Category Archives: Privacy

Joe Biden Is Threatening Our Freedom Of Movement, by Levi Russell

Posted on May 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Cars used to be almost synonymous with autonomy; acquisition of a driver’s license an important rite of passage. Now the federal government wants to take the decisions where and when you can go in your car away from you. From Levi Russell at realclearenergy.org:

The federal gov’t and silicon valley are looking to clamp down on your freedom of movement. Your ability to move about as you please does not fit with their goals for the future of our world. Automotive-related freedoms, including access to fuel, allow us to be free to move without the permission of silicon valley and the federal government. Automotive freedoms are not only hobby related; they are essential to preventing yet another step along the road to serfdom at the hands of woke corporations and federal bureaucrats.

Biden recently signed into law a requirement that all vehicles produced after 2026 be fitted with a remote kill switch. Electric vehicles are already equipped with this capability via internet-connected “superchargers.” These corporations can sell you a product for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, then prevent you from using them. Worse yet, if the law is not challenged or repealed, these kill switches will have a “back door” that allows government agencies to shut your vehicle off remotely as well.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, Tyranny

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The Triumph of Natural Immunity, by Martin Kulldorff

Posted on May 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

In the Green religion, natural is good, much better than anything man dreams up. Except when a person naturally acquires immunity by being exposed to the virus rather than artifically acquires it from a vaccine. From Martin Kulldorff at brownstone.org:

A new CDC study shows that around 75% of American children have already had covid. That means that they have strong natural immunity that protects them from covid infections as they get older. Despite this, the CDC, the FDA and other government agencies are pushing all of them to get vaccinated.

Why?

One important role of public health agencies during a pandemic is to conduct seroprevalence studies to determine how many people have developed antibodies to the disease from having been infected. That way we understand how the disease has spread and how it varies geographically and among different age groups. Spain did such a large, randomized survey early during the pandemic while Sweden did a series of smaller randomized surveys at regular intervals.

In the United States, this important task was left to individual scientists, but they only had resources to conduct small surveys in a limited area such as the Santa Clara County Study. The CDC has now finally got its act together with a national survey. The results are illuminating.

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Posted in Collapse, Governments, Medicine, Politics, Privacy, Psychology, Science

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CDC Tracked Millions Of Americans During Lockdowns To Monitor Movement, Compliance, by Tyler Durden

Posted on May 6, 2022 | 1 comment

Just a warmup for the coming total totalitarianism. They’ll not only know your location at all times, they’ll know every penny you receive and spend. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) spied on millions of Americans using cell phone location data in order to track movements and monitor whether people were complying with lockdown curfews during the pandemic.

According to CDC documents from 2021 obtained by Motherboard via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the program tracked patterns of people visiting K-12 schools – and in one case, monitored “the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation.” The documents reveal that while the CDC used the pandemic to justify purchasing the data more quickly, it actually intended to use it for general agency purposes.

The documents reveal the expansive plan the CDC had last year to use location data from a highly controversial data broker. SafeGraph, the company the CDC paid $420,000 for access to one year of data to, includes Peter Thiel and the former head of Saudi intelligence among its investors. Google banned the company from the Play Store in June. -Motherboard

The data which was purchased comes from cell phones – meaning SafeGraph can track where a person lives, works, and where they’ve been, and then sell that data to various entities. The data which the CDC bought was aggregated – which is designed to follow broad trends in how people are moving around, however researchers have raised concerns over how location data can be deanonymized to track specific individuals.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Medicine, Privacy, Surveillance

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The Bill of Temporary Privileges, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on May 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

The federal government would like to disabuse you of the notion that “rights” are permanent and immutable, a condition that comes not from the government but from God and the requirements of human existence. From Andrew P. Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

Last week, the Director of National Intelligence, the data-gathering and data-concealing arm of the American intelligence community masquerading as the head of it, revealed that in 2021, the FBI engaged in 3.4 million warrantless electronic searches of Americans. This is a direct and profound violation of the right to privacy in “persons, houses, papers, and effects” guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

For the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has characterized electronic surveillance as a search that can only be conducted pursuant to a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, which itself must be presented under oath to the judge. The warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.

