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Posts Tagged ‘patriot act’
REAL ID is Tyrannical … Authored By The Same Author of The Patriot Act!
Posted by M. C. on April 15, 2025
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: patriot act, REAL ID | Leave a Comment »
Happy Patriot Act Anniversary!Oh… nevermind.
Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2024
Email Update
The US PATRIOT Act wasn’t just a mistake; it was a turning point in the relentless erosion of privacy. It institutionalized mass surveillance, shredding the Fourth Amendment in the US and fundamentally altering our lives.
It was sold to us as a temporary measure. But it became a permanent feature of our world, that had global implications.
Today marks the anniversary of the Patriot Act’s passage, and all week NBTV has been leading a major push for surveillance awareness. We released seven new videos: interviews with privacy advocates from all walks of life, and sketches exposing the intrusive surveillance that has become disturbingly normal. This week, I also spoke at Saintcon in Utah to inspire others to join us in this fight for privacy.
Because we can’t afford to stay silent.
The truth is, privacy is disappearing fast.
Corporations, malicious actors, and governments are all working to undermine it.
– Surveillance capabilities double every two years, keeping pace with Moore’s law.
– AI makes data collection easier than ever by aggregating disparate data sets and drawing ever more inferences from the patterns that are revealed.
– Year after year, new legislation is introduced to try to ban end-to-end encryption and force backdoors into every app we use.
But privacy tools aren’t keeping up.
We also face a troubling cultural shift: people insisting they “have nothing to hide” and dismissing the value of privacy entirely. This dangerous mindset is hurting us all.
Developers don’t feel a sense of urgency to build privacy tools because the public isn’t demanding them.
Some developers even fear working on privacy tools—being told “only criminals need privacy.”
And too few people are showing up to fight against bad legislation, because we’re not treating this threat with the seriousness it demands.
We have to change that.
When people tell us they have nothing to hide, we must show them why privacy matters.
This fight isn’t about secrecy—it’s about choice. Even if you don’t think you need privacy today, many people do. For activists, journalists, dissidents, protestors, whistleblowers, and anyone who doesn’t fit mainstream norms, privacy can mean life or death.
We fight for privacy so that the most vulnerable people in our society still have that choice, in a world where this option is rapidly vanishing. We fight to protect this right for our children and grandchildren so they, too, can choose privacy—whether they need it today or not.
Right now, we are dangerously close to losing this choice forever.
The tools needed to protect privacy aren’t advancing fast enough to keep up with the forces working to dismantle it.
I need your help.
We are at a tipping point. This erosion of privacy is not a distant threat—it’s happening now. Together, we can create a future where privacy is not a luxury for the few but a right for all. A future where you don’t need to conform to society’s expectations just to feel safe.
Let’s make sure tech and privacy can coexist freely—for everyone.
Please join me in Accelerating Privacy.
Being a privacy accelerationist means taking action now to ensure privacy tools don’t just survive—they thrive.
It means getting these tools into as many hands as possible, so everyone—no matter their income or technical skill—has access to privacy.
It means fighting back against bad laws designed to strip us of privacy, and ensuring the choice to protect yourself remains available to all.
It also means pushing back against the cultural shift that paints privacy as suspicious. We need to reverse the normalization of surveillance and remind people that privacy isn’t just good—it’s essential for a free society.
Privacy accelerationists know that we can no longer afford to wait for people to wake up to what’s at stake. We must act now to protect the tools and rights we’ll need tomorrow.
Please, lean into this fight with us today.
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Killary starts a new phase of systemic repression
Posted by M. C. on September 24, 2024
It is always the repressor who decides the reason for the repression. Always.
In other words, it was with Hillary and the Democratic Party, and then with the Patriot Act under Bush jr, that the U.S. lost freedom of the press, privacy and freedom of opposition, opening the door to torture and mass surveillance, all of these policies backed by the “fight against terror”. 9/11 worked as a form of power legitimation through victimization.
To prevent this, the strategy is still and always based on demonizing and isolating Russia. The intercontinental connection between Europe, Asia and Africa must be prevented. Faced with the inability and impossibility of characterizing everything as “Kremlin propaganda” when the facts don’t fit the official narrative, Hillary is now proposing a new phase in mind control.
Hillary Clinton, in a tête a tête with Rachel Maddow (Rachel One-to-One program on MSNBC), who is herself the queen of Russophobic propagandists and the main mainstream propagator of the infamous “Russiagate”, defend the lift of criminal charges against Americans who spread Russian “disinformation”.
