A newspaper article published after Nixon’s resignation detailed the CIA Watergate cover-up, sourced from the Watergate prosecutor’s office, the FBI, and CIA staff. The Watergate investigation obstruction of justice began in the White House when it was revealed some of the five Watergate burglars had a CIA background. “This gave the White House conspirators an idea. They might be able to use the CIA to cover up their own connection with the crime,” using CIA resources.
Members of Congress claimed Watergate evils came from the misuse of presidential power, including use of the spy agency for unauthorized citizen surveillance from the White House. One solution to limit increased unauthorized surveillance of US citizens was to enact a law to limit the president and federal personnel from authorizing surveillance of US citizens. This response led naturally to expanded centralized surveillance power which was the opposite of their stated intention.
Beginning on January 27, 1975, a special 11-member Congressional investigative body looked into abuses of power by the nation’s intelligence agencies. Chaired by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church, the Church committee called more than 800 witnesses over nine months, including several former officials from the FBI and CIA.
The Church Committee findings resulted in Congress creating permanent intelligence oversight committees in the Senate and House. They proposed creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bipartisan bill passed the House 246-128 and the Senate 95-1, and was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 25, 1978. The FISA was designed to prevent secret surveillance by the president and others in the federal government after Watergate. History shows how federal government surveillance grew over time when governing personnel were granted a new power by law.
The act created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) as a tribunal tasked with reviewing requests from federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies like the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) who sought permission to begin wiretap surveillance on any “foreign power or an agent of a foreign power” within the US The FISC was comprised of seven federal district court judges (expanded to 11 judges in 2001). Each one is appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and each judge serves staggered, non-renewable terms of seven years.
Details of warrant requests are not publicly disclosed, except the number of approved or denied requests. More than 34,000 requests were made and only a dozen rejected (although the government has withdrawn some requests) as of 2013. The FISC faces criticism by many, including civil liberty advocates, who see it as a rubber stamp of government surveillance requests. After the September 11, 2001, terror attacks the newly-signed USA Patriot Act expanded FISA surveillance orders duration, allowed authorities to share information placed before a grand jury with other federal agencies, and permitted authorities to gather foreign intelligence information on US citizens and non-citizens.
Federal surveillance powers expanded through the 2007 Protect America Act, passed after revelations of widespread warrantless wiretapping during the George W. Bush administration. The 2007 law amended FISA by removing warrant requirements for federal surveillance of foreign intelligence targets outside the US and anyone in the US (including US citizens) that communicated with them. The 2007 law granted immunity to telecommunications companies who provided access to data to federal law enforcement agencies without a federal search warrant.
Surveillance powers metastasized by the 2015 USA Freedom Act, passed after the scandal of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that aimed to end the NSA’s bulk collection of US telephone records and provide greater transparency in the FISA court system operations.
What started out after Watergate to prevent secret unauthorized surveillance of US citizens by the president and others in the federal government resulted with an abundance of secret and warrantless surveillance of US citizens and non-US citizens by the federal government. The executive branch surveillance power has grown in the past fifty years through use of the FISA courts. One lesson of supposed “reform” in Washington was really more centralization and expansion of federal surveillance power.
]]>First started in September 2021, the CDC’s Genomic Surveillance Program was created to track travelers, which the federal agency considers to be “an especially important group to consider when tracking new and emerging infectious disease.”
After the program was launched in the fall of 2021 at just three U.S. airports, the expectation in the coming months was that the program would be disbanded since COVID ended. Instead of shutting the program down, the CDC instead expanded it nearly threefold.
The CDC announced that it would be placing “public health professionals” at the eight airports, including John F. Kennedy International in New York; Newark Liberty International in New Jersey; San Francisco International in California; and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International in Georgia.
“We wanted to achieve several things: to get the platform set up at three airports, gauge the level of participation, and determine if we could detect variants using pooled sampling,” said Cindy Friedman, chief of the Travelers’ Health Branch of the CDC’s Genomic Surveillance Program.
“We achieved our goals and showed proof of concept.”
(Related: Did you catch the CDC study showing that heart disease risk skyrockets by 13,200 percent following COVID injections?)
