Tag: surveillance

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights

The Bobbies That Say NIII

UK, British flag, censorship, surveillance, internet, news

In Great Britain, you can get police to show up at your door just by posting an unauthorized opinion on social media.

Things are about to get worse. By talking about it online, Britons who think that the country has an immigration problem could draw the attention of a new police unit, National Internet Intelligence Investigations.

Saying “we’ve got to protest about this” will probably cause the sirens to go off.

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, says the government is trying “to police what you post, what you share, what you think” because it “can’t police the streets.… Labour have stopped pretending to fix Britain and started trying to mute it.”

However, this kind of thing happened under the Tories too.

People still speak their minds in the UK. They aren’t yet used to regarding their political opinions as prenatal forms of criminal activity.

One could use social media to plan or boast about what everybody agrees is a crime. A thug might post video showing how he beat somebody up. Bank robbers might share bank-​robbery plans on Facebook. Criminals tend not to do these things. But if they did, for real (that is, they’re not play-​acting), who could object if the police inspect the incriminating posts and take appropriate action?

But what’s happening in the UK is not that. 

It’s an attempt to prevent social unrest by finding expressions of dissent and pretending to divine which speech-​crime will lead to protest-crime.

It requires Big Brother Bobbies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights privacy too much government

What Does the FBI Do?

FBI, surveillance, censorship, religion, church

“The FBI began surveilling a Catholic priest in 2023,” wrote James Lynch last week, “after the clergyman refused to divulge details about a recently arrested parishioner who was converting to Catholicism and seeking spiritual guidance.”

The agency’s Richmond Field Office “tracked the priest’s movements and coordinated with several other FBI offices and a foreign law enforcement agency to gather intelligence on the clergyman and his priestly organization,” Lynch summarizes.

This is all based on a new House Judiciary Committee report entitled “How the Biden-​Wray FBI Manufactured a False Narrative of Catholic Americans as Violent Extremists.” *

“The FBI attempted to violate the priest-​penitent privilege,” the report continues, “on the faulty reasoning that the Richmond subject under investigation seeking spiritual guidance had not been baptized or completed catechism.”

You may be asking yourself, is the FBI out of its mind?

Certainly, out of this hemisphere. Consider that FBI agents have also extended their reach way beyond U.S. borders to focus on wrongthink elsewhere.

According to investigative journalist David Ágape, “the FBI has helped Brazil censor its citizens,” working with the Soros’ Open Society Foundation to promote censorship in Brazil and a secret judicial police force targeting “people deemed to be spreading false information.”

Was the FBI nurturing censorship in foreign lands to later re-​import them here?

From its beginning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had trouble staying within constitutional limits. I guess we should not be shocked that it doesn’t obey jurisdictional limits, either. 

Hopefully, Director Kash Patel will rein in the agency. It won’t be easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* According to the committee, “The report reveals that contrary to testimony from former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, the 2023 Richmond memorandum that derisively labeled traditional Catholics as ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ was not an isolated incident. Under the new leadership of Director Kash Patel, the FBI has cooperated considerably with the Committee’s subpoena, and has produced over 1,300 pages of additional documents related to the Richmond memorandum that the Biden-​Wray FBI did not disclose.”
Note: You can also mouse-​over the asterisk in the main text to see the footnote.

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national politics & policies privacy

The State vs. Our Privacy

encryption, privacy, surveillance, censorship

The policies of the new Trump administration have given us only partial reprieves from the war on freedom of speech.

The war is still chugging along. It extends even to our most private communications, including those now hidden from prying eyes by encryption. Revived legislation in the U.S. Senate threatens the providers of such encryption.

Reclaim the Net’s Dan Frieth observes that under the STOP CSAM Act of 2025 (S. 1829), which targets “child sexual abuse material,” providing a “secure, privacy-​focused service could be interpreted as ‘facilitating’ illegal activity, regardless of whether the provider can access or verify the content being transmitted.”

The legislation stipulates that providers may defend themselves from charges of “facilitating” illegal activity by showing that it is “technologically impossible” to remove CSAM without disabling their encryption. But firms would still often have to go to court to make this case, and “many platforms may adopt invasive scanning out of fear, not necessity, just to avoid liability, with real consequences for privacy and user trust.”

Defaulting to routine invasive scanning means an end to providing users with encryption, including users threatened by despotic regimes.

Current law already requires platforms to report known examples of material that entails the sexual abuse of children.

Any good or service that can be put to good use can also be put to evil use. Just as we shouldn’t penalize the makers of knives, forks, mail, curtains, roads, and guns for their use by criminals, the makers of encryption services should also not be so punished.

Nor should we grant to government bodies such a frightening dystopian power, accumulated to override our basic freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Big Ugly Border Bill

Canada, surveillance, privacy, metadata

The price of liberty may be more than eternal vigilance. Must we also employ all-​knowing vigilance? Encyclopedic knowledge of all possible dirty tricks freedom’s enemies may employ?