By failing to comply with these constitutional requirements, the FBI violated the natural and constitutionally protected right to be left alone of millions of Americans.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Investigations, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, Tyranny

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Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big Tech Monopoly Power is Vital to National Security, by Glenn Greenwald

Posted on April 21, 2022 | Leave a comment

Yes, we have to have Google in its present form to protect the nation. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech’s centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.

(l) An illustration of the CIA logo (Getty Images); (r) An illustration shows the logos of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft displayed on a mobile phone and a laptop screen. (Photo by JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP)

A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech’s power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech’s monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow.

While one of their central claims is that Big Tech monopoly power is necessary to combat (i.e., censor) “foreign disinformation,” several of these officials are themselves leading disinformation agents: many were the same former intelligence officials who signed the now-infamous-and-debunked pre-election letter fraudulently claiming that the authentic Hunter Biden emails had the “hallmarks” of Russia disinformation (former Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Obama CIA Director Michael Morrell, former Obama CIA/Pentagon chief Leon Panetta). Others who signed this new letter have strong financial ties to the Big Tech corporations whose power they are defending in the name of national security (Morrell, Panetta, former Bush National Security Adviser Fran Townsend).

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Horseshit, Intelligence, Media, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology, War

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Human Microchip Implants and the Internet of Bodies, by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Posted on April 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

They will know everything they want to know about you as your privacy shrinks to zero. From Dr. Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Story at-a-glance

  • Implantable microchips are marketed as the ultimate in convenience, but the goal is to create the Internet of Bodies (IoB), described by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as an ecosystem of “an unprecedented number of sensors,” including emotional sensors, “attached to, implanted within, or ingested into human bodies to monitor, analyze and even modify human bodies and behavior”
  • Sweden is one of the earliest adopters of implantable microchips. The chip is implanted just beneath the skin on the hand, and operates using either near-field communication (NFC) — the same technology used in smartphones — or radio-frequency identification (RFID), which is used in contactless credit cards
  • Implanted payment chips are an extension of the internet of things; they’re a way of connecting and exchanging data, and the benefits must be weighed against the potential risks

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Governments, Medicine, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology, Tyranny

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Out With the New – in With the Old! By Eric Peters

Posted on April 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

A lot of older cars don’t have all the gizmos and gee-whiz technology of new cars, and that’s what’s driving the unprecedented demand for used cars. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Which costs more – buying a new vehicle or fixing up the one you’ve got?

Everyone has heard about the unprecedented skyrocketing prices of used vehicles – especially trucks – over the past couple of years. The “media” says this is happening because of shortages of new vehicles. The “media” also says that wearing “masks” – and getting Jabbed – “stops the spread.” If you still believe either, then go ahead and believe that used vehicle prices are up by 30-plus percent because of inventory shortages of new ones . . .

The truth is that the value of used vehicles – especially used trucks – waxes because interest in new ones wanes. While some people are stupid, not everyone is – and the ones who aren’t are smart enough to understand that we’ve already passed a kind of event horizon as regards the desirability of new vehicles vs. their undesirability.

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Posted in Business, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology

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Progressive Governance Needs a Social Credit State, by William L. Anderson

Posted on March 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

Progressives are always looking to up governments’ power and control, and right now that means implementing a global social credit state. From William L. Anderson at mises.org:

Critics of the Chinese Communist regime often point toward the government’s social credit system, in which the government traces individuals’ electronic paths, from their comments on social media to items they purchase, and issues rewards and punishments based on the information collected. For example, a Chinese citizen who receives a “bad” social credit score might not be permitted to ride one of the famous high-speed trains, being relegated to the slower trains for travel, and might be denied air travel.

Not surprisingly, people in the West have denounced the system as being heavy-handed, including CBS News, hardly a voice of antiprogressivism:

The fear is that the government will use the social credit scoring system to punish people who are not sufficiently loyal to the communist party, and trying to clear your name or fight your score is nearly impossible since there is no real due process.

