Tag: scotus

Supreme Court refuses to hear challenge to NSA mass surveillance

The entity behind Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundations partnered with the ACLU and the Knight Institute to try to get the US Supreme Court to force Congress to curtail the current NSA internet surveillance.

The decision leaves the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit with a divided opinion, which threw out Wikimedia’s challenge accepting the government’s “state secrets privilege” argument.

The notorious agency’s legal basis for such surveillance are based on FISA (Foreign Surveillance Act) which grew into quite a “monster” since it was first passed in 1978, and in particular after 9/11 – and, specifically with Section 702, introduced in 2008.

Section 702 is up for renewal later this year and this is what the petition sought to prevent. The contested legislation proved to be the foundation of much of the mass surveillance wrongdoings revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Wikimedia and others unsuccessfully attempted to ensure that the NSA “upstream” surveillance program (the harmful nature of which is said to be backed up by a number of disclosures coming from government sources) would be “reviewed” rather than simply renewed this time. It allows the spy agency to search internet traffic to and from the US, and that means emails, messages and other communication belonging to Americans.

This means that both those on US soil and targeted individuals abroad are spied on.

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Kavanuagh Rape Accuser Confesses She Lied, Was Never Raped, Never Even Met The Man

ICYMI| Because the mainstream media was not very interested in this story (for obvious reasons) it is likely that you did not see this when it broke.  For this reason we are posting it again.

The sh*t show the Democrats staged at the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was a disgusting group denigration of the high office Democrats have been entrusted with.

This was borne out again yesterday when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley made a third criminal referral, this one against a second Kavanaugh accuser, Judy Munro-Leighton.

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When Does an Ugly Facebook Message Qualify as an Illegal ‘True Threat’ of Violence? SCOTUS Will Decide.

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment,” the U.S. Supreme Court said in Texas v Johnson (1989), “it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” What that principle means in practice is that all sorts of vile and despicable speech—including hate speech—are constitutionally protected.

But the Court has also said that the First Amendment has its limits. One of them involves “true threats” of violence, which the Court in Virginia v. Black (2003) defined as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” The First Amendment, the Court held, “permits” the government “to ban a ‘true threat.'”

Deciding what actually counts as a “true threat” is not such an easy task, however, as the Supreme Court seems to recognize. Last week, the Court agreed to hear arguments in Counterman v. Colorado, which asks, in the question presented to the Court, “whether, to establish that a statement is a ‘true threat’ unprotected by the First Amendment, the government must show that the speaker subjectively knew or intended the threatening nature of the statement, or whether it is enough to show that an objective ‘reasonable person’ would regard the statement as a threat of violence.”

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The Supreme Court’s Complicity in Our Loss of Freedom

After the Constitution had been drafted, it was submitted to the states for ratification. It had quite a few opponents, called the Anti-Federalists. They argued that the proposed government would have too much power and would become a danger to the people’s rights. Most of their fire was aimed at Articles I and II, which created the legislative and executive branches, but some Anti-Federalists also expressed fears that the judiciary in Article III could become a menace. Seeking to allay all such fears, the Constitution’s proponents wrote 85 essays known as The Federalist Papers.

In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton defended the judiciary, calling it “the least dangerous branch” since it would have neither the legislature’s control over spending nor the executive’s power of enforcement. Hamilton argued that judicial review, the ability of a court (in this case the Supreme Court) to invalidate legislation passed by a legislature (in this case Congress) posed no threat to the rights of Americans, but was essential in protecting them against possible encroachments by the political branches.

So how has judicial review worked out?

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Ketanji Brown Jackson Suggests Christmas Classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” is Fodder For White Supremacists in Oral Arguments Over Free Speech Case

She’s the smartest person on the Supreme Court, according to Joe Biden.

The US Supreme Court on Monday listened to arguments in a case about a Colorado web designer who doesn’t want to create wedding websites for same-sex couples.

The conservative justices argued the web designer has freedom of speech to choose which websites she designs.

“Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that a businessperson’s objection would not be based on the status of the same-sex couple, but instead, the message the businessperson did not want to send. The question isn’t the “who” Gorsuch said, but the “what.”” CNN reported.

Enter Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson…

Ketanji Brown Jackson doesn’t know what a woman is but she’s apparently a movie critic?

And a racist.

KBJ used the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” to argue the First Amendment case.

“I want to do video depictions of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ and knowing that movie very well, I want to be authentic, and so only white children and families can be customers for that particular product. Everybody else can, I’ll give to everybody else I’ll sell them anything they want, just not the ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ depictions,” Ketanji Brown Jackson said. “I‘m expressing something, right? For the purposes of that speech. I can say anti-discrimination laws can’t make me sell ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ packages to non-white individuals.”

”This business wants to express its own view of nostalgia about Christmases past by reproducing classic 1940’s and 1950’s Santa scenes, they do it in sepia tone and they are customizing each one,” Ketanji Brown Jackson said.

Unbelievable!

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Kavanuagh Rape Accuser Confesses She Lied, Was Never Raped, Never Even Met The Man

ICYMI| Because the mainstream media was not very interested in this story (for obvious reasons) it is likely that you did not see this when it broke.  For this reason we are posting it again.

The sh*t show the Democrats staged at the confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, was a disgusting group denigration of the high office Democrats have been entrusted with.

This was borne out again yesterday when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley made a third criminal referral, this one against a second Kavanaugh accuser, Judy Munro-Leighton.

Keep reading

Dismantling the Constitution: Police No Longer Have to Honor the Right to Remain Silent

We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of every constitutional principle that serves as a bulwark against government tyranny, overreach and abuse.

