Tag: surveillance

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Fourth Amendment rights general freedom privacy

GOP Fails on FISA

FISA, surveillance, privacy

“The House appears ready to reauthorize FISA 702 — which has been abused literally hundreds of thousands of times to spy on Americans without a warrant — without requiring the government to get a warrant,” tweeted Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) on X last weekend.

“The U.S. government uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Americans without a warrant,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) seconded, also on X. “This week, the House will vote to require the Feds to get a warrant to snoop on Americans. Sadly this vote is likely to fail. I will demand a recorded vote & post results.”

The “sadly” indicates that the Republicans in Congress are split, despite years of complaining about how the FISA courts treated Trump . . . and us. (A common complaint has been that the courts almost never say No to a FISA request from the Deep State.) 

The Electronic Freedom Foundation explains the nitty-gritty of Section 702: “As the law is written, the intelligence community cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications.”

So while de jure the Deep State is disallowed from peering into our digital data, de facto our paid government snoops do it all the time. 

Rep. Massie seeks to add a warrant process to FISA requests, but it looks like his amendment will fail. In that case, Massie urges Republicans not to re-authorize the whole FISA program.

But that effort will probably fail, too.

Our representatives are just not that into the Fourth Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The RFK Challenge

Joe Biden, censorship, surveillance

Yes, but . . .

When contemplating a candidate for office we may like, we do a lot of “Yes, but” thinking. It’s impossible not to.

Yesterday I considered the candidacy of Bobby Kennedy, Jr., in the context of the Republican/Democrat Duopoly™. Many of my readers may like his stances on COVID or war, but worry about other positions, like the Second Amendment and “climate change.”

Yes, but . . . there is another Yes, But context: the candidate forces mainstream voters and media manipulators to Yes, But their cherished positions.

Yes, Trump was “a threat to democracy” for trying to “overturn an election.” RFK, Jr. grants that Democrat talking point. 

But when pressed by Erin Burnett of CNN, his response was a challenge: “I can make the argument that President Biden is the much worse threat to democracy, and the reason for that is President Biden is the first candidate in history — the first president in history — that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech, so to censor his opponent.”

Now your and my response might be, No, but . . .

As in, he was certainly not the first president in American history to directly censor political speech.

But the presidents who did that are all heroes to the CNN crowd, so they’ll have to say, “Yes, but . . .”

But what? What’s the response? 

The CNN article, linked above, was lame: “‘With a straight face Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Joe Biden is a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump because he was barred from pushing conspiracy theories online,’ DNC senior adviser Mary Beth Cahill said in a statement. ‘There is no comparison to summoning a mob to the Capitol and promising to be a dictator on day one. . . .’”

What CNN and the DNC and the whole establishment ignore is the vast suppression of thousands, millions of voices online, organized by the government and ex-government and close-to-government operatives.

Yes, but . . . they like censoring their competition!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom

Amazon’s Wide, Flowing, Constricted River

Amazon, censor, censorship, surveillance, mind control

Under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government is prohibited from censoring speech.

It often tries anyway. 

One of the ways, as we’ve learned, is by pressuring social media and other companies to suppress speech. Since the federal government can make life very difficult for any company, some companies are understandably reluctant to ignore such pressure.

Amazon did not. When asked by the Biden administration in the person of one Andrew Slavitt, an advisor for the White House’s COVID-19 “response team,” the company agreed to hide books critical of the COVID-19 vaccines

Among the emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee is Slavitt’s March 2, 2021, communication with Amazon complaining that “if you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up [books criticizing the vaccine]. . . . [I]f that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning.”

Amazon was reluctant to intervene “manually” to demote such books and worried privately that rigging the game against particular books because of their viewpoints might undermine the company. But it caved nonetheless, soon modifying its algorithm and advising the White House that “we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective.”

Are such decisions consistent with a “consumer-centric” approach that easily allows people to find just what they’re looking for? Which is Amazon’s big selling point?

Of course not.

But as it has done so often over the years, our government was putting its thumb on the scale.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Amazon, censor, censorship, surveillance, mind control

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general freedom ideological culture privacy

Something to Protect

privacy, security, surveillance

Some people, enemies of drawing the curtains, say: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.”