Human Rights Watch, hardly a right-wing entity, is even more scathing in its criticism of China’s system:

Apple CEO Tim Cook looks forward to a “common future in cyberspace” with China, he told the Chinese government’s World Internet Conference earlier this month. This was an embarrassing gesture toward a state that aggressively censors the internet and envisions a dystopian future online.

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

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No, Canada did NOT seize any crypto wallets connected with the #FreedomConvoy, here’s why, by Mark E. Jeftovic

Posted on March 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

Cryptocurrencies are difficult for governments and judicial processes to crack. From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

Short answer: They can’t

(Unless they’re in a hot wallet on an exchange within Canadian jurisdiction).

Longer answer:

I’m seeing references and hearing anecdotally how the Canadian government froze or even seized crypto wallets associated with the #FreedomConvoy fundraising efforts. Including the sensational headline from Fortune magazine’s “Fed up Ottawa residents win secret suit to freeze the crypto wallets funding Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ protesters“.

…fed up residents

…secret suit

… “Freedom Convoy Protestors” in scare quotes

Oh my.

The article refers to a Mareva Injunction issued by the Ontario Superior Court against the convoy organizers (Dichter, Lich, Barber), Pat King (the convoy crasher in my book), several people who were involved in the Tallycoin fundraiser for the truckers, and then numerous John Doe’s. It orders that 134 crypto wallets be frozen, such that nobody remotely involved with them can basically move or cause to be moved any of the funds in those wallets.

Further, it orders that any wallet that receives funds from any of these wallets also be frozen. Technically that means if somebody were to move a single satoshi to Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, BitBuy, etc – then the receiving hot wallets of those exchanges are technically “frozen” as well.

This isn’t really tenable, and this issue has actually come up before within the context of Bitcoin mining and OFAC compliance. There was a time when Marathon Digital actually tried to create an initiative where they would only mine “fully AML and OFAC compliant” derived blocks. This would have essentially required the censoring Bitcoin transactions and  was widely scorned by the industry. It proved itself to be unworkable, with Marathon  scrapping the program almost immediately. (It is also worth noting here that according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, which consults for numerous law enforcement and intelligence agencies, only 0.5% of all Bitcoin transactions are illicit in nature).

Trying to enforce a “taint chain” on specific crypto addresses would run into similar problems to the point where the choice would simply be to shutdown Bitcoin entirely (not possible) or give up.

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Posted in Currencies, Governments, Law, Privacy, Surveillance

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When normality is exposed as a Ponzi, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on March 5, 2022 | Leave a comment

Putin could crash the global financial system by demanding payment in gold for Russia’s oil and gas. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

Putin’s hubris, yes-men for generals, lack of fighting conviction among the men, poor logistics and strong Ukrainian leadership and determination have combined to turn the Russian invasion of Ukraine into a military quagmire.

Meanwhile, the West has upped the stakes in a financial war. The underlying assumption is that the Russian economy is weak and those of the Western allies are stronger. A few key metrics shows this is incorrect. The underlying resilience of the Russian economy and its financial system is not generally understood, and instead EU sanctions could end up undermining the whole euro system and the euro itself.

This article looks at how errors on the battlefield are likely to bring the financial and economic war between the West and Russia out into the open. By suspending access to them, the West has made the mistake of proving to Russia (and all other national central banks) the ultimate uselessness of currency reserves and the benefits of gold. As well as leading to the likely collapse of the entire euro system, this article explains how this financial war could end up with a de facto gold standard for the rouble and call an end for the entire fiat currency Ponzi scheme.

The destruction of the global fiat Ponzi scheme is a step closer

Being increasingly debased, western currencies serve to conceal deteriorating economic conditions, particularly in the US, EU, UK, and Japan. In China, less so perhaps. But China faces an old-fashioned property crisis which is sure to lead to further currency expansion and therefore, debasement of the renminbi. In this article about the state of the financial war between the US, UK and EU on one side, collectively the West, and Russia on the other, we focus on how the invasion of Ukraine is evolving into open financial warfare.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Privacy, Psychology, War

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