Hillary Clinton herself bears enormous responsibility for disinformation, it must be said, since it was in her personal circle that “Russiagate”, and a whole strategy of demonizing Russia with the aim of separating the EU from this Eurasian power, were projected. Although it wasn’t so transparent at the time, this strategy of accusing the Russian Federation of wanting to “interfere” in Western democracies – as if the U.S. wasn’t the monopolist power of “democratic” interventionism – already represented the result of what we can call the ideological political “new normal”: the “normal” in which the parties of the center unite into a single monolithic and cohesive mass of principles, values and objectives. At the time, the Democratic Party already represented Wall Street and the entire military-industrial complex, as did the most fervent neocons, who many people thought were only in the Republican Party.
The support from people like Dick Cheney, accompanied by the massive support of 238 neocons, former George W. Bush “staffers”, McCain and Mitt Romney, referring to Kamala Harris as the “savior of democracy”, clearly demonstrates the reach of the Democratic Party among the ruling class. Don’t be fooled, for these people, many of them genocidal of the worst kind, responsible for crimes like the “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, responsible for eternal wars like the one in Afghanistan, it’s not about “saving democracy”! It’s about pursuing the plan to regain world hegemony. With everything that this recovery might mean. Trump, for now, is threatening this project by turning inwards. We’ll see what he does when he realizes that nothing, he can do, will stop the loss of U.S. dominance in the world.
If anyone is to blame for the escalation that is destroying the West, it is Hillary Clinton. During the reign of her husband (Bill Clinton), between saxophones and adultery, the Democratic Party not only sold out to Wall Street, starting a process in which, over time, it began to collect as many corporate donations (PACS) as the Republican Party, demonstrating the game played by most corporations on both boards. The truth of today is that the Democratic party collects individual donations from the most important billionaires, like Michael Bloomberg and many others. No longer is the Democratic Party a Worker’s party.
The role of the Democratic Party as an instrument of anti-democratic domination suddenly came to the fore during the Clinton era, as when, in 1996, it destroyed, through the Telecommunications Act, Roosevelt’s regulations about the media sector, which prevented what happened later and what we see today: the concentration of the mainstream media in a handful of large conglomerates that cartelize and create a common narrative. All under the banner of the “liberalization of media markets”, which wiped out the smaller operators, accused of having “local monopolies”. Deregulation ended with the domination of the media by half a dozen large conglomerates.
In other words, it was with Hillary and the Democratic Party, and then with the Patriot Act under Bush jr, that the U.S. lost freedom of the press, privacy and freedom of opposition, opening the door to torture and mass surveillance, all of these policies backed by the “fight against terror”. 9/11 worked as a form of power legitimation through victimization.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Hillary, patriot act, Russiagate, systemic repression | Leave a Comment »
Speaker Mike Johnson Continues the GOP’s War against Freedom
Posted by M. C. on April 26, 2024
Thomas Woods has reminded us more than once that “no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.”
The fact that the average GOP activist still hasn’t caught on to the grift can be seen in the fact that they still refer to people like Johnson as “rinos.” That is, “Republicans in name only.” Anyone who uses the term is advertising that he or she still hasn’t figured out that Republicans like Johnson, McConnell, McCarthy, and the usual beltway type are, in fact, quintessential Republicans.
https://mises.org/power-market/speaker-mike-johnson-continues-gops-war-against-freedom
Thomas Woods has reminded us more than once that “no matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.” It’s not strictly and always true, of course, but the evidence is clear that it’s often true. The latest example is the GOP’s speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) who has turned out more or less exactly like us skeptics have predicted. Johnson is a friend to the war party, a do-nothing on issues important to the rank and file (like immigration), and a true enemy of the people on issues like warrantless spying.
In recent weeks, Johnson has increasingly doubled down on supporting Washington’s foreign policy blob, and insists on spending at least a hundred billions dollars—dollars the Treasury doesn’t have and the Fed will have to print—on propping up the Ukraine regime. This regime, which Johnson tells us is essential in the battle for “democracy”—whatever that means—has abolished elections, ended the freedom of speech, and even destroyed the basic freedom of exercising one’s religion.
But none of that matters because someone at the FBI told Johnson he must keep spending taxpayer dollars on Ukraine while courting World War III. Johnson—ignoring his constituents as most members of Congress do—has assured the agents of the garrison state that he will help them. Perhaps Johnson’s biggest crime is his ongoing support for a new and vast expansion of the American police state. Johnson now supports securing greater prerogatives for America’s spy agencies who seek to spy on American citizens without warrants indefinitely.
[Read More: “FISA Exchanges Real Liberty for Phantom Security“ by Ron Paul.]
This is obviously contrary to basic human rights (i.e., property rights), but Johnson certainly doesn’t care. After all, he told us that there are bad guys out there in the world, and that means the Bill of Rights goes right out the window.
