“A Gulfstream jet from a quiet airport south-east of Raleigh flew captives to be tortured around the world. The government failed to act but local people have refused to let the issue die.”
“This is a march that will be nearly impossible to stop. This is the permanent destruction of the right to privacy. This is the exaltation of safety over liberty, and it will lead to neither. This is the undoing of limited government, right before our eyes.”
“If ‘#Resistance’ means anything, at a minimum it should entail a refusal to trust a dangerous authoritarian to wield vast power with little checks or oversight.”
“The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to extend the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program for six years with minimal changes, rejecting a push by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to impose significant privacy limits when it sweeps up Americans’ emails and other personal communications. Effectively, the vote was almost certainly the end of a debate over 21st-century surveillance and privacy rights that broke out in 2013 after the leaks by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/us/politics/fisa-surveillance-congress-trump.html?_r=0
“Green Party presidential Candidate Jill Stein is being investigated by the Senate Intelligence (sic) Committee for ‘Russian connections.’ What has brought Russiagate to Jill Stein? The answer is that she attended the 10th Anniversary RT dinner in Moscow as did the notorious ‘Russian collaborator’ US General Michael Flynn. RT is a news organization, a far better one than exists in the West, but if you were one of the many accomplished people who attended the anniversary dinner, you are regarded by Republican Senator Richard Burr from North Carolina as a possible Kremlin agent.”
Read more: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/12/21/de-facto-travel-restrictions-now-exist-americans/
“Although ‘knock-and-talk’ policing has become a thinly veiled, warrantless—lethal—exercise by which citizens are coerced and intimidated into ‘talking’ with heavily armed police who ‘knock’ on their doors in the middle of the night, the Supreme Court will not make the government play by the rules of the Constitution. The lesson to be learned: the U.S. Supreme Court will not save us. No one is coming to save us: not the courts, not the legislatures, and not the president.”
“Data from 2017 reveals that the idea that there is a ‘war on cops’ is nothing more than police propaganda, as the number of officers killed in the line of duty dropped to the second-lowest total in more than 50 years. Conversely, there were over 1,000 people killed by cops for the fourth year in a row, according to the website killedbypolice.net, which operates a database of individuals killed by law enforcement officers.”
Read more: http://thefreethoughtproject.com/2017-safest-year-cops-war-citizens/
“Under the guise of stopping violent crime, a County Commissioner in Cook County, Illinois, went to New York City late last week to request that the United Nations deploy foreign troops in Chicago to tackle the city’s ‘quiet genocide.'”
“No one disputes that the Hartes are innocent of any criminal wrongdoing. No one disputes that the officers conducted a raid on their home after mistaking tea for marijuana. And no one disputes that the officers improperly used the results of notoriously unreliable field tests as probable cause for the mistaken raid, instead of sending the tea to a lab for more rigorous testing. No one disputes any of these things. Yet the system failed to compensate the Hartes for what happened to them, and the system failed to hold any of the law enforcement officers accountable for their mistakes.”
“Over 30,000 people had their electronic devices searched without probable cause or a warrant by Customs and Border Protection in 2017. This is a 50% increase from 2016. Most of the searches took place at airports when travelers were leaving the country. Imagine the helplessness of having your phone taken by an Agent, and searched without your consent. No suspicion of any crime. No probable cause. Just some thug using brute force to violate your privacy. In these settings, travelers are powerless. You just want to get home or continue to your destination, but the American police state shakes you down. Hundreds of traveler complaints about such oppression have now surfaced thanks to a Freedom of Information Request.”