“The court ruled that the $3 million in fines stolen from drivers with no due process was all obtained illegally and they must now pay it back.”
“Cities and towns are using [smart meter parking apps] like ParkMobile, StreetLine, ParkMe, Park Smarter, ParkBud, MPay2Park and SmartParking to collect all kinds of personal information. SMPA’s like StreetLine warn that they ‘reserve the right to disclose your personally identifiable information to others as we believe appropriate’. ParkMobile’s privacy policy also reveals how SMPA’s are all too willing to, ‘provide requested information to relevant authorities upon the request of such authorities’.”
Read more: https://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2018/02/law-enforcement-uses-smart-meter.html
“Personal information, along with your biometric data, resides in a database tied to your ID number. The system crunches all of this into a composite score that ranks you as ‘safe,’ ‘normal’ or ‘unsafe.’ Based on those categories, you may or may not be allowed to visit a museum, pass through certain neighborhoods, go to the mall, check into a hotel, rent an apartment, apply for a job or buy a train ticket. Or you may be detained to undergo re-education, like many thousands of other people. A science-fiction dystopia? No. This is life in northwestern China today if you are Uighur.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/china-surveillance-state-uighurs.html
“The facial recognition technology being developed for the pilot program will be capable of identifying the driver, front passengers, and the passengers riding in the back. The CBP currently operates facial recognition exit programs at almost a dozen international airports in the United States. Colleen Manaher, the CBP’s executive director of planning, program analysis and evaluation, told the Statesman that travelers have been accepting of the technology and noted that ‘we can thank the Apples and the Googles for that.'”
“Lauri Love, who has Asperger’s syndrome, is accused of involvement in a series of hacks in 2012 and 2013 into computers at agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. army, the Missile Defense Agency and the Federal Reserve. Charged with multiple offences in three U.S. indictments, he had been facing a life prison sentence in the United States if found guilty, a fate which he has said could lead him to taking his own life.”
“A motorist who was ticketed last summer for ‘provocation’ for flipping off an Indiana state trooper has filed a federal lawsuit saying the citation violates his First Amendment rights.”
Read more: http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2018/02/indiana_man_argues_he_has_cons.html
“Concerned about public confidence in the agency, the FBI didn’t want the FISA memo released. They didn’t want people to know their investigations are politically motivated. Now it’s come out that the Department of Homeland Security pressured CNN into delaying the release of a report until after the Superbowl. DHS was concerned public confidence in Superbowl security would be lost if people found out about an exercise they ran last summer.”
“The FISA court has been a fount of outrages because it is an American Star Chamber: the court meets in secret, only hears the government’s side, and approves 99 percent+ of all the search warrants requested.”
Read more: http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/372324-will-fisa-secrecy-doom-democracy
“The involvement of the intelligence community in the 2016 presidential campaign, clumsy and disorganized as it appears to have been, will be part of the next election, and the ones after that. If you’re in search of a constitutional crisis, here it is. After all, when we let George W. Bush create, and Barack Obama greatly expand, the surveillance state, didn’t we think it would eventually come to this?”
“It’s safe to assume Campbell wouldn’t have gotten so much free publicity if he simply announced he was quitting the FBI to join CNN.”