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FBI, DHS Flew Secret Surveillance Missions Over Albuquerque In Recent Months

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Photo Credit Flicker node worx
Photo Credit Flicker node worx

(ALBUQUERQUE)  Multiple surveillance aircraft equipped with high-tech thermal imaging cameras and “augmented reality” systems have been flying over Albuquerque since last fall, piloted by FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents.

KOB has confirmed at least two planes owned by the FBI through shell companies have flown multiple missions – sometimes for more than an hour at a time – over the city. A Buzzfeed News investigation shows even more planes have also flown over the city, though those could not be independently confirmed by KOB.

View Buzzfeed News’ map plotting the missions over Albuquerque embedded below or by clicking here.

PLANES ARE OFTEN COVERT, REGISTERED TO FBI SHELL COMPANIES

Part of the reason most of the flights could not be independently confirmed is the two planes found by KOB to have flown had no listed flight plans or records on websites that track flights.

They did, however, appear on live playback on the websiteFlightradar24 – with no identification, though the tail numbers could be found upon closer inspection. There were not any flight logs, however, even though most private and commercial flights provided such information.

KOB cross-referenced flight plans discovered by BuzzFeed News from mid-August 2015 through January of this year.

One plane, a Cessna T206H Turbo Stationair, flew at least 12 separate missions over Albuquerque from Nov. 3, 2015 to Jan. 21 of this year. Most of the flights appear to start and end from Double Eagle II Airport on Albuquerque’s northwest side.

The plane was outfitted with a FLIR thermal imaging camera and anaugmented reality system, which can overlay street data and other information on top of live video. The augmented reality system can also use high resolution satellite imagery to pinpoint buildings and locations.

The plane is registered to PSL Surveys, a company registered in Bristow, Virginia that an investigation by The Associated Press found to be a shell company used by the FBI. Its address is listed as a PO Box. Its FAA certificate was issued in Jan. 2011.

It was also seen flying circles over Aurora, Colorado in 2012.

A different plane, a Cessna 182T, flew in Albuquerque on Dec. 5 and 6 of last year. It was outfitted with the same thermal imaging camera and augmented reality system as the other plane.

That plane was registered to a different company The Associated Press found to also be a shell company for the FBI: Greenville, Delaware-based National Aircraft Leasing Corp. Its FAA certificate was issued in Dec. 2009.

FIRST SIGNS APPEARED LAST JUNE

The AP investigation, published in June of last year, found the FBI flew more than 100 times over major cities across the U.S. over a month-long period. At least 13 shell companies were found to have been used by the FBI to certify the planes.

Many of the planes have been registered since 2009, according to BuzzFeed News, which found the planes made more than 1,950 flights over the four-month period it studied.

Its study found primarily FBI aircraft were used over Albuquerque, but some DHS aircraft, which usually deals with drug and human trafficking, also flew over the city.

BuzzFeed News also found some of the FBI planes were equipped with exhaust mufflers and cellphone tracking devices that mimic cell towers, though the FBI told the organization that “is rarely done.”

FBI’S ALBUQUERQUE OFFICE MUM; ACLU SAYS SURVEILLANCE ‘CHILLING’

When asked about the surveillance aircrafts’ missions over Albuquerque, Frank Fisher, the spokesman for the FBI’s Albuquerque division said the program is “an investigative technique” the FBI “would prefer not to discuss at length.” He referred KOB to an FBI news release from last June about the program that was issued following the AP story.

That statement says the FBI “routinely uses aviation assets in support of predicated investigation targeting specific individuals and, when requested and appropriate, in support of state and local law enforcement.”

The statement says the program is not classified, but some aircraft are registered covertly “because overt registration would put our aircraft and operations at risk of compromise.”

The statement also says the aircraft “are not equipped, designed, or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance, and are not routinely equipped with cell site simulators,” and that cell site simulators can only be used “under exigent circumstances.”

Micah McCoy, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, called the surveillance concerning in a statement to KOB Friday.

“The routine aerial surveillance of our communities by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies should be deep concern to any American who values their privacy. It is especially chilling that the data reveals that law enforcement may be targeting communities based upon their religion or ethnicity.

“We need to impose rules, limits and regulations on aerial surveillance, both manned and unmanned, in order to preserve the privacy Americans have always expected and enjoyed,” McCoy wrote.

