Land Of The Flea

A Constitution-Free Zone Where Officials Can Grab Your Computer And Copy Your Hard Drive

"Did you know that the U.S. government considers the U.S. border to be a 'constitution-free zone'? Did you know that customs officials can take your computer away from you, keep it for 30 days or more, and make a copy of everything that is on your hard drive? Sadly, this is actually true. According to the government, when you choose to cross the U.S. border you temporarily give up your constitutional rights. They can look at anything on your computer that they want to, and if they find anything that violates any law, they can use it against you in court. You may think twice about taking your computer out of the country after you read the rest of this article." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingA Constitution-Free Zone Where Officials Can Grab Your Computer And Copy Your Hard Drive

Glenn Greenwald Rebuttal To Washington Post’s Walter Pincus

"That you decided to write an entire column grounded solely in baseless innuendo is between you and your editors. But your assertion of several factually false claims about me, Laura Poitras, and others is not. [...] Our NSA stories have been published and discussed in countless countries around the world, where they have sparked shock, indignation and demands for investigation. So revealingly, it is only American journalists who have decided to focus their intrepid journalistic attention not on the extremist and legally dubious surveillance behavior of the US government and serial deceit by its top officials, but on those who revealed all of that to the world." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald Rebuttal To Washington Post’s Walter Pincus

No Military Coups for America? What About November 1963?

"Let’s just keep living our little myths and deferring to the wisdom and authority of our beloved Cold War national-security state, which suspends our freedom and privacy in order to keep us 'safe' from the threats of terrorism that it itself produces. Let’s just keep believing that it’s only foreigners, not Americans, who make 'mistakes' in elections — mistakes that unfortunately sometimes have to be rectified with coups and assassinations. While our national-security state believes in helping foreign counterparts protect their nations from bad rulers through coups and assassinations, let’s just keep telling ourselves that it would never do the same here at home." Continue reading →

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Kim Dotcom: All Megaupload servers ‘wiped out without warning in data massacre’

"Kim Dotcom has accused the US government and Leaseweb, one of the hosting providers of former file-sharing site Megaupload, of deleting millions of personal files 'without warning.' The information stored on the dormant servers – 'petabytes of pictures, backups, personal & business property' – was what Dotcom called evidence in the case US authorities launched against him in January 2012. Dotcom is wanted in the US on criminal charges for facilitating copyright fraud on a massive scale. 'This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,' Dotcom wrote on Twitter." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingKim Dotcom: All Megaupload servers ‘wiped out without warning in data massacre’

World Service Authority Issues World Passport to Edward Snowden

"Edward Snowden is an alleged National Security Agency whistleblower who exposed the mass monitoring of U.S. citizens. Deprived of his United States Passport, he is currently immobilized in a Moscow Airport Transit Lounge with no ongoing ticket to any nation. This is a flagrant violation of Article 13 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states the following: (Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.) The World Service Authority (WSA), a Washington D.C. corporation and executive branch of the World Government of World Citizens, has issued Mr. Snowden a World Passport so he can travel without limitation." Continue reading →

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Supreme Court asked to suspend NSA and FBI’s blanket collection of phone data

"The US supreme court will be asked to suspend the blanket collection of US telephone records by the FBI under an emergency petition due to be filed on Monday by civil rights campaigners at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic). Previous attempts to appeal against the rulings of these courts have floundered due to a lack of public information about who might be caught up in the surveillance net, but the disclosure of specific orders by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has opened the door to a flurry of new challenges. It comes as a similar legal challenge was filed in Britain on Monday." Continue reading →

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Why Sir John Templeton renounced US citizenship – AKA why the US shot itself in the foot

"The media is prone to depict Templeton as a tax cheat. The reason? Had he been a U.S. citizen when he died, the U.S. government would have received approximately 100 million in estate taxes. I am not aware of Templeton ever publicly stating his reasons for renouncing U.S. citizenship. Nobody knows for sure. But, I suspect that the correlation between his renouncing U.S. citizenship in 1964 and the enactment of the CFC (Controlled Foreign Corporation and SubPart F) rules in 1962 did play a role. The 1962 changes in the Internal Revenue Code meant that Templeton may have been forced to choose between U.S. citizenship and his mutual fund business." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingWhy Sir John Templeton renounced US citizenship – AKA why the US shot itself in the foot

Before Sir John Marks Templeton, there was Cleveland Ferguson

"A few years before Templeton made his famous move to the Bahamas, another American went and made a name for himself by discussing his desire to give up his citizenship and resettle on that famous island of warm breezes and low taxes. Meet Mr. Cleveland Ferguson, Bahamian immigrant and disabled Korean War veteran. If Mr. Ferguson had been able to afford his day in court, he might have won early recognition of the fact finally recognised by a court in 2010: that no formal declaration of war is necessary to allow renunciations under that provision (now renumbered to § 349(a)(6)), as long as there exist hostilities." Continue reading →

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The State: Always the Accuser, Never the Defendant

"As Harvey Silverglate points out, each of us commits at least three acts each day that could be described as felonies by any reasonably ambitious prosecutor. By using NSA-provided metadata to conduct a 'pattern of life' analysis of a targeted individual, law enforcement agencies could probably contrive an excuse to arrest practically anybody at any time. This capacity will dramatically expand opportunities for official retaliation against Mundanes who seek redress for abuses committed by police – including family members of deceased victims." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingThe State: Always the Accuser, Never the Defendant