"[B]oth the [']liberals['] and the conservatives misunderstand privacy. The conservatives engage in a narrow and unnatural reading of the Constitution in order to avoid seeing what they do not wish to see, while the [']liberals['] find in the Constitution not penumbras but a Rorschach test that reveals only what they wish to see. In both cases it comes down to an inkblot. Both approaches allow their adherents to disparage most freedoms and exalt the few freedoms allowed by their respective moral and political philosophies." "Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as Property Right," Cato Policy...
Privacy
New Report Reveals ICE Spent Billions Spying on Americans
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.8 billion to surveil Americans from 2008 to 2021. The report titled “American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century” from the Georgetown Law Center for Privacy and Technology details how ICE used warrantless, mass spying tactics to deport people believed to be in the US illegally. The report found the agency could run images against a facial recognition database that includes a third of Americans and was quickly able to learn where hundreds of millions of people lived, all without any judicial oversight. “In fact, ICE has used...
Released FBI Document Asserts Saudi Embassy Employee Connected to 9/11
Over the past several months, the FBI released thousands of pages of material relating to its investigation of Saudi government links to the 9/11 attacks. This wave of declassifications was pursuant to Executive Order 14040, which President Biden issued on Sept. 3 under pressure from more than 1,800 survivors, family members and first responders who threatened to protest his presence at memorial events if he didn’t make good on a 2020 campaign promise to boost 9/11 transparency. The published documents are riddled with redactions, but a Stark Realities review of the trove has uncovered...
Privacy as a Property Right
In 1993 I wrote an article at the Cato Institute that may be relevant to the current controversy over abortion and the Supreme Court: "Dissolving the Inkblot: Privacy as a Property Right."
Two LA Cops Fired After Video Proves They Ignored Robbery to Play Pokémon Go
Over the years, TFTP has reported on multiple instances of cops ignoring calls for various reasons. But LAPD officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell become the first cops on which we’ve reported who ignored calls because they chose to play video games instead of responding to a robbery call in progress. As innocent citizens waited for their security force to show up—who they are forced to pay for—Lozano and Mitchell were catching Snorlax in Pokemon Go. The cops were never charged for betraying the community’s trust, but they were actually fired. For the last three years, they have been...
‘State Secrets’ Hide Government Perfidy
Will federal law enforcement agencies ever be forced to disclose their abuses of American citizens? The Supreme Court could answer that question in its decision on a potentially landmark case it heard last week regarding surveillance of Muslim communities in California. Though the case may be decided on narrow grounds, it involves a legal Pandora’s Box that has spawned and shielded the worst abuses of the post-9/11 era. Beginning in 2006, the FBI sent Craig Monteilh, a former Drug Enforcement Administration informant, into mosques in southern California to gather evidence against Muslims...
The FBI Pilfered 800 Safety Deposit Boxes, Pocketing People’s Life Savings
For decades now, federal government and their cohorts in law enforcement have been carrying out theft of the citizenry on a massive scale using Civil Asset Forfeiture (CAF). The 1980’s-era laws were designed to drain resources from powerful criminal organizations, but CAF has become a tool for law enforcement agencies across the U.S. to steal money and property from countless innocent people. As the following case out of Beverly Hills illustrates, no criminal charge is required for this confiscation, resulting in easy inflows of cash for law enforcement departments and the proliferation...
The NSA Is Spying on Tucker Carlson (and Everyone Else)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson was mocked on social media this week for stating that he had been told that the National Security Agency was reading his private emails and spying on him. The usual suspects called Carlson paranoid, because there are so many checks and balances to assure the feds would never illegally target a vexatious Biden critic. However, on Tuesday, a dissent by Travis LeBlanc, a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, revealed that one of the NSA’s most intrusive surveillance engines, XKeyscore, may be violating federal law and Americans’ rights and...
Recent Court Cases Uphold Arrests of People Filming Police
George Floyd, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Alexander Gonzales, Walter Scott. and countless others all have one thing in common—their last moments alive were captured on cellphone videos as police killed them. These videos and others like them led to charges against those involved, with some of them putting killer cops in jail for a long time. Not only did these videos lead to charges against cops but they showed the world the reality of police many interactions and how the escalation of force can and will result in the death of those accused of petty offenses. Filming the police, as the...
COVID-19 Passports, Step by Step
With reports that President Joe Biden’s administration is planning for imposing a vaccine passport mandate in America, expect to see in the media a deluge of vaccine passport propaganda. What will that propaganda look like? A template illustrating several elements you can expect to see in the propaganda push was provided several weeks ago in a CNN interview. In the first week of March, host Fareed Zakaria and his guest Arthur Caplan provided at CNN a textbook example of how to present vaccine passport propaganda to the American people. Let’s look at some of the major elements of the...
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