Though only two different aircraft have been independently confirmed to have surveilled Albuquerque, KOB is continuing to cross-reference flights from the time period with other possible surveillance aircraft identified as being used by the FBI or DHS.

We have also reached out to state and local law enforcement agencies to identify when they request FBI surveillance assistance, and are analyzing the dates the planes flew to identify any operations they were possibly involved in. We will keep you posted on any updates at KOB.com.


Mystery Solved! Box On Phoenix Utility Pole Belongs To ATF

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light pole
Photo Credit ABC Screen Grab

(PHOENIX)  The bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives came forward Thursday, admitting that a box spotted and removed from an SRP power pole on 21st and Glendale avenues belonged to them and was part of an ongoing investigation.

ATF officials would not elaborate on the investigation and would not say if they were conducting surveillance in the area.  

“I don’t feel safer,” said Brian Clegg, who called ABC15 about the box on the power pole behind his house.

Clegg was suspicious there could be cameras installed in the boxes but ATF would not confirm that.

“I feel that my privacy has been violated,” said Clegg. “It’s right behind my house.”

There are homes, a high school, an apartment complex and a strip mall in the area. The strip mall has a salon, pet grooming store, alterations business, ammunition store and a barber shop.

“It makes me feel like they’re up to something grimy,” said Kevin Moreno who is a manager at the barber shop.

SRP tells ABC15 they had no idea the box was installed on their power pole. They said ATF has to notify them or work with them if they have an object on their property.

ATF tells ABC15 depending on the investigation and security they can put security measures in place without permission.

They say in this case they “acted within their bounds” but would not elaborate.

NJ Transit Is Recording The Conversations Of ALL Riders, All The Time

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Photo Credit Jazz Guy Flickr
Photo Credit Jazz Guy Flickr

Casual commuter conversations on light rail trains have an unexpected eavesdropper — NJ Transit.

Video and audio surveillance systems designed to make riders more secure are also recording the conversations of light rail passengers at all times.

NJ Transit officials say the on-board cameras and audio surveillance systems are needed to fight crime and maintain security.

But does on-board surveillance go too far when the agency records everything passengers are saying, without telling customers how long they keep or who has access to the recordings?

Commuters generally don’t have a problem with video surveillance, since they’ve come to expect it for safety and security reasons in a post 9/11 world, said Len Resto, New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers president.

“People take it in stride,” Resto said of video recording. “The audio recording, people have a real problem with. A lot of conversations should be private.”

A possible compromise would be setting an audio recorder to turn on when the sound level reaches a certain volume, such as when someone screams, he suggested.

NJ Transit is completing the installation of interior audio and video surveillance systems on its light rail fleet, said spokesman Jim Smith. In the agency’s last commuter survey, riders gave security some of the highest rankings, however light rail riders indicated security could be improved.

“Passengers have repeatedly told the agency that security is a priority in the quarterly scorecard surveys of riders, Smith said. “The onboard surveillance systems are also a deterrent for crime and unruly behavior.”

But security has to be balanced with a person’s right to have a private conversation with the person next to them, critics said.

“You expect some privacy. You don’t have it if you are yelling across the car. If you’re sitting next to a person and talking to them and you don’t know there is a microphone picking up your conversation, our laws say you have a right to a private conversation,” said Ed Barocas, legal director of the state American Civil Liberties Union.

Surveillance equipment cost $750,000 to install on River Line trains and the $1.9 million expense to install them on Hudson-Bergen and Newark light rail trains is funded by a federal Homeland Security grant.

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First Came The Breathalyzer, Now Meet The Roadside Police “Textalyzer”

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Photo Credit Cellebrite
Photo Credit Cellebrite

(David Kravets)  We’re all familiar with the Breathalyzer, the brand name for a roadside device that measures a suspected drunken driver’s blood-alcohol level. It has been in use for decades. Now there’s a so-called “textalyzer” device to help the authorities determine whether someone involved in a motor vehicle accident was unlawfully driving while distracted.

The roadside technology is being developed by Cellebrite, the Israeli firm that many believe assistedthe Federal Bureau of Investigation in cracking the iPhone at the center of a heated decryption battle with Apple.