The current drive to expand spy agencies’ power is no minor affair, and at the joint Mises Institute-Ron Paul Institute event in Houston last weekend, Daniel McAdams suggested that the GOP’s current effort to expand spy powers is even worse than the Patriot Act.
Yet, for anyone who has been around the game very long, he won’t be surprised to note that among the greatest champions of expanding unconstitutional state police powers right now is the GOP leadership. This, of course, is how it was in the early days of the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and their acolytes were on TV daily assuring us that Americans who insist on privacy and human rights are “with the terrorists.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Freedom, John McCain, Mike Johnson, patriot act | Leave a Comment »
Congress’ ‘Gift’ to America This Christmas
Posted by M. C. on December 28, 2023
So rather than debating whether we want a government more like East Germany than the one our Founders imagined, Section 702 was tossed into the military spending bill.
Considering that Speaker Johnson tossed into the “must-pass” bill yet another extension of Section702 of the FISA Act, it’s unsurprising that he wanted to rush the bill through without the possibility of amendment. Section 702 allows the government to intercept and retain without a warrant the communications of any American who is in contact with a non-US citizen.
https://mises.org/power-market/congress-gift-america-christmas
Just before leaving town for Christmas break, the US House gave Americans a last-minute holiday gift: a nearly trillion dollar military spending bill filled with lots of goodies for the special interests and the military-industrial complex. Unfortunately, the rest of America got nothing but coal in its stockings.
With Constitutionalists like Rep. Thomas Massie on the House Rules Committee, Speaker Johnson made the unusual move of bringing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) under suspension of the rules, which bypasses the Rules Committee but requires two-thirds of the House to pass the bill.
Considering that Speaker Johnson tossed into the “must-pass” bill yet another extension of Section702 of the FISA Act, it’s unsurprising that he wanted to rush the bill through without the possibility of amendment. Section 702 allows the government to intercept and retain without a warrant the communications of any American who is in contact with a non-US citizen. It is clearly a violation of the Fourth Amendment which is supposed to protect Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Section 702 was “legalized” under President George W. Bush during the “War on Terror” after it was revealed that Bush was using the National Security Agency to illegally spy on Americans. We were told at the time that government must be granted these authorities because we were under threat from terrorists. It would just be a temporary measure, we were promised, and then the authority would expire. That was fifteen years ago and here we are re-authorizing the government to continue to violate our liberties.
As with the rest of the violations of our civil liberties after 9/11, like the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, the federal government soon turned its terrorism-fighting tools inward, targeting Americans rather than foreigners who we were told wanted to harm Americans. That’s why the FBI’s so-called domestic terrorism watchlist continues to expand to include Christians and those skeptical of big government.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: FISA Act, Homeland Security, Military Spending, patriot act, Section 702, Speaker Johnson, tsa | Leave a Comment »
Enslaving The World To Stop Chinese Tyranny: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Posted by M. C. on April 3, 2023
In the year 2023 there’s really no excuse for ordinary Americans to believe any politician is on their side in either major party. The very best of them will only once in a while do the bare-minimum not-evil thing. Don’t make heroes of these scumbags. They’re not your friends.
Trump should have stuck to just doing legal things like assassinating foreign leaders, deliberately starving civilians, imprisoning journalists, and dropping military explosives on foreign nations.
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If you’re just tuning in, US dollar hegemony and diplomatic dominance are rapidly eroding while the US and its allies accelerate aggressions and provocations against Russia and China simultaneously in a desperate bid to quash the emergence of a multipolar world. I’m a bit less excited about the mounting threats posed to US hegemony than other anti-imperialists, only because a desperate unipolarist empire is a dangerous unipolarist empire. The deadliest time for a battered wife is right when she leaves.
A cornered animal is dangerous, especially when it has sharp teeth. A cornered empire is dangerous, especially when it has nuclear weapons. “If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a partner or to a planet.
Abuse victims need to escape, but we may also be heading into the most perilous moment in all of history.
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“If you don’t like TikTok or Facebook or YouTube, don’t use them. But don’t think any interpretation of the Constitution gives you the right to ban them,” Sen. Paul said, breaking from his GOP colleagues on a measure that would prohibit use of the app. https://t.co/sMNM2wLIxp11:10 PM ∙ Mar 29, 20232,549Likes824Retweets
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It’s so crazy that the immensely authoritarian RESTRICT Act is getting shoved through on a tidal wave of consent that’s based on literally nothing besides people’s fuzzbrained artificially-manufactured hysteria about China.
