"Prosecutors in Pueblo, Colorado are dropping felony drug and weapon-possession charges after an officer involved in the case said he faked body cam footage so he could walk 'the courts through' the vehicle search that led to the arrest. The actual footage of the search that he produced in court was a reenactment of the search, the officer told prosecutors." Continue reading →
"A dad returning from Mexico with his 3-year-old daughter was briefly detained on suspicion that he was engaged in sex trafficking. (And not to pile on, but it was a United flight.) Despite papa having her passport, his passport, and a notarized letter from the mom saying that she gave them her permission to travel, the authorities felt compelled to act upon a 'tip'—a tip that was nothing more than a passenger's hysteria-fueled hunch that 3-year-olds are being trafficked right and left in the USA." Continue reading →
"Video of police officers dragging a passenger from an overbooked United Airlines flight sparked an uproar Monday on social media, and a spokesman for the airline insisted that employees had no choice but to contact authorities to remove the man. As the flight waited to depart from Chicago's O'Hare Airport, officers could be seen grabbing the screaming man from a window seat, pulling him across the armrest and dragging him down the aisle by his arms. The airline was trying to make room for four of its employees on the Sunday evening flight to Louisville, Kentucky." Continue reading →
"When he asked law enforcement if he could see the actual text of the statute he was breaking, the officer on the scene immediately called for backup and threatened the father with jail time." Continue reading →
"The state of Georgia has gone to extreme lengths to keep its own state laws hidden from the people, and has even gone after those who have attempted to give this information to the people." Continue reading →
"Congress as a whole has been more intent on protecting the government from insider leaks than protecting the public from government surveillance. The tension between privacy and government surveillance is one that runs central to the ongoing debate over the CIA and NSA’s data collection tactics, as well as the potential Homeland Security policy that aims to refocus efforts to target 'insider threats.'" Continue reading →
"Data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that searches of cellphones by border agents has exploded, growing fivefold in just one year, from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 25,000 in 2016. According to DHS officials, 2017 will be a blockbuster year. Five-thousand devices were searched in February alone, more than in all of 2015. 'That's shocking,' said Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security. She wrote the rules and restrictions on how CBP should conduct electronic searches back in 2009. 'That [increase] was clearly a conscious strategy, that's not happenstance.'" Continue reading →
"In an era in which federal officials are now requiring Americans who are returning from foreign travel to turn over their cell phones for searches and forcing them to disclose their passwords, it’s time for Americans to start asking some fundamental questions regarding the nature of liberty, the purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the proper role of government in a free society and to abandon the passivity, submissiveness, and deference to authority that have come to characterize their lives." Continue reading →
Did you know that local law enforcement agencies often commit significant resources to helping the federal government enforce federal gun laws and regulations? In this video, we’ll share with you the official agreement between a local police department in Arizona and the ATF.
"While the current rationale for encryption back doors is to fight terrorism, they wouldn’t be used just for that purpose. For proof, just look at the history of the PATRIOT Act. This law gives the US government unprecedented civil forfeiture authority over the US 'correspondent accounts' of any bank in the world. If an alleged terrorist or other criminal deposits money at the bank overseas, the PATRIOT Act allows the government to seize an equivalent sum of money in the correspondent account in the US. Proponents justified the law as a necessary escalation in the 'War on Terror.' But the very first time the government used its new civil forfeiture authority, it had nothing to do with terrorism." Continue reading →