In a report called Stop and Seize, the Washington Post details how aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes. The Washington Post noted there have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments. Law enforcement agencies confiscated more than $2.
A police officer in Illinois was filmed smashing through a car window, tasering and yanking out a passenger after he refused to show ID during a routine traffic stop. According to a Fox 32 report, Hammond police claim that they were left with no choice when Jamal Jones said he did not have ID with him and refused to leave the vehicle. Jones, his girlfriend Lisa Mahone, and their children, aged 14 and 7, were rushing to a hospital to visit Mahone’s mother, who was literally on her deathbed.
A police officer in Ohio was caught on video threatening to take away a man’s children and place under CPS oversight because he refused to ID himself during a routine traffic stop. Andre Stockett was stopped by Sandusky police officer Christopher Denny, who said he believed Stockett to be another person, a suspect with outstanding felony warrants. At first the officer claimed he stopped Stockett and his girlfriend, Kathryn Said, because the license plate number indicated her driver’s license was expired.
In response to the arrests of three law enforcement officials in Oklahoma for sexually assaulting women while on the job, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper told women they can avoid getting raped by a cop if they simply follow traffic laws. Raw Story first pointed out on Tuesday that Capt. George Brown, a state trooper, shared a few tips for women in an interview with local NBC News affiliate KJRH.
Back when the Constitution was drafted the founders did not explicitly include the right to travel. Although the Articles of Confederation recognized the freedom of movement under Article 4, the founders considered this right so fundamental they felt it did not need specific enumeration in the Constitution. So essential was the natural right of travel and freedom of movement considered, it was spelled out in Article 42 of the Magna Carta in 1215.
Top U.S. homeland security officials said Wednesday that the Islamic State is an imminent terror concern for this country, but they remain intently focused on an array of deadly threats, especially Americans becoming indoctrinated on the Internet and executing a “limited, self-directed attack.
What is our society going to look like when our faces are being tracked literally everywhere that we go? As part of the FBI’s new Next Generation Identification System, a facial recognition database known as the Interstate Photo System will have collected 52 million of our faces by the end of 2015. But that is only a small part of the story.
The NSA’s “Treasure Map” project is aimed at conducting global cyber attacks and mapping the Internet in its entirety to include end users’ devices, Der Spiegel has revealed. “The breathtaking mission is described in a Treasure Map presentation from the documents of the former intelligence service employee Edward Snowden… It instructs analysts to ‘map the entire Internet – Any device, anywhere, all the time.” the media outlet reports.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has fully rolled out a new biometric identification system that includes facial recognition technology. The FBI, working with the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, says the Next Generation Identification System is now fully operational. The system is designed to expand biometric identification capabilities across the country and eventually replace the FBI’s current fingerprint system.
If you don’t want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, don’t say, do or even suggest anything that even hints of noncompliance. This is the new “thin blue line” over which you must not cross in interactions with police if you want to walk away with your life and freedoms intact. The following incidents and many more like them serve as chilling reminders that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.
Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired.
A U.S. Army report warns that American troops need to be prepared to enter New York City and other global “megacities” in order to prevent civil unrest, political uprisings and protect key infrastructure and natural resources in the national interest.
The following video footage, captured by Avel Amarel and uploaded to Youtube, shows how easy it is to stop police state tactics dead in their tracks. When two police officers show up at the door claiming to be looking for a wanted fugitive, Avarel begins recording. What you’ll see is nothing short of shocking, as police attempt to first enter his home without a warrant, and then attempt to turn him into a criminal for refusing to submit to their demands.
A Minnesota police chief admitted to beheading a five-year-old boy’s pet chicken with a shovel last month after a neighbor complained about the animal running through the neighborhood. Ashley Turnbull, the mother of the boy, acknowledged that her son was in violation of a local ordinance but says the chief violated multiple laws, including trespassing on private property, when he decapitated the red hen. “The chicken was like a puppy dog to my son,” Turnbull told West Central Tribune.
The U.S. Army is preparing to fight political dissidents who challenge the power of the state as “megacities” become the battleground of the future, according to a new report in the Army Times.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, published last week an “advanced notice of proposed rulemaking” on “vehicle-to-vehicle communications.” What NHTSA is proposing could begin a transformation in the American transportation system that makes our lives better and freer — or gives government more power over where we go and when. In announcing its proposed rulemaking, NHTSA is stressing its intention to protect the “privacy” of American drivers.