Category Archives: Individual Rights

Change Your Constitution, Says Another British Redcoat

Britain, English, Founding Fathers, GUNS, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Terrorism

He looks about 12-years old and is already retired. Where could he possible have worked? In the military, of course, where you are put out to pasture decades before individuals in the private sector (read the real economy) can retire. His name is Lt. Col. Michael Kay, formerly an adviser to the British Ministry of Defense. Lt. Col. Kay is here to tell Americans that, because the amorphous terrorist threat against us is “unconventional”—the National Security Agency has to take unconventional means to counter this undefined, unconventional threat.

Magnanimously, Kay concedes his host’s point about the NSA’s trampling of the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, in particular. But hey, what do the Brits know about a constitution—they’ve already trashed their ancient, unwritten, venerated freedoms which inspired the fathers of this nation. Kay, of course, makes his living stoking fear.

Piers Morgan is another Briton who, from his perch at CNN, suborns treason against Americans by preaching against their natural right to defend life and property.

The backdrop: The Washington Post’s revelation—a mere formality really—that the president’s protestations to the contrary, “The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.”

MORE.

Media-Enabled MEGALOMANIAC Speaks

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Homeland Security, Individual Rights

Barack Obama is an out-of-control megalomaniac—a mindset that has been mediated by media. The intrepid press sat in today rather quietly on a press conference, and listened to the monster speak about his willingness to “jiggle” his surveillance programs here and there so as to allay unnecessary fears (“provide greater assurances,” as he put it).

To quote the moron, “The men and women of our intelligence community work every single day to keep us safe because they love this country and believe in our values. They’re patriots. And I believe that those who have lawfully raised their voices on behalf of privacy and civil liberties are also patriots who love our country and want it to live up to our highest ideals. So this is how we’re going to resolve our differences in the United States — through vigorous public debate, guided by our Constitution, with reverence for our history as a nation of laws, and with respect for the facts.”

In remarks that are not yet all online (or may not find their way there), Obama said—in defiance of the evidence—that he was comfortable that “the NSA program is not being abused,” going on to promise that he’d outsource the matter to a … new hire: A Civil Liberties Officer.

Yes, this “ass with ears” will bring in a civil-liberties bureaucrat to calibrate our unalienable individual right to “be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

This is the essence of the modern-day Managerial State: common-law and constitution is overridden; rights outsourced to the better judgment of bureaucrats and hired “experts,” in this case, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. It “will make public the legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The NSA is taking steps to put in place a full-time civil liberties and privacy officer,” promised Big Daddy. (CNN’s Jessica Yellin was in estrus.)

After all, those white guys in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment: What on earth did they know?

To be fair to this clueless creature, George Bush The Decider had a similar disregard for the Constitution.

Glenn Greenwald: Guarding Liberty @ The Guardian

Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Technology, Terrorism, The State

More than “Smashing a CNN Government Apologist,” as EPJ’s Robert Wenzel put it, Glenn Greenwald “floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee,” Cassius-Clay style, around the unincisive, silly Jeffrey Toobin. Here Greenwald demonstrates why “Major media,” as I wrote, “is like a big amorphous amoeba. This simple, single-celled organism will instinctively act in unison to preserve its integrity.” To maintain equilibrium, morons have to keep the brilliant out.

I’ve searched in vain for follow-up headlines on ABC headline News, UPI, Drudge, Fox News & Business, on and on. US media does not wish to discuss the new twist in an “NSA program [that] reportedly allows analysts to track emails, chats, web searches.”

Liberty’s guardian at The Guardian, the American Glenn Greenwald, is responsible for revealing the following new and horrifying details:

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’

• XKeyscore gives ‘widest-reaching’ collection of online data
• NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches
• Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history
• NSA’s XKeyscore program – read one of the presentations

“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.
US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”
But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.
XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA’s “widest reaching” system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Read on.

IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity

Constitution, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Liberty, Morality, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity” is the current column, now on WND:

“House Republicans are waging a symbolic and futile battle to slash the Internal Revenue Service’s budget by $3 billion. Republicans, according to reports, want the tax-collectors to pay for ‘unfairly scrutinizing conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.’

As usual, the GOP finesses the matter, as does the press.

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson understated the IRS’s abuse of ‘police power’ as a mere ‘intrusion’; an ideological targeting by federal investigation of a political movement. To its credit, the Post’s Editorial Board stepped it up, conceding, at the time of the scandal that, “Any unequal application of the law based on ideological viewpoint is unpardonable—toxic to the legitimacy of the government’s vast law-enforcement authority.”

More to the point—and likely with White-House imprimatur—the IRS persecuted American patriots for promoting the constitutional principles upon which America was founded, but which are no longer a lodestar for the country’s government. These groups were hounded for their principles—and for asking to keep more of what is rightfully theirs in the service of these values.

How perverse is that?

And how perverse is the sight of the same IRS bureaucrats getting their freak-on (as in groove-on) at your expense?

Watch this YouTube clip of a representative cross-section, no doubt, of the IRS workforce at a “training conference.” Look at these off-putting officials having a jolly good time on your dime. Chins and butts wiggling obscenely all over the show; these people belong in a Federico Fellini film.

You could not fan away the smell in that hall if you tried. …

… These repulsive IRS agents, stomping about with abandon in carnival-like conferences and getaways: Do they represent you? Do they reflect your habits, manners, demeanor, priorities or worldview?

…We are trapped in the deforming, deadly clutches of institutionalized freaks, the remedy to which is…”

The complete column is “IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity.” Read it on WND.

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