Under the first-of-its-kind legislation proposed in New York, drivers involved in accidents would have to submit their phone to roadside testing from a textalyzer to determine whether the driver was using a mobile phone ahead of a crash. In a bid to get around the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, the textalyzer allegedly would keep conversations, contacts, numbers, photos, and application data private. It will solely say whether the phone was in use prior to a motor-vehicle mishap. Further analysis, which might require a warrant, could be necessary to determine whether such usage was via hands-free dashboard technology and to confirm the original finding.

The legislation was prompted by intense lobbying from the group Distracted Operators Risk Casualties (DORCs). The son of its co-founder, Ben Lieberman, was killed in 2011 by a distracted driver in New York. The proposed law has been dubbed “Evan’s Law” in memory of 19-year-old Evan Lieberman.

“When people were held accountable for drunk driving, that’s when positive change occurred,” Lieberman said in a press release. “It’s time to recognize that distracted driving is a similar impairment, and should be dealt with in a similar fashion. This is a way to address people who are causing damage.”

Cellebrite already has roadside devices to scrape the contents of a phone, so this technology would just dial it back a bit. If the legislation passes, Cellebrite would have to bid on the project, as would other tech firms.

“Cellebrite has been leading the adoption of field mobile forensics solutions by law enforcement for years, culminating in the formal introduction of our UFED FIELD series product line a year ago,” Jim Grady, Cellebrite’s CEO, said in a statement. “We look forward to supporting DORCs and law enforcement–both in New York and nationally to curb distracted driving.”

The law, which is before the New York Senate Transportation Committee, would recast the motor-vehicle driving law to make it so that motorists give “implied consent” for “determining whether the operator of a motor vehicle was using a mobile telephone or portable electronic device at or near the time of the accident or collision, which provides the grounds for such testing. No such electronic scan shall include the content or origin of any communication, game conducted, image or electronic data viewed on a mobile telephone or a portable electronic device.”

Police will inform motorists involved in an accident that “the person’s license or permit to drive and any non-resident operating privilege shall be immediately suspended and subsequently revoked should the driver refuse to acquiesce to such field test.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each day in the US nine people die and more than 1,153 are injured because of distracted driving accidents. That’s roughly 20 percent of mishaps caused by distracted driving.

“The facts regarding distracted driving are startling,” said Republican New York Senator Terrence Murphy, who is one of the proposal’s backers.

The cause of the accident that killed Evan Lieberman was discovered after the Lieberman family subpoenaed the mobile phone records of the driver involved in the crash, which showed that the motorist was allegedly distracted while driving.

University Student To Face $200,000 Bill For “Racist” Facebook Post

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Photo Credit Flickr Mambembe Arts & Crafts
Photo Credit Flickr Mambembe Arts & Crafts

(QUEENSLAND)  A university student accused of racial discrimination over a Facebook post has amassed a hefty legal bill, which could blow out to $200,000 if the case goes to trial.

Alex Wood is being sued under the Racial Discrimination Act over a 2013 post he wrote after being asked to leave a Queensland University of Technology computer lab reserved for the use of Indigenous students.

“Just got kicked out of the unsigned Indigenous computer room. QUT is stopping segregation with segregation,” he posted on a Facebook page called QUT Stalker Space.

The post attracted comments critical of both the incident and the existence of the Indigenous-only space.

“I wonder where the white supremacist lab is,” wrote another student, Jackson Powell, who is also being sued.

The third student involved in the lawsuit, Calum Thwaites, has emphatically denied being responsible for a post that included a reference to “ITT N—–s” and has produced a volume of evidence supporting his denial.

The trio are being sued, alongside the university and two staff, by the administration officer who asked Mr Wood to leave the room, Cindy Prior.

An Indigenous woman, Ms Prior went on sick leave following the incident and reports she felt unsafe leaving her home because she was afraid somebody would say something offensive to her.

She also says she was unable to return to work in a role that required her to have face-to-face contact with white people.

Ms Prior is seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

Lawyers for the students have sought to have the case dismissed in the Federal Court, citing a lack of legal basis to contend their clients had breached the act and labelling the lawsuit an abuse of process.

Judge Michael Jarrett has reserved his decision.

It is understood the trio’s lawyers have spent several hundred hours defending the action.

A legal source told AAP the costs of defending the proceeding would have already run into tens of thousands of dollars for Mr Wood and could rise to about $200,000 if the case went to trial.