One such is burying the latest assault on liberty in legislation about an unrelated matter in hopes that nobody will notice.

In Canada, a controversial effort to sabotage online privacy has wormed its way into a bill supposedly about strengthening border security: the Strong Border Act (Bill C‑2).

It’s not exactly new, since, as Reclaim the Net reports, it’s something “law enforcement agencies have been pursuing since the late 1990s.”

As with populations south of the border, the people themselves hate such interference. “Despite being repeatedly rebuffed by public opposition, parliamentary committees, and Canada’s highest court,” observes Ken Macon, “the drive to erode digital privacy protections continues.”

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that Canadians have a right to expect that their subscriber information will be kept private. In 2023, the courts affirmed that users’ IP addresses were also entitled to protection. Investigators couldn’t simply rummage through a Canadian’s subscription details and surfing history without a warrant.

But the new legislation would entitle authorities to make warrantless “information demands” on service providers.

If this legislation ostensibly about the border is enacted, service providers would, on demand, have to identify particular users and whether the provider possesses his transmission data. The actual data itself would not have to be handed over, but Macon stresses that permitting such indirect searches would “effectively sidestep the very privacy protections the courts have upheld.”

Vigilance, indeed, knowing our governments’ lust for omniscience about us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights international affairs Internet controversy social media

Against British Censorship

U.K. British, censorship

The dictates of the neo-​redcoat British government, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, are out of control.

Starmer’s Labour government wants the whole world to obey its censorship demands. The latest is that its Office of Communications, called Ofcom, is threatening the American social media platforms Gab and Kiwi Farms with mega-​steep fines for unwaveringly safeguarding the freedom of speech of users. 

Which of course Gab and Kiwi Farms have every right to do.

Ofcom says it’ll sock Gab with fines of up $23 million USD for refusing to censor its users per UK orders. 

“We will not pay one cent,” says Gab CEO Andrew Torba.

Gab is not only not cooperating with Ofconjob’s insanity, it has also reported the Starmer government to the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. Department of Justice in hopes that the U.S. government will retaliate against the United Kingdom for trying to gag social media in the United States.

Kiwi Farms, threatened with the same fine of up to 10 percent of worldwide revenue, is telling UK users who want to use the site to access it through a VPN or Tor in order to protect their online traffic and disguise which country they’re from. Otherwise, they’re out of luck.

Kiwi has also reported success in obtaining pro bono counsel for dealing with “the UK’s attempts to enforce its censorship regime in the United States.”

As the U.S. president famously said in Butler, Pennsylvania: “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tearing Into the Apple

“Any kind of back door … access for the ‘good guys’ can also be exploited by the ‘bad guys,’” observes a Technology & Innovation Foundation report.

We can omit the skeptical scare quotes around “bad guys”; cyberhackers stealing your private information are bad guys.

Example: the China-​affiliated hackers who looted U.S. telecommunications systems with the help of U.S.-mandated back doors.

But “good guys” demanding unlimited access to encrypted information are also bad guys.

Example: the United Kingdom officials behind a secret order last month, recent divulged by the Washington Post, demanding that “Apple allow access to all cloud content from users worldwide.”

Reporter Joseph Menn observes that this hitherto undisclosed order requiring “blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, has no known precedent in major democracies.”

Apple is not commenting, now, to avoid legal jeopardy. But in March, when told the order was impending, Apple said: “There is no reason why the UK should have the authority to decide for citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-​to-​end encryption.”

Apple may stop offering encrypted storage in the UK rather than obey the order. This probably wouldn’t satisfy the Starmer government. If Apple sticks to its guns, its products may even end up being banned in the UK.

The alternative is open season for private and state-​backed cyberhackers.

Meanwhile, time to remove your secrets from the cloud.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people political challengers social media

The Ignorance of Censorship

Covid, censorship, surveillance, PSYOP, mind control

Why is Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, governor of Minnesota right now?

Perhaps because government censors — functioning through agents like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — made it harder to hear his opponent, Dr. Scott Jensen, during Walz’s 2022 re-​election campaign.

A shift in a few percentage points would have tilted things in the challenger’s favor. But Jensen had made the government’s response to the pandemic — including the tyrannical policies of Walz’s state government — a central theme of his campaign.

And in those days (as in these), all-​out censorship of various deviations from the government line was de rigueur. Disagreement about COVID-​19, both the nature of the infection and the wisdom of the government’s response, was among the targets.

Jeffrey Tucker asks “Why Did Zuckerberg Choose Now to Confess” to the fact that Facebook had done so little, in Zuckerberg’s words, to resist repeated pressure “from the Biden administration, including the White House … to censor certain COVID-​19 content”?