In partnership with XpresCheck, an airport-based company that provides COVID “testing,” and Concentric by Ginkgo, a network of more than 60 laboratories with genetic sequencing capability, the CDC hopes to continue probing travelers’ nasal cavities and other orifices in search of COVID germs.
The CDC did it with the “omicron” (moronic) strain and others, and now believes it can do it with whatever further mutations COVID presents, probably around Election Day.
For now, the program is “voluntary,” allowing individual samples to be collected from “participating” travelers who are allowed to remain “anonymous.” Precisely what the CDC is doing with the samples after it collects them remains unknown.
“It started voluntary in China, too, until it wasn’t,” warned someone on X. “Then they welded apartment buildings shut, forced people to get vaccinated at gunpoint, and hauled everyone else into isolation concentration camps where they were only allowed to be released if they paid a bribe. They even killed every pet in Shanghai.”
This same X account, by the way, noted ties between Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance and the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, BlackRock and Peter Thiel.
“Vance’s companies deal with gene therapies, mRNA, and young blood,” this person added.
“There are so many reasons why I refuse to fly anymore, but if I were still flying and they made this mandatory, I’d be done for sure,” wrote another.
Someone named “Jo Christiansen” (@JoChristianse13) retold the ugly story of what Andrew Cuomo did to New York during the COVID “pandemic.”
“Back when Cuomo was trying to introduce contact tracing in New York state, he put the National Guard at JFK on the pretext of them asking travelers what their movements were,” Christiansen wrote.
“I saw them there as I came through, but I never saw them approaching travelers and the contact tracing was never instituted. I don’t think anybody downloaded the app.”
“These psychos collecting airplane toilet wastewater for testing is just sick,” wrote another about the CDC’s weird obsession with human bodily fluids, which it eagerly wants to collect from wherever in order to “test” it for “COVID.”
If the CDC is in charge of it, you can be sure it has nothing to do with improving the health of you or your family. Learn more at CDC.news.
Sources for this article include:
]]>Congress apparently hopes to restructure TikTok by force of law. Wednesday the House passed a bill effectively banning the app. Meanwhile, Microsoft records every keystroke on every computer using its operating system and app software. Not only does it collect any data it wishes to collect, Microsoft reviews the user files, manipulates those files for Microsoft’s financial gain, and exposes everyone’s files to governments and to other private users.
Yet many in Congress are upset the Chinese are “poisoning young people’s minds.” Perhaps the Congress ought to apply a constitutional standard to everyone. That would mean we are safe in our homes and in our personal papers from unreasonable search and seizure, and freedom of the press is allowed to reign.
Microsoft defaults everything its software touches to OneDrive. Even if the user uninstalls the OneDrive software, the default persists. To file a document on your own computer, you must override OneDrive each and every time, and any attempt to add that same document in a second file defaults back to OneDrive.
OneDrive constantly searches your computer and any external storage devices. Proof of that is demonstrated by its overzealous “Memories of this day” self-promotion. OneDrive collects your personal photographs and randomly drops a few images into a formatted layout. Not only is this an egregious violation of one’s privacy, it is dangerous. Personal photographs are kept personal for reasons known only to the owner.
Microsoft is not protecting your pictures by only sending them to you. Often their “Memories of the day” includes people and photographs that are not in your storage files. Maybe some pervert somewhere is “enjoying” a photograph of your wife as you read this. Microsoft is promoting Microsoft using your photographs and the photographs of your neighbors or those of some Iranian. Who knows?
Let’s consider the obvious. Lots of people have been married more than once. As a consequence, there may be photo files of the ex-wife with children, so do we really want Microsoft constantly sending your spouse photographs of the ex-spouse? Do we want to take a tour of our neighbor’s private pictures courtesy of Microsoft? There may be a photograph in your file taken when you were more than 50 pounds overweight. You keep it as a reminder. Do you need it flashed across the world by a software company?
Another example of the one world controlled by Microsoft is the constant parade of pop-up boxes. A recent pop-up said it tracked the user and found its involuntary inquiries were not used. So it asked if it should be deleted. We are all happy to eliminate computer clutter, but why does Microsoft record and analyze every keystroke on every computer it controls in the world?