The cumulative bill for the students to defend the case at trial could be more than $500,000.

The trio have also hit out at QUT, claiming they were kept in the dark about Ms Prior’s complaint to the Human Rights Commission and, therefore, deprived of having the matter thrown out earlier.

Under the Racial Discrimination Act, complainants must go through a conciliation process before a Federal Court action can be launched and the Human Rights Commission says more than half of all section 18C cases have been resolved at that level.

But the students were not made aware of the complaint until days before a final conference with the commission, despite the matter having been underway for 12 months, and Mr Wood claims a QUT lawyer told him he did not need to attend.

QUT’s law firm, Minter Ellison, admits one of its solicitors told Mr Wood his presence was not required but denies she discouraged him from attending.

County Bans Sale Of Family’s $698,000 Off-Grid Land — And Refuses To Compensate

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MJS STCROIX_Murr cottage.jpg




(Daniel Jennings)  A Wisconsin family has had to appeal all the way to the United States Supreme Court to get permission to sell or build on property they have paid taxes on for decades.

The family, the Murrs, are trying to get fair compensation on a rural river-front property that government regulators say they cannot sell. The Murrs claim the land along the St. Croix River is valued at $698,000.

The family actually owns two pieces of land along the river: the vacant lot and an adjacent lot where a cabin resides. Although the family long has considered the two pieces of property separate – they pay separate property bills and have considered the vacant lot an investment property – authorities merged the two against the family’s wishes, and then said they could not split them, Watchdog.org reported.

St. Croix County collected taxes on the lots, separately, for years. The Murrs, in fact, say they paid $78,000more in property taxes than they should have if the county’s $40,000 assessment is correct.

New regulations in the mid-1970s limited construction along the river, but because the properties were bought in the 1960, they were grandfathered, the Leader-Telegram reported. If any other family had owned the plot of land, they could build on it. But because the same family owns both plots, the Murrs are limited in what they can do.

New county regulations that didn’t exist when the property initially was bought say that a plot of land must have one acre of buildable area in order to be sold or developed. The vacant lot is less than that.

The case may seem complicated but involves a simple question: Can the government combine two adjacent lots against a family’s wishes, and then prevent them from selling one of them?

The Supreme Court will hear the case this fall. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) is representing the family.

“In short, when [the vacant lot] was created in 1959, and purchased in 1963, it was of sufficient size, width, and zoning to allow development of a single family house. Indeed, that is the use allowed for all the parcels within the St. Croix Cove Subdivision. However, because of the restrictions that came into place … the parcel was now defined as ‘substandard,’” PLF attorneys wrote in a petition to the Supreme Court.

John M. Groen, the principal attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, said that “everyone who values property rights should welcome the court’s decision to hear this important case,”

“This litigation asks whether government can get away with telling property owners, in essence, ‘The more land you own, the less we’ll allow you to use,’” Groen said. “We’re challenging a practice that is all too common among land use regulators, where they tell a landowner she can’t use her property, based on the excuse that she also happens to own a neighboring parcel.

“In other words, bureaucrats will treat two, legally distinct parcels, as if they were one unified parcel, so they can prohibit all development on one of the parcels without providing compensation as required by the Fifth Amendment,” Groen added.  “As we will argue to the Supreme Court, this kind of regulatory sleight of hand cannot be permitted if the Constitution’s Takings Clause is to be respected.”

The takings clause is the portion of the Fifth Amendment that states: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The Foundation is arguing that St. Croix County and the state violated the clause by merging the lots and then by not offering just compensation.

Who do you support – the county or the Murrs? Share your views in the section below:

NSA Is So Overwhelmed With Data, It’s No Longer Effective, Says Whistleblower

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NSA-Google




(NEW YORK)  A former National Security Agency official turned whistleblower has spent almost a decade and a half in civilian life. And he says he’s still “pissed” by what he’s seen leak in the past two years.

In a lunch meeting hosted by Contrast Security founder Jeff Williams on Wednesday, William Binney, a former NSA official who spent more than three decades at the agency, said the US government’s mass surveillance programs have become so engorged with data that they are no longer effective, losing vital intelligence in the fray.

That, he said, can — and has — led to terrorist attacks succeeding.

