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To Serve, Protect and Terrorize
July 29, 2013 — xanthippa
The war on drugs is not the only time we keep seeing random, but deadly, violence from cops against civilians.
And if you thought a woman who reports a sexual assault and is immediately arrested (with a judge looking on, nonetheless) could only happen in a Middle Eastern, Sharia ruled country, think again. This one happened in Clark County Family Court – that is, Las Vegas.
And, of course, not to stay behind, the Toronto Police oblige with a shooting of a kid on a bus…
If you listen carefully, you can hear what appears to be a Taser deployed long after the kid was shot 9 times. Because, even without a gun and with 9 bullets in him, the kid still posed deadly threat to the 11 officers on scene.
By the way – have you read A Clockwork Orange lately? Remember Little Alex’s buddy’s choice of employment? I never guessed this was a prophecy…
H/T: BCF
Overcriminilization
July 18, 2013 — xanthippaThink about it – there are now so many laws and regulations which carry a criminal penalty (in the US, as per the video below, but elsewhere, too) that the federal government bureaucrats say they don’t have enough manpower to list them all in a central database where citizens could easily access them. The obvious implication of this is that most citizens are not aware of what the laws they live under and thus may infringe them many times a day without being aware of it. (This is the topic of the video below.)
But, take it a step further: consider the widespread supervision of the government of each and every citizen….now, it is clear that it is not a tinfoil-hat-conspiracy-talk, but reality we are living every day.
Then, remember how top bureaucrats are implicated in directing other bureaucrats to target the Obama regime’s political opponents. So far, only the IRS department is implicated, but it would be highly naive to think this form of corruption is limited to only one department.
So, if you want to target a person disliked by the Obama regime, you just have to pull up all the records of their activities, compare them to obscure criminal regulations and voila, your political opponent gets sent to jail for a criminal misconduct….no need for ‘political prisoners’.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the game is played!
The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America
July 4, 2013 — xanthippaAmendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
EFF Sues NSA, DOJ Over Secret Surveillance Program
June 24, 2013 — xanthippa
While on the topic, the Western Center for Journalism asks if, perhaps, some of this NSA-collected material might have been used to influence Chief Justice Roberts to change his vote at the last minute on Obamacare.
And if you still cling to the foolish and long debunked ‘I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to worry about’ fallacy, please, consider the following book: Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate. Here is an excerpt from a review of the book:
‘The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.’
After all, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old student, faced 2 felony charges of bomb-making and was to be tried as an adult for a school science-experiment that produced a ‘pop’, in which nobody was hurt and no damage happened – only popular outcry forced the authorities to eventually drop the charges.
And, of course, who can forget why ‘the authorities’ kept such a concise log on citizens’ activities in Fahrenheit 451! If they could not catch the real culprit, an early-morning dog-walker would be a suitable substitute… (Yes, it is since having read this book in English that I cannot bring myself to use the word ‘fireman’ and instead use ‘fire-fighter’.)
And, if you think that ‘just’ collecting metadata does not tell ‘the regime’ a lot about you, please, consider this interesting, humorously written article which graphically demonstrates how the analysis of metadata would have helped identify and ‘neutralize’ Paul Revere.
P.S. In the above video, they say that when the EFF asked the US government to clarify how they were interpreting the laws, they were told the answer was ‘classified’. Consider the implications of that! How can you possibly follow the laws if you are not permitted to know how the government will enforce them? Do you still think you have ‘nothing to hide’?!?!?
Megaupload data massacre
June 19, 2013 — xanthippaKim Dotcom is charged with having facilitated a large scale piracy operation with his Megaupload, where people uploaded and stored their own, personal files. He faces 20 years in prison, if convicted, on a multitude of charges.
His primary defense had been that the vast majority of the data stored on his servers was of personal nature or backups of business deals and only a tiny percentage held copyrighted material. The US Department of Justice had told the owner of the servers that Megaupload had rented for the storage that since the DOJ has enough data to prosecute Kim Dotcom, they can proceed to delete the files. Kim Dotcom protested on two grounds: the data stored in these servers was the personal intellectual property of his customers and nobody had the right to deprive them of it, and he needed the data for his defense.
Now, without warning, all the data had been deleted…
‘The information stored on the dormant servers – “petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property” – was what Dotcom called evidence in the case US authorities launched against him in January 2012. Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale.
“This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,” Dotcom wrote on Twitter.
Lawyers representing his former company “have repeatedly asked Leaseweb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the US,” he added. ‘
Yeah – go ahead and defend yourself – now that the evidence in your favour had been destroyed!
Kim Dotcom also said:
“My goal is, within the next five years, I want to encrypt half of the Internet. Just re-establish a balance between a person – an individual – and the state,” Dotcom said in an interview with RT. “Because right now, we are living very close to this vision of George Orwell and I think it’s not the right way. It’s the wrong path that the government is on, thinking that they can spy on everybody.”
And you wonder why the US government is targeting him?!?!?
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 