Sent to us by the author.
You weren’t the only one shocked by the string of recent Supreme Court rulings in support of the Constitution.
This week Americans have witnessed multiple landmark decisions against the unconstitutional procedures used by the Obama administration and police departments in the United States.
On Wednesday the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police officers need warrants to search cell phones of the people they arrest. The decision is the most surprising in years, and it is likely to put a spotlight on the government’s ability to do the same thing.
“This is a bold opinion. It is the first computer-search case, and it says we are in a new digital age. You can’t apply the old rules anymore,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University.
90% of Americans own cell phones containing a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives.
“The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand… It does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the founders fought,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the court.
One could argue that even the word ‘cell phone’ has become misleading and inaccurate. Cell phones are not the same as they were a decade ago. A more accurate comparison for a smartphone would be a laptop computer.
These new devices have been introduced to the world at an unprecedented rate and the majority of people using the technology fail to recognize the difference between the two. They’ve also failed to identify the true scope of the NSA’s surveillance dragnet.
The next time you’re in line at the grocery store, try telling the person next to you about police departments obtaining andusing secret military devices such as ‘Hailstorm’ and ‘Stingray’ to intercept cell phone data in secret without any oversight. You can be sure the vast majority of Americans have not heard of such a thing.
Be careful, you might be accused of being one of those ‘wacky conspiracy theorists’ they’ve been hearing about on the television.
The assertion that a warrant is now necessary to search through smartphones is a distraction from the fact that law enforcement can get any warrant at any time and silence the company they serve a warrant on. Police can have a warrant in hand in just 15 minutes using modern technology. They can get a rubber stamp warrant for your cell phone data any time they want, and you aren’t allowed to know about it.
People have gotten stuck on the word ‘warrantless’, but the process of obtaining a warrant has long been corrupted in favor of the security regime.
When the Detroit News published a story about the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department using ‘Hailstorm’ earlier this year, they filed a Freedom of Information Request for more information because the police department refused to disclose an explanation of Hailstorm’s full capabilities. The FOIA request was denied.
These devices are the exact same technology used by the U.S. military in Iraq and they are currently being used against Americans everyday. There is no conspiracy theory here.
Since Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA’s illegal spying programs and forever changed the world, the mainstream media networks have limited the conversation to strictly metadata. Many of you likely already knew about ‘PRISM’, but have you heard of ‘CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE’? This program is used to take control of computers microphones to record audio. What about FOGGYBOTTOM? The news is not interested in a program which instantly captures a user’s complete internet browsing history?
Possibly the most frightening program of them all, GUMFISH, covertly hijacks webcams of Americans to snap photographs. How could these programs have been completely ignored by the mainstream media? The NSA even has a program which is used to log keystrokes named GROK.
The NSA reform bill passed last month is a joke. First of all, why is the author of the Patriot Act the same guy writing the NSA reform bill? Seriously? Why did it take Jim Sensenbrenner 13 years to realize his Patriot Act bill was being abused? The facts are that Sensenbrenner’s ‘USA Freedom Act’ focuses only on metadata and hardly even restricts NSA access to such data. It’s a dog and pony show.
This is not what has millions of Americans fuming over the current surveillance state they are living under.
On Thursday the Supreme Court made another important decision, ruling that President Obama violated the Constitution in 2012 when he selected appointees to the National Labor Relations Board while the Senate was on break. In a surprising chain of events, the high court finally decided to limit some of the president’s power to fill vacancies with temporary appointments.
“The president made an unprecedented power grab by placing political allies at a powerful federal agency while the Senate was meeting regularly and without even bothering to wait for its advice and consent. A unanimous Supreme Court has rejected this brazen power-grab,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Earlier in the week U.S. District Judge Anna Brown ruled that the U.S. government’s no-fly list, which bans Americans accused of links to terrorism, violates their constitutional rights because it gives them no meaningful way to contest that decision.
“The court concludes international travel is not a mere convenience or luxury in this modern world. Indeed, for many international travel is a necessary aspect of liberties sacred to members of a free society,” Brown wrote in her 65-page ruling.
“For years, in the name of national security the government has argued for blanket secrecy and judicial deference to its profoundly unfair no-fly list procedures and those arguments have now been resoundingly rejected by the court,” Hina Shamsi, the ACLU’s national security project director, said in a written statement.
Just like the NDAA and the president’s power to assassinate Americans by drone strike if suspected of associating with Al Qaeda, you’re not allowed to know a damn thing. If you don’t get your day in court, you don’t get a chance to prove your innocence. That means you’re always guilty or already dead.
If the U.S. government suspects you, they can legally detain and/or kill you before you’ve even been accused. With the way the bill is worded, the entire Obama administration could be indefinitely detained for providing weapons to Al Qaeda’s associated forces.
The NDAA has eliminated habeas corpus.
