Free Republic

Video at source. A proposed federal rule that would require black boxes or event data recorders (EDRs) in every U.S. automobile may mean “Big Brother” could be in your passenger seat for every drive. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule requires all light passenger vehicles be equipped with an EDR by Sep.1, 2014. Ninety-six percent of new cars already have them - measuring such inputs as speed, lateral acceleration, pedal effort, seat belt use, wheel spin, steering wheel turn and direction. Black box data retrieved from U.S. car accidents in a single day would provide more information than a...

Constitution Free Zones are what The Department of Homeland Security has established. The federal agency isn’t really securing the borders, but they are extinguishing the Fourth Amendment rights of nearly 197 million American citizens within 100 miles of the border….and the ocean.(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Before I begin, isn’t this really what “Freedom of the Press” is supposed to be about? Doesn’t it exist to keep elected officials and things they do in check and expose corruption and lawlessness? Yeah, I thought so too, but we aren’t hearing this on the evening news, are we? Anthony Gucciardi reports on these “Constitution Free Zones”...

A grassroots movement of Fourth Amendment activists is rallying across at least 20 US cities to protest illegal surveillance techniques by the American government. The protests “1984 Day,” named for George Orwell’s classic novel about an ultramodern surveillance state, have taken place across the nations, most notably in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. The rallies have been organized by a number of social media initiatives by a grassroots organization called Restore the Fourth that demands an end to “unconstitutional surveillance of digital communications.” "By rallying this Sunday, we are sending a very loud message to our...

The liberal elite is still in shock that six Americans resisted the relentless pressure of its hack politicians, slavering mainstream media mediocrities and progressive hustlers in order to acquit George Zimmerman. Consciously or not, the jurors’ verdict was an act of rebellion against the progressives who wants to jettison our most sacred principles. The case was a joke, but you wouldn’t know that if you only listened to the mainstream media. The media’s rank speculation, mischaracterization of the evidence and outright lies were designed to replace the strict adherence to law and the rules of evidence that for a thousand...

Intelligence officials said Tuesday that the government’s sweeping surveillance efforts have helped thwart “potential terrorist events” more than 50 times since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and the officials detailed two new examples to illustrate the utility of the programs. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, officials cited a nascent plot to blow up the New York Stock Exchange and a case involving an individual providing financial support to an overseas terrorist group.

More often than not, when someone says, “I hate to say I told you so,” they love to say they told you so. Prepare to have a bucket of gloat dumped on your head. Still, there are those rare occasions when people both say it and mean it. A few possible examples come to mind: Aboard the Titanic. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Standing before the pearly gates (after your stupid bomb squad partner goes ahead and cuts the blue wire). And right now. Liberals, we conservatives hate to say we told you so. But we told you...

Rand Sullies Fourth: Paul’s bill is just plain wrong by Daniel Clark Last August, a well-meaning but misguided Spanish artist named Celia Gimenez took it upon herself to restore a mural of Jesus in her church. The tragic result was a figure that more closely resembled Ohio State University mascot Brutus the Buckeye. Keep that in mind when you read Kentucky senator Rand Paul’s “Fourth Amendment Restoration Act.” The first-term libertarian Republican’s bill, a draft of which is posted on his dot-gov website, rails against federal surveillance efforts by distorting the Fourth Amendment into something the men who wrote and...

Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the permission it has received is still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more. "These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat," Ullyot said.

It's always instructive to see who quickly takes the government's side in a dispute with a whistleblower, and what kind of argumentation they deploy. David Brooks was certainly a predictable candidate. Here's a sampling of a few others: Roger Simon, chief political columnist for Politico, former White House correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, former political editor of U.S. News & World Report: Think you're a loser just because you dropped out of high school and never finished Think you're a dud just because you work as a security guard even though you dreamed of becoming a global savior?the military training...

6/9/2013 Arlington Heights man, police in dispute over confiscating his guns By Melissa Silverberg Arthur Lovi sat down with a therapist one day last August to talk about some things that were bothering him. He had high blood pressure, and his physician suggested he talk to someone. He already spoke to a VA psychiatrist once a month — he has persistent memories from his days as an Air Force crash rescue helicopter pilot in the 1960s — but he agreed. He'd been through a lot lately and figured it couldn't hurt to get some of it out. "I felt like...