Jan 9
posted by Michael Smith in
2012
| 0 Comments
Useful tips in case the US Military detains you under the new "Battleground law" (NDAA - National Defense Authorization Act)
From http://boingboing.net/2011/12/21/tom-the-dancing-bug-so-yo.html/tom-the-dancing-bug-105
Jan 9
posted by Michael Smith in
2012
| 0 Comments
Face recognition from photos and video, iris scanning, 100s of millions of Americans to be put in new FBI database (and not just criminals, but background check info too). And if they make a mistake flagging your record then good luck straightening it out because the data is being shared with multiple federal agencies and over 18,000 local agencies.
Read details at
Another crack in the Bill of rights first amendment for freedom of the press. The US DHS monitoring journalists, bloggers and PR folks. Big brother is growing...
Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what.
Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November, Washington has the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms.
Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own definition of personal identifiable information, or PII, such data could consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.” Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC’s write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding blogger, can be victimized by the agency.
Also included in the roster of those subjected to the spying are government officials, domestic or not, who make public statements, private sector employees that do the same and “persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest,” which to itself opens up the possibilities even wider.
The department says that they will only scour publically-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn’t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses.
From http://rt.com/usa/news/homeland-security-journalists-monitoring-321/
--
Unfortunately this bill that allows for indefinite detention by US military of anyone on the planet including US citizens without charge or trial is now passed into law. Those who thought that this bill would not be passed or would be vetoed by the president might want to review the situation again. Seems to me that the Bill of Rights is being dismantled piece by piece...
PS The peaceful protesters against this bill in NYC were arrested - what does our government fear that they need to stop people speaking up for First Amendment rights?
WASHINGTON
Dec 31, 2011
– President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.
“President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”
Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war.
“We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,” said Romero. “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today. Thankfully, we have three branches of government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the scope of detention authority. But Congress and the president also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created because no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future president misusing the NDAA’s detention authority.”
The bill also contains provisions making it difficult to transfer suspects out of military detention, which prompted FBI Director Robert Mueller to testify that it could jeopardize criminal investigations. It also restricts the transfers of cleared detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to foreign countries for resettlement or repatriation, making it more difficult to close Guantanamo, as President Obama pledged to do in one of his first acts in office.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/president-obama-signs-indefinite-detention-bill-law
This is the bill I was emailing about last week. It amazes me that it was passed by congress in the first place. I feel sad for our Republic as it dies the death of a thousand cuts to its constitutional heart.
M/M
The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, if signed into law, will signal the death knell of our constitutional republic and the formal inception of a legalized police state in the United States. Passed by the House on May 26, 2011 (HR 1540), the Senate version (S. 1867) was passed on Dec. 1, 2011. Now only one man -- Barack Obama, a scholar of constitutional law -- will make the decision as to whether the Bill of Rights he went to Harvard to study will be superceded by a law that abrogates it.
First, let's be clear what is at stake. Most critical are Sections 1031 and 1032 of the Act, which authorize detaining U.S. citizens indefinitely without charge or trial if deemed necessary by the president. The bill would allow federal officials to take these steps based on suspicions only, without having to demonstrate to any judicial official that there is solid evidence to justify their actions. No reasonable proof will any longer be required for the government to suspend an American citizen's constitutional rights. Detentions can follow mere membership, past or present, in "suspect organizations." Government agents would have unchecked authority to arrest, interrogate, and indefinitely detain law-abiding citizens if accused of potentially posing a threat to "national security." Further, military personnel anywhere in the world would be authorized to seize U.S. citizens without due process. As Senator Lindsay Graham put it, under this Act the U.S. homeland is considered a "battlefield."
What is at stake is more than the Constitution itself, as central as that document has been to the American experiment in democracy. What is a stake is nothing short of the basic fundamentals of western jurisprudence. Central to civilized law is the notion that a person cannot be held without a charge and cannot be detained indefinitely without a trial. These principles date back to Greco-Roman times, were developed by English common law beginning in 1215 with the Magna Carta, and were universalized by the Enlightenment in the century before the American Constitution and Bill of Rights were fought for and adopted as the supreme law of the land.
For more than two centuries of constitutional development since then, the United States has been heralded as the light to the world precisely because of the liberties it enshrined in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution as inalienable. It now seems as if the events of 9/11 have been determined to be of such a threatening magnitude that our national leaders feel justified to abrogate in their entirety the very inalienable principles upon which our Republic was founded.