The most often heard rebuttal of this and other invasions of privacy is “I’ve got nothing to hide,” and that works until suddenly you do have something to hide, or at a minimum, not promote. That is when you realize you have no choice. It is up to Microsoft … or the government. Microsoft, Google and others have designed a system for their benefit, not yours.
The spectacle of Congress berating TikTok and the Communist Party of China while we allow American companies to steal the same information at will, is offensive. But the legal precedent is important. First control TikTok.
Before we go all self-righteous over TikTok and propaganda aimed at children, let’s look at the propaganda we routinely allow.
After the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, there was a dramatic shift in television advertising content. Suddenly, it seemed 90% of the actors hired to perform in advertising were black. Homosexual couples in sexual embrace were common, and obese women were preening and bouncing about enthusiastically. The only time a white male actor lands an advertising gig, it is to play the idiot to the ever-suffering, eye-rolling woman in his life. She, of course, will be laboring over a hot computer while he stands before her, spatula in hand, awaiting her dinner order.
There it is. The entire Democrat Party social agenda paraded every 10 minutes on every channel as the epitome of American life. Demur and you are evil, wicked, bad and nasty.
So Congress is going to save us from China’s TikTok – but who is going to save us from the Advertising Council? Republican Speaker Mike Johnson was all in to pass the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
OK. But America is drowning in propaganda of its own making.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
]]>While many assume that the U.S. Constitution protects property from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” a Supreme Court decision from a century back says private land is not included.
It’s called the “open fields” doctrine and agents use it to enter property whenever they want. However, some states, including Louisiana, have a higher standard built into their state constitutions.
And that’s the focal point of the new dispute being handled by the Institute for Justice.
“Tom Manuel owns land that he uses to grow timber commercially, as well as for recreation. In December, two separate times, game wardens with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) entered Tom’s land without permission in search of possible hunting violations. Both times they left without giving a citation,” the legal team explained.
“The warrantless, permissionless searches by state law enforcers struck Tom as a violation of his rights. The Louisiana Constitution says in stark terms that ‘property’ must be secured from ‘unreasonable searches . . . or invasions of privacy.’ There is no exception for any government official. Now, Tom is suing the LDWF with the Institute for Justice (IJ), which protects property rights nationwide and has several similar suits in other states.”
James Knight, a lawyer for IJ, explained, “The Louisiana Constitution protects all ‘property’ from warrantless searches—and that includes land. That may seem obvious, but misguided U.S. Supreme Court precedent has convinced state officials that they can invade private land at will. This case seeks to put a stop to that and to restore the constitutional protections Louisiana landowners deserve.”
In neighboring Mississippi, the state’s highest court already has held state officials cannot invade private land without a warrant. Other states taking the same position include Montana, New York, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, Vermont, and Tennessee.
The “open fields” ideology is used by not just game wardens but also police, inspectors, code enforcement officers, immigration officers and others.
The lawsuit advocates for a common-sense view of property rights in Louisiana.
“I believe Louisiana’s constitution should mean what it says. While it’s important that state hunting laws be maintained, constitutional limits on government power should be upheld too. Protecting wildlife can be accomplished without trampling on our privacy and property rights. From my experience managing land in both Louisiana and Mississippi, I’ve seen that wildlife can thrive where the government must respect property lines,” the landowner said.
Cases providing similar arguments also now are pending in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
]]>Established in 2006, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is an organization within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The information that it gathers is supposedly meant to help the work of the United States’ intelligence community.
IARPA specializes in “high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage.”
In early February, the organization published a technical draft for its Video Linking and Intelligence from Non-Collaborative Sensors (Video LINCS) research program. (Related: The globalist vision: “15 Minute” prison cities and the end of private property.)
The draft provides very specific information on how the U.S. spy community aims to utilize artificial intelligence to analyze video footage obtained from various sources, including CCTV cameras and drones, maybe even extending to webcams and phones. This autonomous system will also enable the identification, tracking and tracing of individuals and motor vehicles.
According to the draft, the goal is to help with the analysis of “tragic incidents” that require large amounts of “forensic analyses.” Video LINCS will also “analyze patterns for anomalies and threats.” The language is vague, incredibly vague. In a video, IARPA Program Director Reuven Meth said Video LINCS will be used to “facilitate smart city planning.”