The answer to the uninteresting question “why now?” is standard CYApolitical calculus. In any case, the confession isn’t quite exhaustive; Zuckerberg doesn’t acknowledge the extent of the censorship. As Tucker notes, “every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.”

The single COVID-​contrarian piece by Tucker himself that slipped through the social-​media censorship net “by mistake” got an atypical tsunami of response. So what if Dr. Jensen’s message and arguments had not been perpetually smothered by government-​pressured social-​media companies?

Jensen may still have lost (Walz got 52 percent) but the point of elections goes further than a horse race. Where there is free speech, voters can learn something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment partisanship

Who’s Afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?

Tulsi Gabbard, surveillance

Former Democratic congresswoman and anti-​warmonger gadfly Tulsi Gabbard is no terrorist. Yet, the government is treating her like one.

Last November, UncoverDC related the testimony of retired Air Marshal Sonya LaBosco, now executive director of the Air Marshal National Council, which works on behalf of Air Marshals.

LaBosco says that instead of tracking genuine threats, the TSA surveillance programs like Quiet Skies are focusing on political targets, such as those who entered the capitol (or just the capital) on January 6, 2021.

Air marshals are also being diverted to the southern border to perform mission-​unrelated tasks like dispensing water.

LaBosco says she’s been getting nowhere with requests for explanations from Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas and others with oversight of the surveillance programs. Shocker.

Now UncoverDC reports that according to an Air Marshal whistleblower, Tulsi Gabbard has been added to the Quiet Skies program, created to “protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists.”

Listing Gabbard, who is now accompanied by Air Marshals and other TSA personnel when she flies, certainly appears politically motivated. Marshals “were first assigned to Gabbard on July 23, a day after she criticized Kamala Harris, Biden, and the National Security State in an interview with Laura Ingraham.”

Such targeting of critics is very disturbing. Thanks to UncoverDC’s reporting and LaBosco’s testimony, it does not seem as implausible as it might have been a few years ago. Years of similar opposition-​targeting conduct by the Biden administration have helped us accept it, too.

Discussing the surveillance, Gabbard says: “No American deserves to live in fear of our own government.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Bills of Suppression

censorship, misinformation, disinformation, surveillance

In 2021, Democrats took aim at persons who donate to Democrats’ opponents with legislation called the For the People Act, which Republicans successfully blocked.

Back then, Bradley Smith, chairman of Institute for Free Speech, observed that the legislation aimed to violate the rights of groups “who do nothing more than speak about policy issues before Congress.” It would also have limited political speech on the web.

Now the bill is being resurrected as two separate pieces of legislation, each with language purporting to counter the purported threat of artificial intelligence. They are the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act and the AI Transparency in Elections Act.

Some Republicans seem to be buying into the resuscitated anti-​speech agenda, even though the legislation incorporates many proposals — even much of the same language — from the earlier bill. Again, says Smith, the goal is to expose conservative donors to “to harassment and boycotts.” Also to outlaw content called “materially deceptive content” as judged by a “reasonable person.” 

Of course, “reasonable persons” can and do disagree about the meaning of various speech and whether it’s “deceptive.” It’s reasonable to assume that the legislation, if enacted, will be used against speech that enforcers happen to disagree with.

As for actually deceptive speech: all manner of jabberwocky is protected by the First Amendment unless uttered to rob or defraud someone. If I tell you the moon is green cheese and you believe it, that may be sad. But I haven’t picked your pocket … or made you eat lunar cheese.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ATF’s 115-​Year Mistake

mistaken identity, prison, guns

“Oops. Sorry about almost sending you away for 115 years. Case of mistaken identity and dishonest testimony.”

But Bryan Montiea Wilson did not get even a “sorry” from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) or local law enforcement.

Wilson, who works for a railroad equipment manufacturer, had never been arrested when ATF agents nabbed him in December 2023. Accused of gun and drug sales to local police officers said to be working with the ATF, Wilson could only repeatedly assert his innocence.

His looming punishment included up to 115 years in prison and millions in fines. Then, suddenly, he was released.

How did Wilson wind up being falsely accused? The Truth About Guns site reports that prosecutors realized their blunder after his court-​appointed lawyer investigated. But an uninformative request to dismiss the case is all ATF offered.

“Further review … reveals that the interests of justice would best be served by a dismissal of the pending charges as opposed to further prosecution.… The Government respectfully requests that the Court dismiss the pending charges against defendant Bryan Montiea Wilson.”

I guess we can thank the prosecutors for mentioning “justice.” But there should at least be an accounting in such cases; and this accounting, plus further consequences, should be mandatory.

“Something got messed up and they landed on me,” Wilson says. “I don’t know how this happened, but it can’t happen again. It shouldn’t happen again.”

Wilson has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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