As usual, the latest assault comes from the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 6-3 ruling in Vega v. Tekoh, the Supreme Court took aim at the Miranda warnings, which require that police inform suspects that they have a right against self-incrimination when in police custody: namely, that they have a right to remain silent, to have an attorney present, and that anything they say and do can and will be used against them in a court of law.

Although the Supreme Court stopped short of overturning its 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, the conservative majority declared that individuals cannot hold police accountable for violating their Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.

By shielding police from lawsuits arising from their failure to Mirandize suspects, the Supreme Court has sent a message to police that they no longer have to respect a suspect’s right to remain silent.

In other words, concludes legal analyst Nick Sibilla, “the Supreme Court has effectively created a new legal immunity for cops accused of infringing on the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.”

Why is this important?

In totality, the rights enshrined in the Fifth Amendment speak to the Founders’ determination to protect the rights of the individual against a government with a natural inclination towards corruption, tyranny and thuggery.

The Founders were especially concerned with balancing the scales of justice in such a way that the innocent and the accused were not railroaded and browbeaten by government agents into coerced confessions, false convictions, or sham trials.

Indeed, so determined were the Founders to safeguard the rights of the innocent, even if it meant allowing a guilty person to go free, that Benjamin Franklin insisted, “It is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.”

Two hundred-plus years later, the Supreme Court (aided and abetted by the police state, Congress and Corporate America) has flipped that longstanding presumption of innocence on its head.

In our present suspect society, “we the people” are all presumed guilty until proven innocent.

With the Vega ruling, we have even fewer defenses for warding off government chicanery, abuse, threats and entrapment.

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Rogue Cops: The Supreme Court Is Turning America Into a Constitution-Free Zone

“No one should get used to their rights. Predicting with certainty which ones, if any, will go, or when, is impossible.”—Mary R. Ziegler, legal historian

The Supreme Court has spoken: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating.

The doctrine of qualified immunity was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to ensure that government officials are not held accountable for official misconduct.

In Egbert v. Boule, the Court gave total immunity to Border Patrol agents who beat up a bed-and-breakfast owner, in the process carving out a massive exception to the Fourth Amendment for border police (and by extension, other federal police) who unconstitutionally use excessive force. As journalist Ian Millhiser concludes, “Egbert v. Boule is a severe blow to the proposition that law enforcement must obey the Constitution.”

In Cope v. Cogdill, the Court let stand a Fifth Circuit ruling that granted qualified immunity to jail officials who watched a suicidal inmate strangle himself without intervening or calling for help. Likewise, in Ramirez v. Guadarrama, the Court let stand a lower court ruling granting qualified immunity to police officers who fired their tasers at a suicidal man who had doused himself in gasoline, causing the man to burst into flames.

Both Cope and Ramirez move the goal posts for the kind of misconduct that merits qualified immunity, suggesting that even sheer incompetence is excusable when it involves a cop.

It’s a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

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Supreme Court Refuses to Limit Warrantless Surveillance

According to the Supreme Court, the legality of NSA mass surveillance can’t even be legally challenged.

This was the message the Court sent when it refused to take up Jewel v. NSA, allowing an appellate court decision to stand.

The high court’s decision further underscores the futility of depending on federal courts to challenge federal surveillance power. Tenth Amendment Center executive director Micheal Boldin called it “a really bad strategy.”

“We don’t expect it to ever get the job done.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the NSA in 2008 on behalf of Carolyn Jewel and several other AT&T customers in an effort to end dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary people. The EFF based its case on declarations from three NSA whistleblowers, along with other evidence that included documents published by the Washington Post and the Guardian. The evidence showed that the NSA collected communication directly from fiber optic cables. It also revealed a domestic telephone record collection program that the government confirmed in 2013.  Mark Klein worked as an AT&T tech who claimed the communications giant routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

In 2015, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White denied the plaintiffs’ challenge saying that it would require “impermissible disclosure of state secret information” The Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the district court opinion, affirming that “state secret privilege” blocked the plaintiff’s efforts to tp prove that their data was intercepted. Unable to prove that, they had no standing to sue.

As EFF put it, the Supreme Court allowed the case to be dismissed because the surveillance program that everybody has known about since Edward Snowden released a trove of documents in 2013 is a “secret.”

 “Yes, you read that right: something we all know is a still officially a “secret” and so cannot be the subject to litigation.”

As the EFF explains, the U.S. government contends that “even if all of the allegations of serious law-breaking and Constitutional violations are true, surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans is exempt from judicial review.”

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Transgender Activist Who Created ‘Gender Unicorn’ Calls for ‘Supreme Court Assassination Challenge’

A transgender activist who creates widely distributed educational resources for nonbinary students called for a “Supreme Court assassination challenge” on the same day Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Eli Erlick, a founder of Trans Student Educational Resources (TSER) and creator of a popular “Gender Unicorn” graphic for “gender fluidity,” tweeted and later deleted the remark on Friday, when the High Court delivered its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Since 2011, Erlick and the “youth-led” organization have helped implement transgender policies in dozens of school districts, including Wisconsin, New York, and Texas. The group backs sweeping “structural change” as opposed to “equality,” which according to its website, “reinforces systems of white supremacy, transphobia, and injustice.”

Following the leaked Dobbs decision in May, pro-abortion activists have targeted pro-life offices and crisis pregnancy centers across the country. Vandals firebombed pro-life buildings in Wisconsin and New York and defaced four pro-life churches in Washington State. Fears heightened in June when an armed California man was arrested outside the home of Brett Kavanaugh and later confessed to plans to assassinate the justice.

Assassination threats, sometimes from accounts with thousands of followers, erupted on social media on the day the Court ended constitutional protection for abortion.

“Can someone kill Clarence Thomas??” an account with more than 14,000 followers tweeted. The post hadn’t been taken down as of this article’s publication.

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