Consent for the PATRIOT Act was manufactured by planes crashing into American skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. Consent for the RESTRICT Act was manufactured by a few right wing pundits stoking a dopey moral panic about an app where kids post dancing videos.
It just says so much about the lies the west tells about itself and its values that the second any social media service becomes widely used you see the entire US security state converge upon it and demand control over it.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Chinese Tyranny, dollar hegemony, Enslave, patriot act, Restrict Act | Leave a Comment »
The Restrict Act Is The Patriot Act on Steroids
Posted by M. C. on March 29, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: patriot act, Restrict Act, steroids | Leave a Comment »
The Patriot Act on steroids: D.C. Uniparty wants to use anti-TikTok legislation as Trojan horse for censorship and surveillance
Posted by M. C. on March 29, 2023
Beltway lawmakers are setting up a smokescreen to curtail rights.
Unfortunately, the ongoing TikTok hearings in D.C. have very little to do with protecting the rights of Americans from potential Chinese Communist Party data harvesting, and lots to do with protecting the Uniparty’s dominance over the communications and surveillance space.
TikTok is indeed a pestilence upon our society.
But there are right ways to go about minimizing this “digital opium” and its impact on our lives, and other means that will allow the American government to leverage the situation to further curtail our individual rights.
And unsurprisingly, the latter idea is making lawmakers in the beltway beyond giddy this week.
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TikTok is indeed a pestilence upon our society.
But there are right ways to go about minimizing this “digital opium” and its impact on our lives, and other means that will allow the American government to leverage the situation to further curtail our individual rights.
And unsurprisingly, the latter idea is making lawmakers in the beltway beyond giddy this week.
The Dossier is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribe
The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act (S.686), which was introduced in the Senate earlier this month, would do much more than just ban TikTok.
This bill is no mere “TikTok ban,” it is a mechanism for a massive, sweeping surveillance and censorship overhaul.
The RESTRICT Act goes far, far beyond potentially banning TikTok. It gives the government virtual unchecked authority over the U.S. communications infrastructure. The incredibly broad language includes the ability to “enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk” to “national security” today and in any “potential future transaction.”
The Senate legislation currently has 19 cosponsors, all of whom are Uniparty members in good standing. It is fully “bipartisan,” consisting of 9 democrats and 10 republicans.
Darin Feinstein @DarinFeinstein
TikTok is bad, but the Restrict Act could be worse “To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain TRANSACTIONS between persons in the USA and foreign adversaries, AND for other purposes(?)” Overly Broad Language = Future Abuse congress.gov/bill/118th-con…
Timcast’s Ian Crossland fittingly described the legislation as The Patriot Act for technology.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: censorship, patriot act, Restrict Act, steroids, Surveillance, TikTok | Leave a Comment »
The FBI and Personal Liberty – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on January 19, 2023
The FBI admission that it uses the CIA and the NSA to spy for it came in the form of a 906-page FBI rulebook written during the Trump administration, disseminated to federal agents in 2021 and made known to Congress last week.
Needless to say, the CIA and the NSA cannot be pleased. The CIA charter prohibits its employees from engaging in domestic surveillance and law enforcement. Yet, we know the CIA is present physically or virtually in all of the 50 U.S. statehouses.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/01/andrew-p-napolitano/the-fbi-and-personal-liberty/
Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the “wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies.
Those of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been warning for a generation that government spying is rampant in the U.S., and the feds regularly engage in it as part of law enforcement’s well-known antipathy to the Fourth Amendment. Last week, the FBI admitted as much.
Here is the backstory.
After President Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Congress investigated his abuse of the FBI and CIA as domestic spying agencies. Some of the spying was on political dissenters and some on political opponents. None of it was lawful.
What is lawful spying? The modern Supreme Court has made it clear that domestic spying is a “search” and the acquisition of data from a search is a “seizure” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires a warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime presented under oath to the judge for a search or seizure to be lawful. The amendment also requires that all search warrants specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized.
The language in the Fourth Amendment is the most precise in the Constitution because of the colonial disgust with British general warrants. A general warrant was issued to British agents by a secret court in London. General warrants did not require probable cause, only “governmental needs.” That, of course, was no standard whatsoever, as whatever the government wants it will claim that it needs.
General warrants, as well, did not specify what was to be searched or seized. Rather, they authorized government agents to search wherever they wished and to seize whatever they found; stated differently, to engage in fishing expeditions.
When Congress learned of Nixon’s excesses, it enacted FISA, which required that all domestic spying be authorized by the new and secret FISA Court. Congress then lowered the probable cause of crime standard for the FISA Court to probable cause of being a foreign agent, and it permitted the FISA Court to issue general warrants.