The Sociable editor Tim Hinchliffe wrote that the deployment of the Video LINCS program could be repurposed to spy on dissidents and enforce order in smart and 15-minute cities.
“Ask yourself, why would the U.S. spy agency funding arm want to develop tools for smart city planning?” he wrote.
Smart cities are incredibly similar to 15-minute cities or FMCs. In FMCs and smart cities, every imaginable facility, ranging from coffee shops to schools to gyms, can be conveniently reached within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.
At first glance, there may not appear to be many downsides to living in such a place. However, expediency is not always synonymous with positive outcomes; in fact, it can sometimes be perilous. This is particularly true when individuals, whether consciously or unconsciously, sacrifice their freedom in exchange for convenient access to specific services.
While FMCs may enhance the accessibility for citizens to travel between different locations, they also create opportunities for those in positions of authority to invade privacy, exploit personal data and enable an even more intrusive surveillance state.
The Video LINCS program aims to utilize a broad range of technologies to identify and track individuals, vehicles and objects over extended distances and time periods, including AI and soft biometrics (analysis of physical and behavioral traits).
In addition to detecting perceived threats and aiding in the development of smart cities, Video LINCS could also be used to “identify who was present at a rally, protest or riot – such as the one that occurred in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 – and follow their every move as they make their way back home, even when they change their clothes,” warned Hinchliffe.
Of course, such technology “would be invaluable to governments wishing to enforce future lockdowns or low-emission zones in 15-minute smart cities as the authorities would be able to identify who broke protocol while tracking and tracing their every move for law enforcement to hunt them down. All of this would be done autonomously and automatically,” he added.
Watch this video of Brannon Howse warning about the rise of 15 minute cities.
This video is from the Worldview Report channel on Brighteon.com.
Sources include:
]]>When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think 1984. You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film – or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.
Whether a surveillance state is the end goal is hard to say. The police chief of Pawnee, Indiana probably isn’t plotting the development of his own mini-Oceania. But, 18,000-plus mini-Oceanias operating across multiple platforms with varying degrees of integration, both locally and nationally, is undoubtedly the direction in which we are heading as salespeople peddle shiny new surveillance gadgets to cities big and small, making often unverified but intuitively appealing claims of how their devices will decrease crime or prove to be useful investigative tools.
Facial recognition tends to be the surveillance gadget that receives the most attention these days. You’ve seen it in movies and maybe feel some unease over visions of government agents sitting in a penumbrous room illuminated only by the faint glow of countless monitors with little boxes tracking the faces of every person walking down a busy city street. Likely, by now, you’ve also probably heard of facial recognition being used for relatively petty purposes or leading to incidents in which innocent people were harassed or arrested because a program made a mistake. Maybe you’ve even been following the efforts to ban the technology.
Yet, other surveillance gadgets that aren’t quite as sexy or as prevalent in pop culture manage to remain under the radar of even the most privacy-conscious as they are promoted through law enforcement peer referral programs organized by surveillance gadget companies seeking to have their devices in every town in America.
Some, such as gunshot detection devices, may seem relatively benign, although there have been concerns they might pick up bits of conversation on quiet streets. Others, such as cell site simulators, are quite a bit more intrusive as they can be used by law enforcement to monitor the location of people through their cell phones, as well as collect metadata from their calls and a considerable amount of other information.
Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, can be used to log a person’s movements through the license plates of their vehicles. Given the exponential increase in their use over the past few years and the ease with which data from the cameras of some vendors are integrated, they also pose a threat to privacy on par with facial recognition and cell site simulators.
Often positioned on street lights, traffic lights, independent structures, or police vehicles, ALPRs are a type of camera that captures the license plate and other identifying information of passing vehicles before comparing the information in real time to “hot lists” of vehicles actively being sought by law enforcement and transmitting the information to a searchable database. ALPRs sold by some companies are even said to be able to assess a car’s driving patterns to determine whether the person behind the wheel is “driving like a criminal.”
Depending on the vendor and the particulars of their contract with a municipality or private entity leasing the cameras from them, the information the cameras collect is maintained usually for thirty days but sometimes for a period of months or even years.
