matters. A superior court judge upheld the decision.

Despite providing tax returns showing that it operated at a loss in 2020 and received a PPP loan, the court ruled that the Dulings have not provided evidence that their company cannot pay the fines.

“Duling has not demonstrated that it is unable to pay the fine or that the fine is excessive,” Judge Rebecca Glasgow wrote for the unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the State of Washington judges that considered the case. “There is nothing in the record about what savings or assets Duling had,” Glasow continued, adding “Duling had ample opportunities to provide additional documentation and deposition testimony to support its contention that it was unable to pay the fine, and it did not do so.”

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The New Normal Of US Domestic Spying

What if the federal government captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message and all the fiber-optic data generated by every person and entity in the United States 24/7? What if this mass surveillance was never authorized by any federal law and tramples the Fourth Amendment?

What if this mass surveillance has come about by the secret collusion of presidents and their spies in the National Security Agency and by the federal government forcing the major telephone and computer service providers to cooperate with it? What if the service providers were coerced into giving the feds continuous physical access to their computers and thus to all the data contained in and passing through those computers?

What if President George W. Bush told the NSA that since it is part of the Defense Department and he was the commander in chief of the military, NSA agents could spy on anyone, notwithstanding any court orders or statutes that prohibited it? What if Bush believed that his orders to the military were not constrained by the laws against computer hacking that Congress had written or the interpretations of those laws by federal courts or even by the Constitution?

What if Congress has written laws that all presidents have sworn to uphold and that require a warrant issued by a judge before the NSA can spy on anyone but Bush effectively told the NSA to go through the motions of getting a warrant while spying without warrants on everyone in the U.S. all the time? What if Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump have taken the same position toward the NSA and ordered or permitted the same warrantless and lawless spying?

What if the Constitution requires warrants based on probable cause of criminal behavior before surveillance can be conducted but Congress has written laws reducing that standard to probable cause of communicating with a foreign national? What if a basic principle of constitutional law is that Congress is subject to the Constitution and therefore cannot change its terms or their meanings?

What if the Constitution requires that all warrants particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized? What if the warrants Congress permits the NSA to use violate that requirement by permitting a federal court — the FISA Court — to issue general warrants? What if general warrants do not particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized but rather authorize the bearer to search indiscriminately through service providers’ customer data?

What if the government has no moral, constitutional or legal right to personal information about and from all of us without a valid search warrant consistent with constitutional requirements?

What if raw intelligence data comes to the government without any proper names on it? What if in order to find those proper names, the government goes through a procedure called unmasking? What if lawful unmasking can only occur when the government knows that a national security problem is afoot and it needs to know the identity of the person whose communications it has in hand? What if the Constitution requires a search warrant to engage in unmasking?

What if the Obama administration made it easier for political appointees to unmask members of Congress and other government officials without demonstrating a national security need as a reason for doing so? What if unmasking for political purposes is a felony? What if it is common today?

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Man ARRESTED In UK For Saying “We Love Bacon”

A British man has been arrested for saying “we love bacon” while protesting the building of a proposed giant mosque.

The Telegraph reports that the protest occurred at the site of planned super mosque in the Lake District, which is populated by an almost 100% white population.

The report further notes that the 23-year-old man, was not otherwise being disruptive, causing any damage or being in any way violent.

The arresting police officer claims that the grounds for the detainment were “racial abuse.”

Telegraph writer  Isabel Oakeshott notes:

Of course Muslims don’t eat pork. As a result, they cannot share this particular delight with the rest of us. However, despite a steady rise in our own Muslim population, the UK remains a Christian country. Supposedly, we also enjoy free speech. Why then did the unfortunate father find himself frogmarched away from the protest by two police officers?

Saying ‘We love bacon’ is simply a truism. We British do love it, and there is nothing wrong with saying so.

As for remarks about bacon near a religious site or in the company of Muslims, they hardly constitute public disorder, still less ‘racial abuse,’ as the officer who arrested him can be heard suggesting.

The South Lakes Islamic Centre, often referred to as the Kendal mosque due to its proximity to the town of Kendal in Cumbria, is a £2.5 million facility under construction in Dalton-in-Furness on the edge of the Lake District.

