Free Republic

The discussion that will take place next year in the Utah Legislature over law enforcement raid-style search warrants is a necessary topic to debate. Certainly, the use of a battering rams to combat minor offenses is something that should not occur. A libertarian group, the Libertas Institute, and others, including the American Civil Liberties Institute, will lobby for limits on police use of force during search warrants for minor crimes. When this discussion occurs, it must focus on the safety aspects — to police and suspects — that these raids provide. These raids, as conducted now, are too dangerous. One...

The Fourth Amendment protects us from random invasions of our homes by police, right? We know we're secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" unless the cops demonstrate probable cause to a judge and get a warrant. Except... Except when they don't. The fact of the matter is that police have a lot of leeway to bust your door down and take a look around if they fear that waiting for a warrant could lead to loss of evidence or danger to people. Or lead to something, anyway. That end run around the Fourth Amendment is called "exigent circumstances,"...

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s dominant role as the nation’s spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say. -SNIP- “The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of...

In a major victory for the Justice Department over privacy advocates, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that government agencies can collect records showing the location of an individual's cell phone without obtaining a warrant. The 2-1 ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld the Justice Department's argument that "historical" records showing the location of cell phones, gleaned from cell site location towers, are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. A key basis for the ruling: The use of cell phones is "entirely voluntarily" and therefore individuals who use them have forfeited the right to...

“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.” – Franz Kafka, The Trial In a bizarre and ludicrous attempt at “transparency,” the Obama administration has announced that it asked a secret court to approve a secret order to...

The traitor to our country and NSA, Edward Snowden, is now making the rounds of the major Communist countries; China and Russia, with either Ecuador or Venezuela or possible Cuba being a final destination. Who knows, it may be someplace no one ever thought about. For all of you who labeled him a hero, I must excuse your ignorance on national security issues. If you haven’t worked in the intelligence community, you have no idea the damage that this sniveling coward has done to the intelligence community’s efforts and endangered your life and those of your loved ones.. When both...

“If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.” – Philip K. Dick, author of Minority Report On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes...

Last night the Constitution was, we hope only temporarily defeated by the “security at any cost” surveillance state when, in a close vote, 94 establishment Republicans teamed with 111 Democrats to defeat Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to H.R. 2397, Department of Defense appropriations bill for fiscal year 2014. Amash’s amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2014 would have limited the National Security Agency’s use of taxpayer funds under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Amash’s amendment simply said: “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to collect tangible things (including telephone numbers...

Microsoft has collaborated closely with U.S. intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, top-secret documents obtained Thursday by the British Guardian show. The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month. According to the Guardian, the documents show that: snip

Video: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9e3_1373034153

Brandy Hamilton, 26, and Alexandria Randle, 24, say their civil rights were violated by the invasive search Texas Department of Public Safety trooper ordered the body cavity search because he smelled marijuana and allegedly found the end of a blunt The women say that the female trooper used the same glove to search inside both of them ============= Disturbing video shows two women in bikinis being subjected to body cavity searches on the side of a Texas highway after they were stopped returning from a weekend at the beach. Brandy Hamilton, 26, and Alexandria Randle, 24, are suing the Texas...

The big lie is that the National Security Agency (NSA) could have prevented 9/11 hence the need for its expanded powers. This agency in some form has been in the spying business since 1949 and it didn’t prevent that nor were they identifiers for the recent Boston Marathon bombers whom even the Russians had warned a security threat. They did however do a good job of scanning for the bombers once the deed was done. In 1949 the predecessor of NSA, the Armed Forces Security Agency was established as a cryptologic (decipherer of communications) intelligence body. The activities of NSA...

LAKELAND -- The State Attorney's Office that covers Polk county has criticized a Lakeland Police officer for his method of searching a female for drugs. State Attorney Jerry Hill wrote the Department saying Officer Dustin Fetz's request for a woman to shake her bra to free any hidden drugs was 'demeaning.' Hill went on to say the method used on the May 21 traffic stop was also ineffective and dangerous, according to Bay News 9's coverage partner, The Lakeland Ledger. Hill's letter to Police Chief Lisa Womack said an investigation showed Fetz did not have a reason to ask for...

Live coverage of the rally at the U.S. Capitol online:The Right Scoop live streaming starts at 11:30 a.m. EDTC-SPAN 3 will be showing the rally live on cable/satellite and online here.The rally is being organized by the Tea Party Patriots.Speakers (via TPP) Ted Cruz , US Senate (TX) Mike Lee , US Senate (UT) Rand Paul , US Senate (KY) Michele Bachmann , US House (MN) Jim Bridenstine , US House (OK) Dave Camp , US House (MI) John Fleming , US House (LA) Louie Gohmert , US House (TX) Tom Graves , US House (GA) Richard Hudson , US...

I remember once when I was in college I took a trip home to the DC metro area with my girlfriend. She and I went to the movies not far from where my mother lived in a rather rough part of town called Capitol Heights, MD. I have no idea what we saw. I do however remember that we had a terrible time, and it had nothing to do with what was on the screen and everything to do with what was going on in the theater. Not long before this at a different theater a few miles away...

It's becoming increasingly difficult to give the government the benefit of the doubt in regards to dragnet domestic surveillance. Even before Glenn Greenwald published a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems and interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, there were credible reports that the NSA was intercepting U.S. communications. The most significant of those occurred in July, when the court that was established to "hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance," called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction...

<p>George Orwell was right. He was just 30 years early.</p> <p>In its April cover story, Wired has an exclusive report on the NSA's Utah Data Center, which is a must read for anyone who believes any privacy is still a possibility in the United States: "A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.... Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”... The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013." In other words, in just over 1 year, virtually anything one communicates through any traceable medium, or any record of one's existence in the electronic medium, which these days is everything, will unofficially be property of the US government to deal with as it sees fit.</p>

The following document is the current Department of Defense manual on the procedures for intercepting wire, electronic and oral communications for law enforcement. The manual also discusses 'access to electronic communications in electronic storage or in a remote computing service.' Though the manual was issued in 1995, it is still current according to another, unreleased DoD Directive-Type Memorandum updated in 2012 (DTM 11-007 – Delegation of Authority to Approve Consensual Interceptions for Law Enforcement) that makes reference to the manual and modifies some of its language.

Dear Mr. President ` ` I hereby absolve you of ANY responsibility to protect my family from terrorism on our farm. I have some pretty spiffy self-defense gadgets and have established decent clear zones around the house and out-buildings. So I think we can take care of most terrorist threats on our own for now. ` Of course, I'll let you know if that EVER changes. (But thanks for standing by--just in case.) ` ` In exchange, please remove the surveillance you are conducting on our mail, cell phones, internet, credit cards and CB/shortwave radios. You don't need me to...

Most voters oppose the U.S. government’s secret collection of the phone records of millions of Americans and think the feds are spying too much on U.S. citizens these days. Just 26% of Likely U.S. Voters favor the government’s secret collecting of these phone records for national security purposes regardless of whether there is any suspicion of wrongdoing. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 59% are opposed to the practice. Fifteen percent (15%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.) The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on June 6-7, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The...