Category Archives: Privacy

Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program, by John Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on May 20, 2021 | 2 comments

How would you like to be arrested because someone in government claims you “might” commit a crime in the future? From John Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford

It never fails.

Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.

In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.

Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.

Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, Law, Privacy, Surveillance, Tyranny

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Refusing Erasure: Palestinian Resistance, Israel’s Hopeless Fury, and a Coming Cataclysm, by Danny Sjursen

Posted on May 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Palestinians are prisoners in the tiny portion of their ancestral homeland to which they’ve been relegated and they’re rebelling against it. From Danny Sjursen at antiwar.com:

There hadn’t been much talk of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Nor had there been serious attempts at diplomacy, of Washington brokering a settlement. The reasons were manifold: part apathy, part outrage-exhaustion, part Donald Trump’s intentionally ditching the illusion of America-the-honest-broker and decisively swinging support to one side (Israel), and part Joe Biden’s desire to avoid the controversy of getting embroiled in seemingly hopeless Mideast conflict third-rails. Yet despite increasingly right-wing Israeli intransigence, and American apathy or antagonism, the Palestinian people – not their divided and corrupt Fatah or Hamas “leaders” – refused to be silenced. Few Western commentators counted on that. They should have.

These are resilient people, the Palestinians, and they’ve never gone gently into that good erasure or apartheid night. Just as their youths surprised Israel, the world, and their own exiled leaders, and rose in response to decades of structural disenfranchisement and security force-brutality – in the First Intifada (“Shaking Off”) of 1987 – today a new generation of stateless, open air prisoners are again willing their way into the global spotlight.

On (and Off ) Script

The current uprising – and cruelly disproportionate Israeli military response – has both followed and strayed from the standard script of modern Holy Land conflict. It began with heavy-handed police suppression – including a violent raid on the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan – of Palestinians protesting far-right Israeli extremist provocations and (illegal) government-backed eviction efforts spearheaded by (illegal) Israeli settlers in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of (illegally) occupied East Jerusalem.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Privacy

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The Age of Fear: A Graduation Message for Terrifying Times, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Posted on May 14, 2021 | 3 comments

Some good advice, and not just for graduates, from John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”—Hermann Goering, Nazi leader

With all that is crashing down upon us, from government-manipulated crises to the blowback arising from a society that has repeatedly prized technological expedience and mass-marketed values over self-ownership and individual sovereignty, those coming of age today are facing some of the greatest threats to freedom the world has ever witnessed.

It’s downright frightening.

Young people will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be threatened, intimidated and beaten by militarized police. They will be the subjects of a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies and government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment’s notice.

As such, they will find themselves forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands that “we the people” be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences.

It’s a dismal prospect, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, we failed to guard against such a future.

Worse, we who should have known better neglected to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to resist oppression and survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Debt, Government, Labor, Law, Media, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance, Taxes

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The American Cyber Stasi Will Suppress All Digital Dissent In Biden’s Dystopia, by Andrew Korybko

Posted on May 11, 2021 | 1 comment

This is clearly the direction we are heading. From Andrew Korybko at off-guardian.org:

CNN’s recent report that the US’ security services are considering contracting the services of so-called “researchers” as a legal workaround for spying on average Americans confirms that Biden’s dystopian hellhole is rapidly moving in the direction of establishing a “Cyber Stasi” for suppressing all digital dissent against the Democrats as they continuing consolidating their de facto one-party rule of the country.

The dystopian hellhole that I predicted would become a fait accompli following Biden’s confirmation as President by the Electoral College is quickly becoming a reality after CNN’s recent report that the US security services are considering contracting the services of so-called “researchers” as a legal workaround for spying on average Americans.

According to the outlet, these ostensibly independent contractors would be charged with infiltrating the social media circles of white supremacists and other supposedly terrorist-inclined domestic forces within the country.

[We’ve already seen moves to brand all kinds of dissent – whether questioning the election result, countering COVID hysteria or warning about possible dangers of vaccines – as “domestic terrorism”. Ed.]

The report claims that the intent is to “help provide a broad picture of who was perpetuating the ‘narratives’ of concern”, after which “the FBI could theoretically use that pool of information to focus on specific individuals if there is enough evidence of a potential crime to legally do so”.