At the heart of this Act is the most fundamental question we must ask ourselves as a free people: is 9/11 worth the Republic? The question screaming at us through this bill is whether the war on terror is a better model around which to shape our destiny than our constitutional liberties. It compels the question of whether we remain an ongoing experiment in democracy, pioneering new frontiers in the name of liberty and justice for all, or have we become a national security state, having financially corrupted and militarized our democracy to such an extent that we define ourselves, as Sparta did, only through the exigencies of war?
Within a week of 9/11, the Use of Military Force Act was approved which authorized the full application of U.S. military power against "terrorism." A month later, on Oct. 26, 2001, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act that began the legislative assault on the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment right to freedom of association was gutted as federal officials were authorized to prosecute citizens for alleged association with "undesirable groups." The Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure was compromised by permitting indefinite detentions of those suspected of "terrorism." The Fourteenth Amendment right to privacy was obliterated as unchecked surveillance was authorized to access personal records, financial dealings, and medical records of any citizen at any time without any judicial oversight or permission. Evidence obtained extra-judicially could be withheld from defense attorneys.
The Patriot Act also criminalized "domestic terrorism." It stated that civil conduct can be considered "domestic terrorism" if such actions aim to "influence by intimidation or coercion" or "intimidate or coerce a civilian population." Put in plain language, this means that actions such as Occupy Wall Street can be designated as "domestic terrorism" by Federal authorities without judicial oversight and dealt with outside the due process of constitutional protections.
Two weeks after passage of the Patriot Act, on Nov. 13, President Bush issued Military Order No. 1 authorizing the executive branch and the military to capture, kidnap, or otherwise arrest non-citizens anywhere in the world if suspected of engaging in terrorist activities. Proof was not required. It stipulated that trials, if held, would be military tribunals, not civil courts, and that evidence obtained by torture was permissible. No right of appeal was afforded to those convicted. Numerous executive orders, findings, and National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives followed, further consolidating the militarization of due process under the law and enabling the executive branch to act without legal constraint after it has defined a person or group as potentially engaging in "terrorist" activity.
A year later, on Nov. 25, 2002, the Homeland Security Act was passed that for the first time integrated all U.S. intelligence agencies, both domestic and foreign, into a single interactive network under the president. The Act gave these intelligence agencies complete freedom to collect any and all data on anyone anywhere in the United States and, working with allies abroad, to access complete information on anyone anywhere in the world, working closely with local police, intelligence agencies, and the corporate sector. This dissolved the distinctions between domestic and foreign spying and made more ambiguous the distinction between domestic and foreign "terrorism."
The next major step took place on Oct. 17, 2006, when Congress passed the Military Commissions Act that effectively abrogated habeas corpus for domestic and foreign enemies alike, stating, "Any person is punishable who aides, abets, counsels, commands, or procures" material support for alleged terrorist groups. One of the most basic principles of both our democracy and our civilization, that a person cannot be held without being charged, was surrendered, and done so by substantial majorities in both houses. On the same day, the 2007 NDAA was passed, which amended the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting U.S. military personnel from acting upon U.S. citizens within U.S. borders. Not only was anything allowable in the pursuit of "terrorists," but the military was authorized to conduct operations inside the homeland in their pursuit.
Now comes the 2012 NDAA, which completes the process and thus serves as the coup de grace for a democratically voted metamorphosis from republic to national security state. It puts the final nail in the coffin of the Constitution by designating the entire United States as essentially the same "battlefield" in the war on terror as Iraq or Afghanistan, and authorizes the executive branch and the military to take whatever actions they consider legitimate against any human being anywhere on planet earth, civilian or enemy combatant, and to do so without any judicial oversight or constitutional constraint. If this Act is passed, the Bill of Rights will no longer protect American citizens from their government. The Constitution will no longer be the ultimate law of the land.
The House and Senate versions of the Act must now be reconciled and the Act sent to the president to either sign or veto. With his decision, he will determine the fate of those very liberties which, up to this point, have been integral to and indeed have defined America.
from
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-garrison/obamas-most-fateful-decis_b_1143005.html
(Bold and italic added by me)
Dec 13
posted by Michael Smith in
2012
| 0 Comments
Interesting new info on global warming speed up from the mainstream UK newspaper The Independent:
It is time for humans to work together in love. It is time to "Occupy Earth".
Thanks to Barry for alerting me to this info
In case you are not aware of these camps that are spread over all the states in the US they are designed to hold men, women and children for extended periods of time. I imagine the government line is that they are for emergency evacuations from natural or man-made disasters. An alternative view is that they are concentration camps for who ever is picked up using the new Battlefield law that the senate just passed that allows any US citizen to be held indefinitely by US military after military court martial with no right of appeal or habius corpus.
Either way there is a question mark as to why these camps are being activated now several years after being built - I imagine someone higher up in government know of some reason they will be put to use soon...
