Who Will Protect You from the Police? The Rise of Government-Sanctioned Home Invasions

Why The 2,776 NSA Violations Are No Big Deal

Ron Paul
Ron Paul Institute
August 19, 2013

Thanks to more documents leaked by Edward Snowden, this time to the Washington Post, we learned last week that a secret May 2012 internal audit by the NSA revealed 2,776 incidents of “unauthorized” collection of information on American citizens over the previous 12 months. They are routinely breaking their own rules and covering it up.

The Post article quotes an NSA spokesman assuring the paper that the NSA attempts to identify such problems “at the earliest possible moment.” But what happened to all those communications intercepted improperly in the meantime? The answer is, they were logged and stored anyway.

We also learned that the NSA routinely intercepts information from Americans while actually targeting foreigners, and that this is not even considered a violation. These intercepts are not deleted once discovered, even though they violate the government’s own standards. As the article reports, “once added to its databases, absent other restrictions, the communications of Americans may be searched freely.”

U.S. Explodes With 100 Anti-NSA Protests

Americans take to streets, Internet to demand feds stop spying on citizens

(Massachusetts protest photo: Dustin M. Slaughter)

SOURCE

Americans outraged by the federal government’s spying programs took to the streets on Independence Day for “Restore the Fourth” protests in an estimated 100 American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Memphis and Miami, plus international cities such as London and Munich.

The “Restore the Fourth” national protest was named after the Fourth Amendment, which was intended to protect Americans against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Ohio police set up fake drug checkpoint to fool motorists

AFP Photo / Justin Sullivan

SOURCE

Can police officers trick automobile drivers with bogus traffic stops? Cops in a small Ohio town seem to think so, and now they’re under attack for trying to sweep the city of drugs using a creative little loophole.

The Mayfield Heights, Ohio Police Department is under fire after the city recently decided to establish a “drug checkpoint” on Interstate 271. Randomly stopping cars and combing them for contraband is illegal, though, so law enforcement has been using the next best thing: fake checkpoints.

Cops in the Cleveland suburb of only 19,000 have been placing warning signs ahead of a bogus stop and then monitoring the behavior of drivers. If any cars demonstrate suspicious activity after being alerted of the phony roadblock, police say that’s enough to stop and search them.

Justin Amash: NSA Spy Gate Damages Our Culture

Infowars.com
June 30, 2013

Justin Amash recently went on the Stossel Show on FOX Business News to remind us that the NSA spy gate violates our Fourth Amendment.

“The reason the Founders believed it was wrong was because we didn’t want the government collecting this kind of information,” Amash said. “They put the Constitution in place to prevent the government from injecting itself into our personal affairs.”

Shock Video Shows Police Forcibly Drawing Blood

Man screams “what country is this” as cops strap him down

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
June 28, 2013

Shock video out of Georgia shows police strapping down citizens accused of drunk driving before using a needle forcibly draw blood as the victim screams, “what country is this?”

The policy of police obtaining a warrant to draw blood from those merely suspected of being drunk at a DUI checkpoint or a routine traffic stop has been in place for years across many states, but to actually see it in action is disturbing.

The clip shows individuals being strapped down on a padded table at the Gwinnett County jail. Even those who show no resistance whatsoever are forcibly restrained and have their heads pressed down by an officer using his elbow.

“We all are American citizens and you guys have me strapped to a table like I’m in Guantanamo f***ing Bay,” complains another victim of the blood draw.

Obama Continues His War on the Fourth Amendment

Andrew Napolitano
reason.com
May 2, 2013

Here they go again. The Obama administration has asked its allies in Congress to introduce legislation that would permit the feds to continue their march through the Fourth Amendment when it comes to obtaining private information about all of us.

The Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to be left alone, was written largely in response to legislation Parliament enacted in the colonial era that permitted British soldiers to write their own search warrants and then use those warrants as a legal basis to enter private homes. The ostensible purpose of doing that was to search through the colonists’ papers looking for stamps, which the Stamp Act required the colonists to affix to all documents in their possession. The laws that permitted the soldier-written search warrants and the Stamp Act were the British government’s fatal political mistakes, which arguably caused a major shift in colonial opinion toward secession from Britain 10 years before the bloody part of the Revolution began.

After the Founders won the Revolution, the Framers wrote the Constitution in large measure to assure that the new government in America would not and could not do to Americans what the king had done to the colonists. Hence the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that only judges issue search warrants and only after the governmental agency seeking the warrants presents evidence under oath of probable cause of crime. Regrettably, that was weakened after 9/11 with the enactment of the Patriot Act.

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Liberal Gun Haters Like Militarized Cops Tromping Through Their Homes

Infowars.com
April 21, 2013

Apologists for the police state say we needed all those combat troops – er, excuse me, policemen – because there was a terrorist on the loose. It was necessary to violate the Fourth Amendment and search all those homes without court-issued search warrants.

But imagine if half the people in the neighborhood pictured below owned an AR-15 or some other suitable firearm. Militarized cops going house-to-house would not have been necessary. No self-respecting terrorist would force his way into a house where the owner has a firearm and is trained in its proper use. If he had, we wouldn’t have had to put up with so many hours of hysterical drama on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc.

But then this is Watertown, a suburb of Boston, in the liberal state of Massachusetts. Liberals fear and hate guns. Because of this they have to put up with cops pointing automatic weapons at them and screaming for them to put up their hands. They are as defenseless as a herd of sheep.

Liberalism is like some kind of disease. It may be fatal.

Note the cop drawing a bead on the photographer. Photo: Tarrin Lupo.

This article was posted: Sunday, April 21, 2013 at 8:14 pm

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