Doesn’t follow. Hiding is a form of protecting. We all have things to protect. Innocent people advisedly hide information from neighbors, from bureaucrats eager to erode liberty, from plain criminals.

And from the political fanatic who acts as a criminal. 

If you’re a political activist with a public profile, or even just a voter, it may be a good idea to prevent ideological criminals from knowing where you live or work. That’s why God gave us post offices boxes and commercial mail receiving agencies.

Somebody recently firebombed the offices of Powerline’s John Hinderaker, a pro-liberty activist. One fire was set in an office that he subleases in “the building that houses Center of the American Experiment,” Hinderaker’s organization, another near a law center that he works with in the same building.

The suspects are many. Why? Well, as Hinderaker told federal investigators, CAE is “unusually effective across a broad range of issues.”

If bad guys can do something to hurt you — doxxing, stalking, firebombing — once they’ve got certain information about you, it is eminently reasonable to keep that information as private as possible.

Even when such data is already circulating, you can take significant steps to improve your privacy. Among the better books on how to do so is How to Be Invisible by J. J. Luna. More current and comprehensive is Michael Bazell’s Extreme Privacy.

Worth consulting, since — without the recourse these resources provide — the cost of political activism could induce us to cede to evil people the future of our country and the world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies partisanship Regulating Protest

Home of the Surveilled 

surveillance, banking, Congress, government, privacy

Abusive investigations that must themselves be investigated are piling up.

In the case commanding our attention today, the meta-investigating organization is the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It is investigating the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

Who does FinCEN pursue? True scoundrels? Hapless executives caught in a regulatory net?

Nope. FinCEN has been on fishing expeditions. It hasn’t been going after persons suspected of either willfully committing crimes or even tripping over regulations accidentally, or at least not only such types.

It has been going after anybody whose purchasing history puts them in the category of wrong-thinking rightists — hence, I guess, crypto-terrorists.

FinCEN has been instructing banks to scan customer records for evidence of suspect purchases. Not illegal purchases. Just “suspicious” in light of an ideological filter, unconstitutionally applied.

On Twitter, Representative Jim Jordan reported recently that the subcommittee now knows that FinCEN required financial institutions to screen transactions in which terms like “MAGA,” “Trump,” “Bible,” and “Bass Pro Shop” popped up. 

Apparently, if you’re fishing while wearing a MAGA cap and quoting Genesis, you just might be on the verge of shooting up your local post office.

Please don’t ask me to explain what anybody involved with FinCEN could possibly be thinking by engaging in this illegal spying. Or whether they have even a glancing acquaintance with constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

I’m just glad Jordan and his Weaponization Subcommittee are on the job, “watching the watchers.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

The Citizen Threat

surveillance, government

“The Republicans,” said Tucker Carlson — speaking of elected Republicans — “who really do hate their own voters in a way that’s pathological, are just re-upping the spy laws to allow the Biden Administration to spy on their voters.”

Mr. Carlson is not wrong, at least about Republican leaders aiding Democrats in spying on conservatives and others who sometimes vote GOP.

Yes, the federal government’s surveillance and criminal “justice” apparatus has been directed by Democrats — the Biden Administration specifically, and whoever runs that — to target, as The Enemy, conservatives and others associated with (or merely adjacent to) the Republican Party.

This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Democratic thought leaders pushed this new anti-terrorism paradigm from the first moments of the Biden Administration, in public. 

Or at least on MSNBC, where John Brennan clearly reconceived opposition to his Democratic Party as a movement looking “very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.” 

“Even libertarians,” he said, constituted “an insidious threat” to, not the Democratic Party, but “our Democracy.”

This perspectival shift, of seeing policy and political opposition as “insurgency,” is key to the new anti-democratic mindset.

And very real. It could end our small-r republican experiment.

Which brings us back to Republican politicians and their willingness to let Democrats institute a permanent pogrom against all who oppose Democrats’ big government programs.

Why do this? Out of hatred? Disdain? Fear?

Let’s not ignore the age-old impulse of politicians to squelch the speech of opponents. The longer in office, the more these careerists tend to view their own constituents as threats. After all, anyone might freely offer a complaint that emboldens or comforts the opposition. This is a bipartisan principle.

Better an enforced silence about the dictates of Washington, sadly, if you are a Washingtonian delivering dictates.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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