57 replies to this topic

[Rogerdodger]

'Without the right of privacy, there is no real freedom of speech'...

State surveillance of personal data is theft

More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.

"A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space."
We have had no debate, no vote, no say, hardly any information about how our data is used and for what purpose. Our mobile phones have become tracking devices. Social networking is data profiling. We can't shop, spend, browse, email, without being monitored. We might as well be tagged prisoners. Privacy is an illusion. Do you mind about that? I do."

Local cops tap cellphone data...
The records, from more than 125 police agencies in 33 states, reveal:
• About one in four law-enforcement agencies have used a tactic known as a "tower dump," which gives police data about the identity, activity and location of any phone that connects to the targeted cellphone towers over a set span of time, usually an hour or two. A typical dump covers multiple towers, and wireless providers, and can net information from thousands of phones.

Cell data dumps: A legally fuzzy area

Examples of data-gathering abuses

MOJO: How Every Part of American Life Became a Police Matter...
"If all you've got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life..."

Edited by Rogerdodger, 10 December 2013 - 12:28 AM.

[Rogerdodger]

Like many other areas of American law, the Fourth Amendment finds its roots in English legal doctrine. Sir Edward Coke, in Semayne's case (1604), famously stated: "The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose." Semayne's Case acknowledged that the King did not have unbridled authority to intrude on his subjects' dwellings but recognized that government agents were permitted to conduct searches and seizures under certain conditions when their purpose was lawful and a warrant had been obtained.

[Rogerdodger]

Banana republic. Everybody's for sale.

REPORT: Lawmakers who oversee surveillance programs receive millions from intel companies...



Unions Paid MSNBC's Schultz $177K in 2012, $75K in 2013...

Edited by Rogerdodger, 12 December 2013 - 11:40 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

Freedom hangs on by it's fingernails...

JUDGE: NSA SPYING VIOLATES 4TH AMENDMENT...

Second Smackdown Coming? Snowden: Ruling vindicates disclosures...

Edited by Rogerdodger, 16 December 2013 - 08:06 PM.

[*JB*]

Roger --

Surveillance it only part of it. When life altering decisions, enforced by an incompetent and corrupt government -- at odds with it own citizens -- are imposed on the individual -- that is freedom lost.

The bigger government grows, the more people lose their sovereignty. The bigger government grows, the more power large corporations have over the little guy. Government and corporations become two sides of the same coin where more and more power lies with the state.

Their is no such thing as "social justice" as it is means in today's parlance. REAL Justice is only when it protects the individual against state overreach.

Social justice only really occurs when individual protections apply to all individuals, not just the favored class (and politics) chosen by that state. Otherwise, Totalitarianism and Fascism are the result. This is true if the rich are protected over the poor, as well as the opposite.

Unfortunately, this president has contempt for the bill of rights and has made that LITERALLY VERY clear in earlier writings and interviews.

Edited by *JB*, 17 December 2013 - 01:28 AM.

[Rogerdodger]

Merkel compared NSA to Stasi in heated encounter with Obama
German chancellor furious after revelations US intelligence agency listened in on her personal mobile phone

Edited by Rogerdodger, 17 December 2013 - 11:32 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

Freedom hangs on by it's fingernails...

But maybe I spoke too soon.

Pennsylvanians Coerced Into Giving Cheek Swab at 'Voluntary' Checkpoint...
“Our rights are being violated more and more every day, it’s another way of government intrusion into our lives,” said Councilman Dennis M. Sterner, complaining that local police were unable to pick up local drug dealers after years of investigations, yet were perfectly happy to pull over motorists on a whim.
“A car driver or passenger cannot be required or pressured into providing a DNA sample and, in fact, can’t be stopped at all except on suspicion of a crime or for a properly conducted sobriety checkpoint,” Mary Catherine Roper, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told the newspaper.
However, this hasn’t stopped police across the country running the supposedly “voluntary” checkpoints at the behest of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which in some cases involve the collection of not just saliva but blood too.

A supposedly “voluntary” survey checkpoint run by a private firm in Reading, Pennsylvania on behalf of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy caused outrage when residents said they were forced off the road into a car park and coerced into giving cheek swabs as a result of an intimidating police presence.

Shocking video footage taken at the Gwinnett County jail in Georgia shows police strapping down citizens accused of drunk driving before using a needle forcibly draw blood as victims scream, “what country is this?”

Edited by Rogerdodger, 17 December 2013 - 11:39 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

Our four fathers and four mothers would be proud!

GALLUP: RECORD HIGH SAY BIG GOV'T GREATEST THREAT TO COUNTRY...

Edited by Rogerdodger, 18 December 2013 - 04:30 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

Those who give up freedom for security will have neither.

TX Court Rules Search Warrants May be Based on 'Predictions of Future Crime'...

SUIT: American Woman Cavity Searched, Subjected To Observed Bowel Movement -- Then Billed $5K...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Federal agents wrongfully strip-searched a New Mexico woman at the El Paso border crossing, then took her to a hospital where she was forced to undergo illegal body cavity probes in an attempt to find drugs, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in El Paso said the unnamed 54-year-old U.S. citizen was “brutally” searched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in December 2012 after being selected for additional random screening.

Agents quickly stripped searched her and did cavity searches but found no evidence of drugs, court documents said. But the woman was transported in handcuffs to the University Medical Center of El Paso, the lawsuit said, where doctors subjected her to an observed bowel movement, a CT scan and other exams without a warrant.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 19 December 2013 - 10:45 AM.

[Rogerdodger]

Who's the criminal here?
The citizen whistle blowers or the government agency violating the very laws it claims to uphold?

A government "of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, for the PEOPLE."

Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows
“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”
So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.

The so called FISA court was established, but after 9/11, that court has become a mere rubber stamp.

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it"
The Declaration of Independence

Edited by Rogerdodger, 07 January 2014 - 10:37 AM.