Binney said that an analyst today can run one simple query across the NSA’s various databases, only to become immediately overloaded with information. With about four billion people — around two-thirds of the world’s population — under the NSA and partner agencies’ watchful eyes, according to his estimates, there is too much data being collected.

“That’s why they couldn’t stop the Boston bombing, or the Paris shootings, because the data was all there,” said Binney. Because the agency isn’t carefully and methodically setting its tools up for smart data collection, that leaves analysts to search for a needle in a haystack.

“The data was all there… the NSA is great at going back over it forensically for years to see what they were doing before that,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop it.”

Binney called this a “bulk data failure” — in that the NSA programs, leaked by Edward Snowden, are collecting too much for the agency to process. He said the problem runs deeper across law enforcement and other federal agencies, like the FBI, the CIA, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which all have access to NSA intelligence.

Binney left the NSA a month after the September 11 attacks in New York City in 2001, days after controversial counter-terrorism legislation was enacted — the Patriot Act — in the wake of the attacks. Binney stands jaded by his experience leaving the shadowy eavesdropping agency, but impassioned for the job he once had. He left after a program he helped develop was scrapped three weeks prior to September 11, replaced by a system he said was more expensive and more intrusive. Snowden said he was inspired by Binney’s case, which in part inspired him to leak thousands of classified documents to journalists.
Since then, the NSA has ramped up its intelligence gathering mission to indiscriminately “collect it all.”

Binney said the NSA is today not as interested in phone records — such as who calls whom, when, and for how long. Although the Obama administration calls the program a “critical national security tool,” the agency is increasingly looking at the content of communications, as the Snowden disclosures have shown.

Binney said he estimated that a “maximum” of 72 companies were participating in the bulk records collection program —including Verizon, but said it was a drop in the ocean. He also called PRISM, the clandestine surveillance program that grabs data from nine named Silicon Valley giants, including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, just a “minor part” of the data collection process.

“The Upstream program is where the vast bulk of the information was being collected,” said Binney, talking about how the NSA tapped undersea fiber optic cables. With help from its British counterparts at GCHQ, the NSA is able to “buffer” more than 21 petabytes a day.

Binney said the “collect it all” mantra now may be the norm, but it’s expensive and ineffective.

“If you have to collect everything, there’s an ever increasing need for more and more budget,” he said. “That means you can build your empire.”

They say you never leave the intelligence community. Once you’re a spy, you’re always a spy — it’s a job for life, with few exceptions. One of those is blowing the whistle, which he did. Since then, he has spent his retirement lobbying for change and reform in industry and in Congress.

“They’re taking away half of the constitution in secret,” said Binney. “If they want to change the constitution, there’s a way to do that — and it’s in the constitution.”

An NSA spokesperson did not immediately comment.


Supreme Court To Rule On Warrantless Sobriety Tests

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Photo Credit Envios
Photo Credit Envios



()  May citizens legally refuse to take a chemical sobriety test when stopped by the police?

This is the question to be decided by the Supreme Court in a trio of cases — Birchfield v. North Dakota, Beylund v. Levi, and Bernard v. Minnesota — that have been consolidated.

Precisely, the high court will rule on the following issue of Fourth Amendment interpretation: “Whether, in the absence of a warrant, a State may make it a crime for a person to refuse to take a chemical test to detect the presence of alcohol in the person’s blood.”

Some states have enacted laws allowing criminal charges to be filed against anyone who refuses to submit to this type of sobriety test. Others, however, disagree, considering such compulsion to violate the right to be free from searches and seizures without a warrant.

Reason magazine reported on the pending cases, pointing out the distinct views of the scope of the Fourth Amendment:

The arrested parties in these cases offer a different view. Danny Birchfield, for example, is a North Dakota man arrested on suspicion of drunk driving who refused to submit to a warrantless chemical test. He was charged for his refusal and sentenced under the refusal statute. Birchfield maintains that the state law imposed an unconstitutional condition upon him, forcing him to either sacrifice his constitutional right to be free from a warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment or else face criminal sanctions. Birchfield and his lawyers therefore urge the Supreme Court to reject “the extraordinary proposition that persons may be subjected to criminal penalties for asserting their constitutional right to resist a search that is not supported by a warrant or an exception to the warrant requirement.”