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X Slams Brazil for Censorship, Secret Orders, and Free Speech Crackdown in USTR Trade Investigation

As part of an ongoing investigation by the US Trade Representative (USTR) into Brazil’s treatment of American digital platforms, X has filed a stark warning about what it describes as intensifying threats to freedom of expression and the rule of law in Brazil.

The USTR probe, focused on policies that may harm US companies, closed its comment period on August 18, with a hearing scheduled for September 3.

We obtained a copy of the comments for you here.

X’s submission outlines a series of aggressive measures by Brazilian authorities that the company says are undermining internet freedom and imposing extraterritorial censorship demands.

Among the most concerning developments, according to the platform, is a ruling from Brazil’s Supreme Court in June 2025 that gutted a core protection in the country’s 2014 internet law, the Marco Civil da Internet (MCI).

By declaring Article 19 partially unconstitutional, the ruling opened the door for tech platforms to be held legally responsible for user-generated content, without requiring judicial oversight.

This, X argues, has increased operational burdens and incentivized preemptive content removals.

The platform also warned that Brazil’s judiciary, particularly under Justice Alexandre de Moraes, has been issuing covert content removal orders targeting journalists, politicians, and even US users.

These directives are often enforced without any notice or opportunity to appeal, a practice X says raises serious concerns about due process and transparency.

Further, the company expressed alarm over Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice asserting jurisdiction beyond its borders. According to X, the court has ordered content to be removed globally, even when such content is legal in countries like the United States. The court has described this overreach as a “natural consequence” of the internet, a justification X contends disregards international legal norms.

X also highlighted what it sees as the Brazilian judiciary’s disregard for the US-Brazil Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT).

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Here’s A Pile Of Evidence Lockdowns Would Never Have Happened Without Corporate Media

Artificial intelligence may make books even more important, because they preserve a footnoted historical record that an AI-powered internet edits, erases, and obscures in real time. This is why I dedicate hard-earned family funds to buying physical books worth keeping, such as Sen. Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up.

Although a part of me wants to join many Americans in pretending lockdowns are all in a misty, distant past, I can’t do that, because to forget would dishonor the suffering. It would deliberately discard what we learned at so great a price. I want to see and preserve evidence of the evils our political class and Democrat voters continue to inflict. Remembering may be the only way to help prevent or dilute repeated mass psychoses.

This is why I read An Abundance of Caution, a book out in April by the left-leaning journalist David Zweig, who has bylines in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. Zweig meticulously inspects a linchpin of the surreal U.S. lockdowns, extended school closures, against good evidence available not just weeks after they began but well before.

The End of Credential Credibility

Abundance of Caution documents how America’s disaster response disqualified the vast majority of America’s credentialed class. For example, three out of the four most accurate groups of people modeling Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were outside of the public health field. Several were “random” stats guys.

“A team from a management consulting firm, along with — to be frank, two random guys — McConnell and Karlen, outperformed teams of researchers from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, Columbia, the University of Michigan, the famed IHME, and the US Department of Energy’s elite Los Alamos National Laboratory, among others.” Zweig writes. “It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of public health ‘experts’ than this outcome.”

As a longtime fact-checker for major publications and a father of two children shut out of school, Zweig also had internal motivations to question his political tribe’s hysteria during a presidential election year.

“[S]chool policies emerge as a window into the larger conversation around COVID-19 and, broader still, a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis,” Zweig writes in his introduction. “Ultimately, this is not a book about COVID. It’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”

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SHOCKING: South Korean Police RAID Former Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn’s Party Office After He Dared to Question ELECTION FRAUD — Democracy Under Siege

South Korea, once hailed as a beacon of democracy in Asia, is now carrying out police raids on political opponents who dare raise questions about election fraud under the current pro-Chinese regime.

On August 20, armed police stormed the office of the Free and Innovation Party, led by former Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, under the guise of investigating so-called “election law violations,” according to our contact in South Korea, Kim Yu-jin.

Hwang, along with hundreds of citizens organized under the Committee for Preventing Election Fraud, had officially registered as election monitors.

They followed legal procedures, participated transparently, and documented what they believed were serious irregularities. Instead of being commended for strengthening democracy, they are now being treated as criminals.

According to reports in the Herald Economy, the National Election Commission (NEC) filed complaints accusing Hwang and his group of “interfering” with elections, claiming they trained monitors on how to disrupt voting, induced invalid ballots, and even held rallies near polling places.

Police used those accusations as the basis for sweeping raids, ransacking offices and seizing materials.

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