Although on the surface this may sound relatively unintrusive, leading to places such as Nashville approving ALPRs while rejecting facial recognition, what this ultimately does is create a searchable database for the timestamped rough location of any individual who regularly travels using a single vehicle – in other words, most Americans especially those living outside of major cities.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s national office, who has written extensively on matters pertaining to technology, privacy, and surveillance, stated in a 2023 phone interview, “There’s no question that if you get enough license plate readers and you got one on every block, that put together…can create a GPS-tracker-like-record of my movement and even if there’s, you know, only one every ten miles and [I’m] driving around the country, I’m driving from Texas to California or what have you, that can be very revealing as well.”
Subsequently, organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, and the Brennan Center for Justice, a self-described “non-partisan law and policy institute,” have expressed concerns that the devices could be used to track the activities of protesters and activists.
If ALPRs were as prevalent during lockdowns as they are now, it’s not difficult to imagine at least some governors or mayors using them to track and reprimand those who dared violate Corona law.
Furthermore, sometimes the devices do make mistakes, leading to claims by individuals and families that they were psychologically traumatized after they were pulled over, held at gunpoint, searched, and handcuffed by police essentially due to a computer error.
As for the benefits they provide in terms of making communities safer, quantitative data demonstrating their success tends to be lacking.
The University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights released a report in December 2022 indicating hit rates for ALPRs, or the percentage of license plates photographed by ALPRs within a municipality that are associated with a vehicle being sought by law enforcement, tend to fall below 0.1%, meaning a lot of data have to be collected on a lot of law-abiding citizens in order for the devices to be of any use. Moreover, even when they do aid law enforcement in finding a wanted vehicle, the end results still can be somewhat underwhelming.
The University of Illinois’ Community Data Clinic, for example, in a preliminary report dated Fall 2023, indicated that of 54 instances law enforcement in Champaign, one of the two cities U of I calls home, accessed data from their ALPRs within a particular period, only 31 of those instances likely involved felonies, most of which did not involve a firearm. The University of Illinois report went on to indicate only ten of those instances led to an arrest or an arrest warrant and only two of those arrests led to formal charges.
As demonstrated at an October 2021 town hall regarding ALPRs in Urbana, IL, Champaign’s sister city, even proponents of the devices struggle to produce a single study showing that the cameras deter or prevent gun violence, which is often one of the main reasons communities turn to ALPRs in the first place.
However, when vendor reps and local law enforcement are trying to gain approval from city councils and assuage the fears of wary citizens, the surveillance potential of the devices, along with their questionable effectiveness and the devastating consequences that can follow when one makes a mistake, tend not to be what they lead with.
Instead, proponents emphasize how common they are in surrounding cities, cite anecdotal evidence of their utility, and try to present ALPRs as non-threatening, normal, and perhaps even a little old-fashioned.
You have nothing to worry about, you’re told. The town down the road brought them in six months back. Chief Jones over there said they helped solve that murder from the news. And, by the way, they’re not really that much different from a concerned citizen just keeping an eye on things.
At the town hall in Urbana, for example, then-police chief, Bryant Seraphin, worked to dismiss the notion that ALPRs actually pose a threat to privacy or even constitute a surveillance tool.
“They [ALPRs] are not surveillance cameras,” stated Seraphin early in the event. “I cannot pan, tilt, [or] zoom them. There’s no live looking to see what’s happening at the corner…” he explained.
Repeatedly, he emphasized that ALPRs do not capture any information about the person driving a car or automatically link to information about the person to whom a vehicle is registered. Their ubiquity in the area was accentuated. Supposed success stories were shared.
To allay any remaining notion that there might be something scary about ALPRs, Seraphin described them with a folksy metaphor: “One of the things that I’ve talked about with these things is that if you pictured somebody sitting in a lawn chair writing down every plate that went by, the date, and the time when they wrote ‘red Toyota ABC123’, and then they would make a phone call and check the databases and then hang up and then go on to the next one – that’s what [an ALPR] does automatically and it can do it over and over again…with incredible speed.”