How can Congress, which is itself a creature of the Constitution, change standards established by the Constitution? Answer: It cannot legally or constitutionally do so. But it did so nevertheless.
Yet, the FISA compromise that was engineered in order to attract congressional votes was the wall. The wall consisted of regulatory language reflecting that whatever data was acquired from surveillance conducted pursuant to a FISA warrant could not be shared with law enforcement.
So, if a janitor in the Russian embassy was really a KGB agent who was distributing illegal drugs as lures to get Americans to spy for him, and all this was learned via a FISA warrant that authorized listening to phone calls from the embassy, the telephonic evidence of his drug dealing could not be given to the FBI.
The purpose of the wall was not to protect foreign agents from domestic criminal prosecutions; it was to prevent American law enforcement from violating personal privacy by spying on Americans without search warrants.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: CIA, Constitution, FBI Informant, NSA, patriot act, personal liberty | Leave a Comment »
The Covid Stimulus Isn’t Like Other Stimulus. It’s Much Bigger. | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on August 27, 2021
The US was running budget surpluses in the late forties and through much of the fifties. Americans were young, and there were far more workers producing than collecting government Social Security welfare checks.
Those days are gone, and although American workers continue to be highly productive, the burden each worker must bear to pay for the elderly and the unproductive continues to grow.
What we have now is a country heavily dependent on ever-larger amounts of government spending and monetary expansion.
https://mises.org/wire/covid-stimulus-isnt-other-stimulus-its-much-bigger
When it comes to policy debates, it’s now pretty clear that if you’d like to sound very quaint and old fashioned, be sure to express some concerns over the size of the federal budget and deficit spending.
Such concerns are now taken about as seriously by the average politician in Washington as is the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act. Virtually no one cares.
Admittedly, the lack of interest in spending was already largely in place before the covid crisis began. During the Trump administration, reckless federal spending was the norm, and inflation-adjusted federal spending surged even past spending in 2009, when the federal government was panicking over the financial crisis and the Great Recession. In other words, the Trump administration gave us crisis-level spending when there wasn’t even a crisis.
Not surprisingly, deficit spending was also remarkably high under Trump—precovid—as well. By 2019, Trump had signed off on a trillion-dollar deficit, something many thought to be outlandish during a nonrecessionary period before that.
But those numbers—including the numbers from the Great Recession bailout years—all look modest compared to the surge in spending that occurred with the covid panic of 2020 and 2021.
Let’s compare spending in the two periods. For example, from 2019 to 2020, federal spending rose 54 percent—from $4.5 trillion to $6.5 trillion, respectively—as Congress and the White House poured money into bailouts and stimulus. On the other hand, in the wake of the financial crisis, from 2008 to 2009, spending “only” increased 14 percent, from $3.6 trillion to $4.2 trillion.
On a per capita basis, the numbers were similar. Per capital federal spending rose 13 percent from 2008 to 2009, rising from $12,000 to $13,700 for each American. But from 2019 to 2020, per capita spending rose 44 percent, from $13,600 to $19,700. (These numbers are all in constant 2020 dollars.)
Spending Levels Similar to World War II
At this point, defenders of runaway spending will often suggest that what really matters is spending compared to gross domestic product (GDP).
So let’s look at that measure. In 2020, federal outlays as a percentage of the nation’s GDP surged to 31 percent, the highest number seen since 1945.
Similarly, the federal deficit as a percentage of GDP surged to nearly 15 percent in 2020. Again, this is the highest number seen of this measure since 1945.
(Proportional comparisons of this sort tend to understate the extent to which debt and spending is growing compared to the overall GDP. This is because government spending is itself a component of GDP, and since GDP is measured in dollars, monetary expansion—even without true growth in economic activity—can fuel GDP expansion as well.)
Also of political significance is the fact that while federal spending was taking off over the past eighteen months, growth in state and local spending nearly flatlined, dropping to 0.38 percent growth over the previous year. That’s the lowest growth rate in state and local spending since 2011, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet, at the same time, federal spending increased by 25 percent—the largest year-over-year increase in federal spending since the Korean War.
All combined, this means federal spending surged to comprise more than two-thirds of all government spending in the US during 2020. We’d have to go back to the dark days of the Cold War and the Vietnam War to find the last time federal spending so dominated government spending in America.
This all reflects the fact that state and local governments are actually affected by economic crises. That is, when incomes and economic activity fall, state and local revenues—and spending—fall. Not so with the federal government, which, thanks to the central bank’s willingness to buy up US debt, can much more easily engage in large amounts of deficit spending than can state and local governments.
Author:
Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: COVID Stimulus, Great Recession, patriot act, social security, welfare | Leave a Comment »
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