(if you missed the info on the Senate passing TheNational Defense Authorization Act see the link toward end of this article. And related post on precrime
FEMA camp locations:
The barbed wire points in. (see article below and photo)
There over 600 camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive people. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States.
[snip]
The camps all have railroad facilities as well as roads leading to and from the detention facilities. Many also have an airport nearby. The majority of the camps can house a population of 20,000 prisoners. Currently, the largest of these facilities is just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. The Alaskan facility is a massive mental health facility and can hold approximately 2 million people.
A person named Terry Kings wrote an article on his discoveries of camps
located in southern California. His findings are as follows:Over the last couple months several of us have investigated three soon-to-be prison camps in the Southern California area. We had heard about these sites and wanted to see them for ourselves.
The first one we observed was in Palmdale, California. It is not operating as a prison at the moment but is masquerading as part of a water facility. Now why would there be a facility of this nature out in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no prisoners? The fences that run for miles around this large facility all point inward, and there are large mounds of dirt and dry moat surrounding the central area so the inside area is not visible from the road. There are 3 large loading docks facing the entrance that can be observed from the road. What are these massive docks going to be loading?
[snip]
from http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread59023/pg1
I thought arrests for Pre-Crime (movie Minority Report) was as fictional as being arrested for Thought-Crime (novel 1984) , but now pre-crime is a crime in the USA....
If you live in the United States today, you need to understand that your privacy is being constantly eroded. Our world is going crazy, government paranoia is off the charts and law enforcement authorities have become absolutely obsessed with watching us, listening to us, tracking us, recording us, compiling information on all of us and getting us all to spy on one another. If you doubt that we are rapidly getting to the point where the government will monitor every breath you take and every move you make, just read the rest of this article. The truth is that the government is watching you more closely than ever, and they are spending billions upon billions of dollars to enhance their surveillance capabilities even further. If our society stays on this current path, we will eventually have zero privacy left. At this point, it is not too hard to imagine a society where we will not be able to say anything, buy anything, sell anything, assemble with others or even leave our homes without government permission. We truly are descending into a dystopian nightmare and the American people had better wake up.
Sadly, most people living in the United States and in Europe do not realize what is happening. Most of them think that everything is just fine. The "Big Brother control grid" that is being constructed all over the western world squeezes all of us just a little bit tighter every single day, and most people don't even feel it. But when you step back and take a look at the big picture, it truly is horrifying. The following are 14 new ways that the government is watching you.... #1 In many areas of the United States today, you will be arrested if you do not produce proper identification for the police. In the old days, "your papers please" was a phrase that we used to use to mock the tyranny of Nazi Germany. But now all of us are being required to be able to produce "our papers" for law enforcement authorities at any time. For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zucker was recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hours just because she could not produce any identification for police. #2 The federal government has decided that what you and I share with one another on Facebook and on Twitter could be a threat to national security. According to a recent Associated Press article, the Department of Homeland Security will soon be "gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes".Other law enforcement agencies are getting into the act as well. For example, the NYPD recently created a special "social media" unit dedicated to looking for criminals on social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. #3 New high-tech street lights that are being funded by the federal government and that are being installed all over the nation can also be used as surveillance cameras, can be used by the DHS to make "security announcements" and can even be used to record personal conversations. The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson for Infowars.com.... Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level. #4 More than a million hotel television sets all over America are now broadcasting propaganda messages from the Department of Homeland Security promoting the "See Something, Say Something" campaign. In essence, the federal government wants all of us to become "informants" and to start spying on one another constantly. The following comes from an article posted by USA Today.... Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels. #5 The FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programs all over the United States. The following comes from a recent article by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com.... If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI. The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet. The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence. Potential evidence of what? This is very creepy. Why is the FBI so interested in what is being said during Internet talk radio programs? #6 TSA VIPR teams are now conducting random inspections at bus stations and on interstate highways all over the United States. For example, the following comes from a local news report down in Tennessee.... You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR). "Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons. Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state. #7 Thermal imaging face scanners are becoming much more sophisticated. Law enforcement authorities in the western world are getting very excited about "pre-crime" tools such as this that will enable them to "prevent crimes" before they happen. The following is from a recent BBC News article.... A sophisticated new camera system can detect lies just by watching our faces as we talk, experts say. The computerised system uses a simple video camera, a high-resolution thermal imaging sensor and a suite of algorithms. Researchers say the system could be a powerful aid to security services. But face scanners are not just a tool that will be used in the future. The truth is that face scanners are being used all over the United States right now. The following comes from an article posted on Singularity Hub.... Law enforcement continues to adopt new technologies in an effort to make their jobs easier and keep us safer. The latest gizmo attaches to officers’ iPhones and turns them into biometric face scanners. The scanners have already been street tested in Massachusetts. Pretty soon cops all across the US will be using them to ID suspects. Before long, technology like this will be all over America. In fact, the FBI has announced that it will be activating a "nationwide facial recognition service" in January. #8 Another "pre-crime" technology currently being tested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) program. The following description of this new program comes from an article in the London Telegraph.... Using cameras and sensors the "pre-crime" system measures and tracks changes in a person's body movements, the pitch of their voice and the rhythm of their speech. It also monitors breathing patterns, eye movements, blink rate and alterations in body heat, which are used to assess an individual's likelihood to commit a crime. The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) programme is already being tested on a group of government employees who volunteered to act as guinea pigs. Do you want government officials to pull you aside and interrogate you just because you are feeling a little bit nervous one particular day? #9 Sadly, "pre-crime" technology is even being used on our children. The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it will begin using analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents and will place "potential offenders" in specific prevention and education programs. How soon will it be before this type of things is applied to adults? #10 Our children are being programmed to accept the fact that they will be watched and monitored constantly. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending large amounts of money to install surveillance cameras in the cafeterias of public schools all across the nation so that government control freaks can closely monitor what our children are eating. #11 The U.S. government is also increasingly using "polls" and "surveys" as tools to gather information about all of us. In previous articles, I have noted how government authorities seems particularly interested in our children. According to Mike Adams of Natural News, the CDC is starting to call parents all over the U.S. to question them about the vaccination status of their children.... The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which has been comprehensively exposed as a vaccine propaganda organization promoting the interests of drug companies, is now engaged in a household surveillance program that involves calling U.S. households and intimidating parents into producing child immunization records. As part of what it deems a National Immunization Survey(NIS), the CDC is sending letters to U.S. households, alerting them that they will be called by "NORC at the University of Chicago" and that households should "have your child's immunization records handy when answering our questions." You can see a copy of the letter that the CDC has been sending out to selected parents right here. #12 As I have written about previously, a very disturbing document that Oath Keepers has obtained shows that the FBI is now instructing store owners to report many new forms of "suspicious activity" to them. According to the document, "suspicious activity" now includes the following.... Do any of those "signs of suspicious activity" apply to you? According to a report on WorldNetDaily, this document is part of a "series of brochures" that will be distributed "to farm supply stores, gun shops, military surplus stores and even hotels and motels." #13 In some areas of the country, law enforcement authorities are pulling data out of cell phones for no reason whatsoever. According to the ACLU, state police in Michigan are now using "extraction devices" to download data from the cell phones of motorists that they pull over. This is taking happening even if the motorists that are pulled over are not accused of doing anything wrong. The following is how a recent article on CNET News described the capabilities of these "extraction devices".... The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information. #14 The government can spy on us and record our conversations seemingly without any limitation, but in many areas of the country it has become illegal to watch them or record them in public. For example, one 21-year-old man down in Florida was recently arrested for trying to document a confrontation that he was having with police on his iPhone. But if we can't record them, how can we prove our side of the story in court?
Copyright © 2011 End of the American Dream
Definition: Tipping point - a time when a previously stable slowing changing system sudden shifts into a new state unexpectedly.
You have probably seen the movie "Titanic" were a great "unsinkable" ship hits an iceberg and for hours nothing appears to be wrong, people dress up for dinner, everything seems calm and normal. Then slowly the ship starts to list and becomes water logged. In the final minutes the ship suddenly breaks in two and there is a shift into a very fast sinking. At the beginning most people didn't even want to get into the lifeboats, by the end they were fighting each other like Black Friday shoppers at WalMart for the few seats remaining to safety when even money might not buy your way off the sinking ship and the ship government (officers) start shooting at the passengers in an attempt to retain control. This is a good model of a Tipping Point: everything seems normal then there is a sudden change.
I have noticed an increase in the last 2 years in long aggressive questioning by Immigration border people as I enter the USA. I am US citizen and in my option if I am holding a valid passport then after scanning it they should just let me into the country. I am also UK citizen and that is what happened the last time I entered UK this summer. No aggressive questioning, just a 30 second scan of my passport and "Welcome back to Britain, sir"
I think it is as bad or worse for non-US citizens entering the USA. In addition everyone else (except Canadians) have to fill out an application form 2 weeks ahead of time to even get on a plane to US plus they get fingerprinted and photographed on entry. All part of the US-VISIT program. I imagine that this will be extended to US citizens too in the coming year for "our security" - really to expand Big Brother's power and to intimidate people into obeying orders like sheep.