Yet, when Anita Chan, the director of the University of Illinois Community Data Clinic, proceeded to raise concerns regarding “the potential violation of civil liberties” and how a license plate alone is sufficient for the police to not just find out “where you live and where you work but also…who potentially your friends are, what religious affiliation you might have, essentially where you get medical services…[and] suss out essentially who’s traveling and where,” Seraphin acknowledged all this is possible. However, he assured her with a frustrated chuckle, ALPRs simply provide a notebook that would only be referenced when investigating serious crimes.
By the same logic, facial recognition simply provides a notebook as well. As do cell site simulators. As do any surveillance device. Yet, there is a fundamental question of whether such a notebook should exist. Does the chief of police in Urbana or the sheriff in Pawnee need a notebook containing your approximate location three Thursdays ago at 8:15pm, as well as a record of who attended last week’s political rally, in order to solve a murder? Should he be allowed to keep such a notebook if it might help solve an extra murder in his town each year? If the answer is yes, then what are the limits to the tools he and his department should be afforded?
Furthermore, there is also something a little off about the disarming metaphor of a guy who spends his days sitting around in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles. Something a little insidious. Something that perhaps Anita Chan was piking up on.
One guy in a lawn chair jotting down license plate numbers is a nosy neighbor, maybe even a neighborhood crank, but not someone to whom you would pay much attention. When he starts following you around though to the point of knowing who your friends are, where you worship, and when you go to the doctor, he kind of becomes a stalker. But, when he develops the ability to gather this kind of information on everyone, he starts to develop a level of omnipresence and omniscience with which no one should be comfortable – which may be why you’re told he’s just a guy in a lawn chair.
Daniel Nuccio holds master’s degrees in both psychology and biology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in biology at Northern Illinois University studying host-microbe relationships. He is also a regular contributor to The College Fix where he writes about COVID, mental health, and other topics.
]]>This unsettling news was disclosed in response to Senator Ron Wyden’s urgent communication to the Department of Justice. Wyden highlighted that foreign officials have been pressuring technology companies for data to track smartphones via apps that send notifications.
These apps, he noted, put tech companies in a pivotal role to assist in governmental monitoring of app usage.
Senator Wyden urged the Department of Justice to alter or revoke any existing policies that restrict public discourse on the surveillance of push notifications.
In a reaction to this, Apple stated to Reuters that Wyden’s letter presented them with an opportunity to divulge more information about government monitoring of push notifications. The tech giant clarified, “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information. Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”
The letter from Wyden reportedly stemmed from a “tip” about this surveillance activity. An informed source confirmed that both foreign and US agencies have been requesting metadata related to notifications from Apple and Google. This metadata has been allegedly used to link anonymous messaging app users to specific accounts on these platforms.
While the source, speaking to Reuters, did not specify which governments were involved, they characterized them as “democracies allied to the United States” and were uncertain about the duration of these requests.
“In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information,” Apple said in a statement. “Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”
Apple, meanwhile, has advised app developers to refrain from including sensitive data in notifications and to encrypt any data before it is incorporated into a notification payload.
However, this relies on the developers’ initiative. Importantly, metadata such as the frequency and origin of notifications remains unencrypted, potentially offering insights into users’ app activities to those who can access this data.
The news, which is hardly unexpected yet nonetheless deeply troubling, underscores the precarious path we seem to be treading, one that veers ominously towards policies that infringe on civil liberties.
The key cog in a functioning democracy, our judicial system, and its informed oversight exists precisely to prevent such oversteps. It endows a suspected individual with the crucial right to mount a robust defense against unwarranted infiltration by the state government. Alarmingly, the situation at hand eerily mirrors scenarios where private entities and individuals are strong-armed into being active partners in such covert operations, all the while being legally bound to cryptic silence.
]]>Surveillance drones are being deployed by the New York City Police Department over Labor Day weekend to monitor “large gatherings” of people in their own backyards. That statement alone should send chills down all of our spines but I imagine most will just shake our head because news like this is no longer shocking. But our complacency is misplaced; they are normalizing the police state before our eyes.
This goes far beyond crime prevention, especially in a city that ignores actual crimes and releases violent criminals incessantly. If this was happening in Provo, Utah, or Great Falls, Montana, I’d mark it down as an overzealous police force forgetting our right to privacy. After all, drone technology offers benefits for fighting real crime when applied right. But this is New York City where crimes go unpunished. That tells us this is a move to do two very important things for the Globalist Elite Cabal’s agenda.
