“After New Jersey state troopers arrested Rebecca Musarra for remaining silent, they informed her, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ That should have been a clue that something was amiss with their legal justification for hauling her off to jail.”
Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2016/05/06/after-arresting-driver-for-silence-cops
“California has voted to eliminate a Cold War-era law that allows state workers to be fired if they are found to be communists.”
Read more: https://www.rt.com/usa/387773-california-bill-communist-workers/
“The San Diego District Attorney (DA) seized all of the family’s money from their bank accounts on February 2, 2016, following a raid on James Slatic’s legal medical marijuana business. Although no one has been charged with any crime, the DA used civil forfeiture laws to seize more than $55,000 from James’ personal bank account, more than $34,000 from his wife, Annette, and more than $5,600 each from their teenage daughters Lily and Penny, who had saved the money for college. Judge Ipema’s order requires the DA to return all $100,693.85 to the Slatics.”
“Duterte is doing nothing more than copying the processes and methods of the U.S. government in its war on drugs and its war on terrorism, both of which most members of the mainstream media have long supported.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2017/05/09/dutertes-murder-model-u-s-government/
“The Justice Department is prosecuting a woman who laughed during a Senate hearing to confirm Jeff Sessions as attorney general. I can sympathize with her somewhat absurd plight because I was once tossed out of the press box in the Supreme Court for laughing at the wrong time.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/getting-arrested-for-laughing-is-no-joke/
“The commission released its findings on Monday and noted that the judge’s defense is that he was trying to be funny.”
“The unidentified attackers exploited weaknesses in Signalling System No. 7, a telephony signaling language that more than 800 telecommunications companies around the world use to ensure their networks interoperate. SS7, as the protocol is known, makes it possible for a person in one country to send text messages to someone in another country. It also allows phone calls to go uninterrupted when the caller is traveling on a train. The same functionality can be used to eavesdrop on conversations, track geographic whereabouts, or intercept text messages.”
“You can imagine my surprise when I found out that SWIFT runs on Windows Vista – an obsolete operating system that Microsoft no longer supports. When my bank received its SWIFT code, we were told that we had to have a computer running Vista in the office in order to connect to SWIFT. It was such an absurd exercise to find an obsolete computer running an obsolete operating system to connect to the supposedly most advanced and important international payment network in the world. Unsurprisingly, SWIFT has been hacked numerous times, both by the NSA as well as private hackers who have stolen a great deal of money from their victims.”
“In its latest John Doe summons, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is requiring American Express to send account information of Dutch residents with credit or debit cards linked to bank accounts outside the Netherlands to U.S. tax authorities. The IRS had requested the information in cooperation with the Dutch government as part of an investigation to determine whether Dutch citizens living outside the Netherlands are complying with tax laws.”
Read more: http://www.pymnts.com/consumer-finance/2017/amex-must-share-dutch-account-info-with-irs/
“All of Europe is dangerous enough to elicit a warning from the State Department? But no warnings against visiting places inside the U.S. like Chicago.”