In another analysis of the case published by Learn Liberty, a blog managed by the Institute for Humane Studies, their shot at constitutional scholarship fell well wide of the mark.

Learn Liberty summed up the issue before the court this way: “The question, then, would be: where do we draw the line between citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights and the rights of the government to conduct warrantless searches?”

Constitutionalists will instantly notice the error in that assessment.

Governments do not have any rights at all. In fact, even the powers exercised by government are given by people, who in order to establish justice, provisionally endow government with a part of their natural sovereignty.

People are possessed of rights as an inheritance from their Creator. He alone gives rights and He alone may revoke them. Government is the creature, not the creator.

The defendants in these three cases each attack their subjection to these warrantless chemical sobriety tests in different ways, although each insists that the exceptions to the rule requiring warrants for searches and seizures are not applicable in these cases.

As explained in the Reason article regarding the Bernard v. Minnesota case,

As Bernard and his lawyers point out, the classic justifications for the search incident to arrest doctrine center on officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence. This stems from the idea that the police need to secure the scene for weapons and evidence and can’t always wait around safely for a warrant before doing so. “Because a breath test is not administered to further officer safety or to preserve evidence,” Bernard and his lawyers point out, “it is not a valid search incident to arrest.”

In other words, it has been argued that the police should be able to search and seize evidence without a warrant if there is a reasonable belief that the evidence would be compromised or the police would be in danger. In these cases, those procedural hurdles were not cleared by the states whose statutes are being challenged.

There are two other considerations at work here that went unmentioned in both the Learn Liberty and Reason articles.

First, Thomas Jefferson had something to say in the matter. In 1804, he wrote that giving the Supreme Court power to declare unconstitutional the acts of the legislature or executive “would make the judiciary a despotic branch.” He noted that “nothing in the Constitution” gives the Supreme Court that right.

In this Mexican standoff of states, Supreme Court, and federal government, the last man standing is the people acting in their collective political capacity as states.

Abraham Lincoln recognized the lack of constitutional authority for the Supreme Court’s assumption of the role of ultimate arbiter of an act’s conformity with the Constitution. Lincoln said that if the Supreme Court were afforded the power to declare whether an act of the federal government was constitutional, “the people will have ceased to be their own masters, having to that extent resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

In his 1887 book The Constitutional Law of the United States of America, renowned German-American constitutional scholar Hermann Von Holst explained the error in accepting the Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of constitutional fidelity.

“Moreover, violations of the Constitution may happen and the injured cannot, whether states or individuals, obtain justice through the court. Where the wrongs suffered are political in origin the remedies must be sought in a political way,” he wrote.

He continued, regarding this “aristocracy of the robe,” “That our national government, in any branch of it, is beyond the reach of the people; or has any sort of ‘supremacy’ except a limited measure of power granted by the supreme people is an error.”

How can anyone read these statements and honestly conclude that any branch of the federal government is intended to be the surveyor of the boundaries of its own power?

Every department of the federal government was created by the Constitution — therefore, by the states — and has no natural sovereignty. No branch can define its own authority. Such a thought is ridiculous and contrary to any theory of popular sovereignty ever proposed. If courts, Congress, or presidents had such power, it would make them judge, jury, and executioner in every case in which their own act exceeding constitutional authority is at bar.

Aristocracy is not exactly the name of the form of government created by judges usurping authority. Technically such a scheme is called kritarchy, from a Greek word meaning “rule by judges.” This includes both those societies where such an establishment is approved by the people, and those where judges are not constitutionally empowered to exercise legislative and executive powers, but act in those areas nonetheless, such as the United States of America.

We seem every year to be running headlong toward inclusion in the list of contemporary kritarchies, which includes, among others, Somalia.

Next is the historical analysis.

While Americans should be concerned with consolidation of immense power in the hands of eight unaccountable, unelected judges, the historical fact is that our Founders intended to shield the citizens of their new union from deprivations of the fundamental right to be free from warrantless general writs.

The Founders abhorred this practice, believing that “papers are often the dearest property a man can have” and that permitting the government to “sweep away all papers whatsoever,” without any legal justification, “would destroy all the comforts of society.”

In 1776, George Mason, the principal author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights — a document of profound influence on the construction of the federal Bill of Rights — upheld the right to be free from such searches, as well: “That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offence [sic] is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive, and ought not to be granted.”