In other words, the US security services essentially want to establish a “Cyber Stasi” of “fellow” citizens who spy on one another and produce purported “evidence” of “potential crimes” for “justifying” the FBI’s “legal” investigations. CNN quoted an unnamed senior intelligence official who asked, “What do you do about ideology that’s leading to violence? Do you have to wait until it leads to violence?”, thereby hinting that this initiative might likely be exploited to stop so-called “pre-crime”, or crimes before they occur.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Law, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance

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The Biden Administration Wants To Partner With Criminals To Spy on You, by Thomas Knapp

Posted on May 8, 2021 | 1 comment

Public-private surveillance partnerships, what a great idea! From Thomas Knapp at antiwar.com:

“The Biden administration,” CNN reports, “is considering using outside firms to track extremist chatter by Americans online.”

Federal law enforcement agencies are legally and constitutionally forbidden to monitor the private activities of citizens without first getting warrants based on probable cause to believe those citizens have committed, or are committing, crimes. The feds can browse public social media posts and so forth, but secretly trawling private groups and hacking encrypted chats is off-limits.

Private companies and nonprofit civic organizations, not being government entities, don’t need warrants or probable cause to access those private discussion areas. The administration’s bright idea is that through partnership with these non-government entities, they can get around legal and constitutional barriers: “WE didn’t collect the information. THEY collected the information, then gave it to us.”

There are several flies in that ointment. Here’s a big one:

It’s entirely understandable that – to use an entirely hypothetical example – someone with the Southern Poverty Law Center might impersonate a fictional white supremacist to get into a private Ku Klux Klan chat room and see what those people are up to.

But the US Department of Justice says it’s illegal (under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) to evade terms of service with false identities.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Intelligence, Law, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance

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More Government Spying and Lying, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on May 6, 2021 | 1 comment

Spying and lying, it’s what governments do.

They do it to me, they do it to you.

From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Twice last week, the federal government’s unconstitutional spying on ordinary Americans was exposed. One of these revelations was made by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., who wrote that the FBI is still using warrantless spying in criminal cases, notwithstanding the Constitution and federal laws. The other revelation was a surprise even to those of us who monitor these things — the United States Postal Service acknowledged that it has been spying on Americans.

Here is the backstory.

The modern American security state — the parts of the federal government that spy on Americans and do not change on account of elections — received an enormous shot in the arm in 1978 when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That naively misguided and profoundly unconstitutional law was sold to Congress as a way to control the security state’s spying in the aftermath of Watergate. Watergate had revealed that President Richard M. Nixon used the FBI and the CIA to spy on real and imagined domestic political adversaries.

FISA set up a secret court that authorized domestic spying by issuing warrants not based on probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires, but on probable cause of communicating with foreign agents. Never mind that communications about noncriminal matters are protected speech; the FISA court issued tens of thousands of these warrants.

As the security state’s appetite for spying grew more voracious, its agents and lawyers persuaded the FISA court to lower the bar for issuing a surveillance warrant from communicating with a foreign agent to communicating with a foreign person, and to expand the scope of those warrants to include Americans who have communicated with other Americans who have communicated with foreign people. Under this procedure, if I call my cousins in Florence and then you call me, all of your calls could be surveilled.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Horseshit, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance

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The Time Has Come for a Campaign of Resistance, by Gen Z Conservative

Posted on April 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s past time for a campaign of resistance, but better late than never. From Gen Z Conservative at genzconservative.com:

a campaign of resistance

As Jordan Schatchel recently wrote on AIER, Covid has killed the free world. The West, that brave group of countries that stood up to and defeated first the fascist threat then the Soviet threat, standing up for republican and democratic ideals against the tyrants of the East, has fallen into the grip of tyrants. Petty tyrants, to be sure, but, as CS Lewis noted in his quotation about the worst type of tyranny, those tyrants are some of the most insidious and evil. Well, I say NO MORE! The time has come for a campaign of resistance. We must stand up to tyranny.

First, let’s review what the Covid tyrants have done to this land and the nations of our friends.

In the US, practically every state not run by a deep-red governor is still shut down to some extent and bureaucrats with any scrap of power are abusing it. The government was prodding people to take a vaccine that can cause blood clots, masks are still a requirement in most stores and restaurants from sea to shining sea, various arbitrary restrictions on opening and capacity plague small business owners, and overweight people still glare (or scream) at you for “putting their health in danger” by not wearing a mask or properly social distancing. As if a lack of a piece of blue cloth is worse for them than fifty years of unhealthy eating. In any case, we have become a nation of tyrants and informants.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Governments, Insurrection, Medicine, Politics, Privacy

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The Military Origins of Facebook, by Whitney Webb

Posted on April 13, 2021 | 1 comment

Who would have thought that Big Tech, particularly Facebook, was birthed by the national security state? From Whitney Webb at unlimitedhangout.com:

Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.

