You Can Stop The Cops From Doing This to You

Say that you're walking down the street and that two robbers hit the cellphone store across the street. One of the robbers is shot, they leave the store and the bullet-catching robber goes to the ER. Then, two days later, the cops contact you and ask if you saw anything.

How did they know you were there? They did a "geofence warrant" and asked Google for information of anyone nearby the scene of the crime. Bet you have Google Maps or Waze or any other app that uses Google Maps on your phone. Most people do.

You can avoid that happening, if you choose. One way is to shut off location services. A more user-friendly way is to ensure that your apps use location services only when they're open on your phone (you do routinely closebackground apps, don't you).

(H/T)

The Dotard of Mar-a-Lago Is Becoming Increasingly Unhinged

Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021

That is just nuts. Those who believe it are insane. We are in for some tough times in this country, as thw white supremacists are likely going to commit more and more acts of violence because they think that their Orange Overlord wants them to (and when he gets back in, they'll be released from prison). If you run or work in any sort of liberal or union organization (other than apoolice union), you had better have a plan for the day when some nut walks in with a gun for a firebomb and tries to kill people.

Meanwhile, authoritarian police fascists keep doing what they do:

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced today that Brian Buglio, age 45, of Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania, was charged in a criminal information on May 27, 2021, with a civil rights violation.

According to Acting United States Bruce D. Brandler, the information alleges that Buglio, the Chief of Police for the West Hazleton Police Department, threatened a private citizen with criminal charges, in retaliation for social media posts created by the private citizen that were critical of Buglio and of the West Hazleton Police Department.

One would presume that the Bill of Rights cuts no ice in West Hazleton, PA. Chief Buglio has chosen to plead guilty.

Did You Criticize the 2020 Census Online?

If you did, a bunch of Constitution-shredding spooks in the Department of Commerce called the Investigations and Threat Management Service probably opened a file on you. When they weren't busily racially profiling Commerce Department workers, they were scouring social media in seach of people who were critical of the Census.

The Washington Post has the story: "In one instance, the unit opened a case on a 68-year-old retiree in Florida who tweeted that the census, which is run by the Commerce Department, would be manipulated “to benefit the Trump Party!” records show." That retiree made his comments on Twitter; he had under 100 followers.

ITMS came to the attention of a Trump appointee, who was working to shut them down, except that he quit after the Insurrection. In March, Biden Administration ordered ITMS to stop all ciminal investigations (which they had no authority to conduct) and ordered them to cease all activities after the Post asked for interviews. The abuses of authority of ITMS have sparked critical interest by legilators from both parties.

The whole operation seems to be the diseased brainchild of one career Federal employee. That goon sent copies of critical social media posts on the Census to the FBI, which told him that maybe he ought to take a referesher course in freedom of speech.

Said goon probably deserves to be at a Federal guest house for awhile. If they can't convict him or fire him, they can at least transfer him to working the trash pickup detail at a remote Federal park.

Why is DeJoy's Postal Service Spying on People?

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests, according to a document obtained by Yahoo News.

The details of the surveillance effort, known as iCOP, or Internet Covert Operations Program, have not previously been made public. The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.

What the hell is wrong with the Postal Service? They complain that they're running short of cash, but then they spend Lord-knows how many millions of dollars surfing around the internet to spy on people? Don't we have the FBI and the DHS to do that shit?

I get that the USPS is a qualsi-independent government agency, but I still think that Congress ought to pass a law that forbids the Postal Service from doing stuff like this. Violations would result in the chief postal inspector and the postmaster general being sent to the pokey where they can only correspond with people by mail.

It Smells Like a Summary Execution

The shooting of Michael Reinoehl by a Federal task force smells fishy. He had a handgun, which was in his pocket, and a rifle, which was cased. Most witnesses said the cops just rolled up and began shooting. Then they pretty much faked trying to save him after shooting him full of holes.

Barr and Trump wanted that guy dead and the Marshal's Service obliged.

Defunding the Cops?

I thought about writing about what I believe should be considered for police reform.

But hell, I've been at this blogging gig for a very long time. And, as you might have expected, I have already written about this.

Nine fucking years ago.