Thus, the Fourth Amendment: “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.”

The rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment are under nearly constant assault by the forces of the federal government. From NSA surveillance to IRS use of tax records as a political tool to the practice being considered by the cases currently pending before the Supreme Court regarding the criminalization of refusal to submit to warrantless chemical sobriety tests, Americans are now denied the protections our Founders held so dear.

The undeniable truth is that not a single one of our Founding Fathers, not even the most ardent advocate of a powerful central government, would have remained even one day at the Philadelphia Convention if he had believed that the government they were creating would become the instrument of tyranny that it has become.

Finally, the cases whose oral arguments were heard before the eight justices on April 20 — Birchfield v. North Dakota, Beylund v. Levi, and Bernard v. Minnesota — will be regarded as bellwethers of the increasingly invasive practices of the police, in addition to the Fourth Amendment focus being given by most news and legal outlets.

Illinois School District Installs Fingerprint Scanners In School Cafeterias

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Photo Credit Kevin Dooley
Photo Credit Kevin Dooley



(Victor Skinner)  Students and faculty at Harrison Street Elementary School just love the new thumbprint scanner in the school’s lunch line, but civil rights experts are warning parents about serious privacy concerns with the technology.

The Geneva Unit District 304 replaced a different biometric scanner system for school lunch lines this year with devices from a local company, PushCoin Inc., that read students’ thumb prints to track their accounts, the Daily Herald reports.

“It’s good, because you don’t have to carry your own money or anything like that,” fifth-grader Quinlan Bobeczko told the news site. “It’s just there. Your thumb is easy, because you just have to put your thumb on (the device).”

Officials in several area school districts are watching District 304 in hopes of installing similar devices in their schools.

East Maine Elementary District 63 spokeswoman Janet Bishop said the district hired PushCoin Inc. this spring to begin offering the thumb scan option this month, and Lake Zurich Unit District 95 board president Doug Goldberg said schools there will implement the biometric scanners in the 2016-17 school year, the Daily Herald reports.

“I will tell you that many of the kids aren’t very good about keeping track of their ID cards,” Goldberg said. “And so moving to biometrics was felt to be sort of the next generation of that individual, unique ID. We’ll record their thumbprints, there will be thumbprint readers at all the cash registers, and they’ll simply come by and — bang — hit their thumbprint. It makes it faster and, also, there’s a lot less opportunity for any kind of misuse or fraud when they’re using biometrics.”

PushCoin Inc. allows parents to closely monitor their children’s lunch accounts through email updates, and the company’s CEO, Anna Lisznianski contends the scanners can help school officials use lunch time more efficiently.

“With more busy parents relying on schools to provide meals to their children, more and more schools seek a balanced solution to crowded cafeterias,” she said.

The thumb scanners are not a new technology, but an increasing number of schools seem to be embracing it and other biometric technology to streamline lunch lines by eliminating lost lunch cards and reminding parents about past due accounts ahead of time.

EAGnews documented numerous school districts across the country that have implemented biometric technology in recent years – from thumb, finger and iris scanners for school lunch accounts to schools using facial recognition to track students on campus and online –as well as lawmakers and experts warning against the practice.

Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the ACLU-Chicago, told the Daily Herald that lunch line thumb scanners and other biometric data collection in schools sends the wrong message to students about protecting their privacy.

“I think it undermines the notion of really thinking about the importance of your biometrics as a matter of privacy,” Yohnka said. “I think in this age, when so much is available and so much is accessible online about us and there is all this information that floats out there, to begin to include in this one’s biometrics, it really does raise some legitimate concerns.”

Local law enforcement officials, for example, could subpoena fingerprints from a vendor like PushCoin to track down student criminals, he said. Other child psychology experts echoed Yohnka’s privacy concerns.

“At some point, Big Brother is going to have a lot of information on us and where is that going to go?” University of Washington psychology professor Laura Kastner told the Daily Herald. “And that’s just for parents to consider. But from a kid point of view, they have no idea what they’re giving up and, once again, the slippery slope in what’s called habituation.”

“We’re getting so used to giving up data about ourselves,” she said.

Officials told the news site that the vast majority of the roughly 6,000 students in District 304 use the thumb scanner, and they’ve received no complaints from parents.

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