First, this is part of the aforementioned normalization of the police state. They want us to expect Big Brother to be there, just barely out of reach, so even the most freedom-loving among us start to accept that we’re always being watched. Just as many patriotic Americans masked up on their way to get jabbed even though they didn’t really want to do either, so too will many Americans reluctantly accept this type of surveillance if they’re exposed to it enough.
In other words, this move and similar ones like it are shifting the Overton Window so things that were anathema in the recent past will be expected and even accepted in the near future.
The second thing this does for the Globalist Elite Cabal is act as a test run for totalitarian measures. We are experiencing creeping tyranny in the United States, but soon it will no longer be creeping. They are accelerating their plans and imposing more dystopian policies on us every day. Some of it makes the news. Most of it does not. This is why I put so much effort into managing news aggregators like The Liberty Daily and Discern Report. I can’t write every story, but thankfully there are others out there writing about important topics already.
Here is the article from Reclaim The Net with some of the details. Let’s get this information out to our friends and family. The news about the drones is bad enough, but the bigger story to me is that so few are speaking out against it. Sound off about it on my Substack.
The NYPD’s announcement to deploy drones as uninvited guests at private backyard gatherings this weekend continues to ignite a heated debate over personal freedom and privacy, a treacherous line that government authorities seem keen to cross as much as possible.
Responding to complaints about large gatherings over the upcoming Labor Day celebrations, Assistant NYPD Commissioner Kaz Daughtry stated drones will come into play if “a large crowd, a large party in a backyard” gets reported.
This shocking move showcases a worrying amount of overreach from the authorities, prompting criticism from privacy advocates and citizens who know the value of freedoms.
Indeed, it does feel as though we are living a dystopian Sci-Fi narrative with these police surveillance revelations. Is Mayor Eric Adams endorsing an eerie future where our every movement is monitored from the sky?
Alarmingly, the NYPD seems to be coy about disclosing their drone policies. A request for comment from Mayor Adams only received links to laid-back guidelines for private drone operations in the city. Is this preparation for when these silent observers become more commonplace in the urban skies?
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices. Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.
Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.
They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
Article cross-posted from The Rutherford Institute.
]]>Yum Brands in general and Taco Bell in particular represent a pathway to normalization. It will not be the powers-that-be who are forcing people to embrace these draconian measures. It will be the growing number of “cashless normies” who will demand such measures be embraced by businesses and their peers alike. Keep that in mind as you read this story from Reclaim The Net…
Taco Bell’s recent announcement of transitioning to a cashless business model raises alarming concerns about privacy and civil liberties. While the company proudly touts its endeavor to become a fully digital establishment in the near future, it obscures the deeper implications for consumers.
The company’s aim to capitalize on impulse digital transactions over traditional cash exchanges might sound like a novel approach to modernize sales techniques. However, behind this façade lies a concerning benefit: to heavily surveil and monetize consumers’ preferences. Taco Bell’s new data platform, designed to analyze consumer behavior meticulously, embodies a step towards an invasive corporate oversight into what people eat, when, and how often.
Chris Turner, CFO of Yum! Brands, Taco Bell’s parent company, might express enthusiasm about the potential of this platform for “personalized marketing, joint branding, and future automation.”
Yet, such initiatives might just be a veneer for a more troubling reality – the erosion of consumers’ privacy.
Even more disconcerting is the potential societal exclusion this move could propagate. A cashless model marginalizes groups who predominantly rely on cash and prefer privacy.
Moreover, individuals in service industries, who primarily depend on cash tips, stand to lose the immediacy of their hard-earned income in a cashless landscape. Digital payments, while convenient for some, can become an impediment for others.
While Taco Bell seems eager to replace human interaction with cold, impersonal touchscreens across its franchises, the real cost of this move extends beyond just a changed payment method. It’s a dangerous precedent, risking the erosion of privacy and inclusivity in the relentless pursuit of digital dominance. As Taco Bell strives to redefine the fast-food industry with its digital-first approach, it’s essential to question: at what cost to individual freedom?
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