If the Obama administration never planned on using the NDAA to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or trial, why wouldn’t Obama veto it in 2012, 2013 or 2014? Why was an amendment proposed by Adam Smith(D-Washington) which would have only eliminated indefinite detention in the U.S., voted down last month?
The good news is that many Americans are taking the situation into their own hands. Organizations such as ‘People Against the NDAA’ have organized hundreds of thousands of activists and coordinated dozens of successful anti-NDAA campaigns across the country. So far, 14 cities and 11 counties have passed anti-NDAA legislation.
Ask yourself, why is the mainstream media still silent about this?
The truth is that there is an ongoing media blackout for anything anti-NDAA. The point of the right to a fair trial is your ability to present evidence in your defense to a jury. If you aren’t guilty, you still have a chance of getting out.
The United States has been funding and arming Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria for over two years now… Do I believe hundreds of U.S. officials are guilty of supporting Al Qaeda’s associated forces? Yes. Do I believe they should all be indefinitely detained without a trial just because I’ve accused them? No.
Just in the last couple of hours, President Obama announced he is seeking another $500 million dollars to arm and train the Syrian rebels. What?
A 41-page memo was released on Monday by a federal courtexplaining the legal theories behind the Obama administrations extrajudicial killing of American citizens. This is the ‘drone memo’ that was promised after President Obama appointed David Barron, the author of the memo, to become a federal judge last month.
Why is the government using secret memos to launch drone strikes on American citizens in the first place?
Almost a third of the secret drone memo has been redacted. The first 11 pages, which describe the government’s allegations against al-Awlaki, are redacted entirely. The rest of the memo contains citations, sentences and even whole paragraphs blacked out.
The redaction’s suggest the existence of an entire body of secret law, a library of legal opinions produced by government lawyers but withheld from the American public.
The Guardian published an article this week discussing the American Civil Liberties Union new survey into the use of SWAT teams by police forces across the country which concludes that policing has become dangerously militarized with equipment and strategies being imported directly from the U.S. army.
“Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using paramilitary squads to search people’s homes for drugs. Neighborhoods are not war zones and our police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies,” the ACLU writes.
The survey discovered that 62% of SWAT team raids were for drug searches. 79% involved raids on private homes, and 21% were done without warrants authorizing searches. Only about 7% fell into the categories for which the technique was originally intended, such as barricades or hostage situations.
In the 1980′s there were only 3,000 SWAT raids per year, but by 2005 that number had drastically increased to 45,000. What’s worse is that Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws.
The militarization of police forces has been strongly encouraged by the federal government, particularly by the Department of Homeland Security the Defense Department after 9/11. Under the Pentagon’s 1033 program, military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan has been channeled to domestic police forces.
“If the federal government gives the police a huge cache of military-style weaponry, they are highly likely to use it, even if they do not really need to,” the ACLU writes.
We must end the militarization of the police and the surveillance state we are living under. It’s hard to believe, but two-thirds of the U.S. population is now living in a fourth amendment-free zone. Are you one of them?
If you’re currently living within 100 miles of the border, the answer to that question is yes. The lack of media coverage is very unsettling. In fact, there are very few people know this policy even exists and it has been that way since Bush was in office.
“Obama’s Justice Department has been unusually aggressive in prosecuting government officials for leaking secrets to the press. Six of the ten cases over the past century occurring under Attorney General Eric Holder’s watch,“ said Steve Coll, the dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Since Obama has been elected he has been waging a war on whistle blowers and it’s having a chilling effect on the press. Several journalists such as Jonathan Landay, a national security reporter for the McClatchy newspaper chain, are concerned they’ll be investigated for publishing secret information obtained from government whistle blowers in hopes of discovering their sources.
“The Obama administration’s been extremely aggressive in trying to root out whistle blowers within the government,” said NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff.
Is this the kind of country we want our children to grow up in? If you’re working for the government and participating in an illegal program, you’re expected tojust shut up or be sent to prison?
“It’s extremely dangerous in America right now to be right as a whistle blower when the government is so wrong. Speaking truth to power is now a criminal act,” said Thomas Drake, a former senior executive of the NSA.
In her first article for the Pontiac Tribune, Tabetha Wallace explained why words are her weapon of choice and I couldn’t agree with her more. The most effective tool available to us for combating the wars of aggression, political and financial corruption, militarization of the police, and surveillance state is our words. We’ve been given the gift of the Internet and we’re in the middle of new type of war. This is the information war.
We have all been torn apart and pit against each other through politics, religion, gender, race, sexuality, age, ethnicity and income bracket… This is how they control us. It’s time to unite and stand up for what we believe is right.
Why would NBC and CBS portray the unanimous SCOTUS ruling as limiting Obama’s power rather than correcting the president’s overreach? Public relations is just a pretty word for propaganda.
Knowledge is power.
DO NOT GET TOO HOPEFUL, ITS JUST A TACTIC.