In mid-February, Daniel Baker, a US veteran described by the media as “anti-Trump, anti-government, anti-white supremacists, and anti-police,” was charged by a Florida grand jury with two counts of “transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure.”

The communication in question had been posted by Baker on Facebook, where he had created an event page to organize an armed counter-rally to one planned by Donald Trump supporters at the Florida capital of Tallahassee on January 6. “If you are afraid to die fighting the enemy, then stay in bed and live. Call all of your friends and Rise Up!,” Baker had written on his Facebook event page.

Baker’s case is notable as it is one of the first “precrime” arrests based entirely on social media posts—the logical conclusion of the Trump administration’s, and now Biden administration’s, push to normalize arresting individuals for online posts to prevent violent acts before they can happen. From the increasing sophistication of US intelligence/military contractor Palantir’s predictive policing programs to the formal announcement of the Justice Department’s Disruption and Early Engagement Program in 2019 to Biden’s first budget, which contains $111 million for pursuing and managing “increasing domestic terrorism caseloads,” the steady advance toward a precrime-centered “war on domestic terror” has been notable under every post-9/11 presidential administration.

This new so-called war on domestic terror has actually resulted in many of these types of posts on Facebook. And, while Facebook has long sought to portray itself as a “town square” that allows people from across the world to connect, a deeper look into its apparently military origins and continual military connections reveals that the world’s largest social network was always intended to act as a surveillance tool to identify and target domestic dissent.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, Intelligence, Military, Privacy, Surveillance

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Liberal Author Naomi Wolf Warns ‘Vaccine Passports’ Are the ‘End of Human Liberty in the West’, by Victoria Taft

Posted on April 3, 2021 | Leave a comment

With today’s technologies, something like a vaccine passport can easily morph into a surveillance and compliance tool for various levels of government. From Victoria Taft at pjmedia.com:

AP Photo/Jessica Hill

The Left would like to dismiss Naomi Wolf as a heretic and conspiracy theorist now that she disagrees with their anti-liberty responses to coronavirus, but her warning about President Biden’s threatened “vaccine passports” should be heeded.

Wolf, who started a tech site that she says is meant to bring the right and left together, says the passport would divide people between haves and have nots: those who have had the COVID shot and those who have not. In her words, it “is literally the end of human liberty in the West if this plan unfolds as planned.”

Here’s what she means, in case you haven’t figure it out yourself.

Vaccine passports sound like a fine thing if you don’t know what those platforms can do. I’m CEO of a tech company, I understand what this platform does. It’s not about the vaccine, it’s not about the virus, it’s about data. And once this rolls out you don’t have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all.

Wolf told Fox News host Steve Hilton that Big Tech companies will oversee all of your personal information and intermingle it with information that government will use to determine if you’re eligible to be able to travel and do anything else in polite society. President Biden signed an executive order in January to coordinate with other countries to track people to stop the spread of COVID.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Medicine, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Surveillance

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Sailing Into Solitude, by Ray Jason

Posted on March 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

Deep thoughts from paradise. From Ray Jason at theburningplatform.com:

My little ship’s bow was pointed towards one of my favorite destinations. It is a tropical lagoon enclosed by the steep, lush hills of a full-climax jungle. But more importantly, I was also sailing towards a “state of mind.” This idyllic bay would provide me riches that are rarely savored in the low-grade mayhem that we call The Modern World. The treasures I was seeking were Simplicity and Solitude.

For twelve days and nights, I would bask in a hideaway so pristine that it had never been violated by a siren or a car alarm. There were very few humans and most of my immediate neighbors were creatures who live in the Sea and the Sky. Occasionally, a smiling local Indio paddled past in a hand-carved dugout canoe. The tranquility was so visceral, that when a boat powered by an outboard motor passed by, it was as jarring as a chain saw at a yoga retreat.

My days of slow, quiet contemplation brought me both joy and sadness. The regret was not for myself, but for the great mass of humanity that is either strapped to the wheel of survival, or that is hypnotized by their iDistractors. Both of these groups are rarely able to break loose from their shackles and ponder The Big Stuff.

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Posted in Morality, Philosophy, Privacy, Psychology

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