In the 1940s, Doing This Sort of Shit Got the Perpetrators Executed

Apparently ICE hired Josef Mengele's grandson as a contractor:

Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women.

The nurse, Dawn Wooten, was employed at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company. The complaint was filed with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.

Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed.
...
“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” the detainee said.

According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist – outside the facility – who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.

“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

This is the sort of evil shit that the Chinese are doing to the Uighurs.

Of course a private prison company is involved in this shit. There is nothing good that has come out of private prison companies. They should be legislated out of existence most rikki-tik.

The Trump Administration is almost as evil as the Communists. No doubt that Stephen Miller is creaming his jeans on this.

Dismantle DHS

To the DHS, the First Amendment is just a goddamned piece of paper, right?

The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.

Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for the New York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents about DHS operations in Portland. The intelligence reports, obtained by The Washington Post, include written descriptions and images of the tweets and the number of times they had been liked or retweeted by others.

Oh sure, after the story broke, DHS did the usual ritual reassignment of a functionary, but that means zip -point-shit.

DHS has also been spying on peaceful protesters, again, because the First Amendment doesn't matter a fuck to DHS.

The Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since anti-police protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri last summer, according to hundreds of documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination, indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful. The reports confirm social media surveillance of the protest movement and ostensibly related events in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New York.

They also show the department watching over gatherings that seem benign and even mundane. For example, DHS circulated information on a nationwide series of silent vigils and a DHS-funded agency planned to monitor a funk music parade and a walk to end breast cancer in the nation’s capital.

You read right, the DHS was monitoring a fundraising walk to end breast cancer, because why? Breast cancer patients and their families are prone to rioting?

DHS has become an Orwellian agency whose main function has been to suppress the rights of American citizens, at least, those of color and of a different political persuasion than the GOP. This has been going on for decades and across three administrations. Every time the threat of far-right extremism is pointed out, their fellow-traveler politicians squelch any attempts to investigate them.

Creating DHS was a knee-jerk overreaction by a bunch of jerks to a terrorist attack. DHS's structure, if not its very existence, should be re-examined with an eye to its complete dismantling.

Brave, Brave, Brave Federal Officers

Christopher J. David had largely ignored the protests in downtown Portland, Ore., but when he saw videos of unidentified federal agents grabbing protesters off the street and throwing them into rented minivans, he felt compelled to act.

Mr. David, a Navy veteran, said that federal agents’ use of violent tactics against protesters, without the support of the mayor, the governor or local law enforcement, was a violation of the oaths that agents take to support, uphold and defend the Constitution.

And so, on Saturday, he took a bus downtown to ask the officers how they squared their actions with that oath.

Instead of getting an answer, Mr. David was beaten with a baton by one federal officer as another doused him with pepper spray, according to video footage of the encounter. After he walked away from the confrontation, Mr. David was taken to a nearby hospital, where a specialist said his right hand was broken and would require surgery to install pins, screws and plates. He declined pain medication.

Federal police strike protester with baton, use pepper spray and tear gas outside courthouse in Portland pic.twitter.com/VX2xTVaaYq

— Zane Sparling (@PDXzane) July 19, 2020

Mr. David is one seriously brave man. Every last one of those masked, faceless, gutless cowards should be sent to a hellhole of a prison somewhere.

Along with their leaders, but that's, in part, up to us.

Trump's Federal Goons

Federal goons in unmarked vehicles are snatching people off the streets of Portland. Smart victims don't waive their rights and ask for lawyers. Then they're let go, with no record of being arrested made.

This seems to be the brainchild of Chad Wolfe, the DHS Secretary who seems to have been named for an aspiring Bond villain.

Apparently, to DHS, the Constitution is just another goddamned piece of paper, to be ignored whenever they feel like it.

Betcha that the Wingnuts who were frothing about Jade Helm 15 won't give a shit about this.

Trump Signals He's Open to Taking Children Hostage (Plus Some Tab-Clearing)

Determined to reopen America’s schools despite coronavirus worries, President Donald Trump threatened on Wednesday to hold back federal money if school districts don’t bring their students back in the fall. He complained that his own public health officials’ safety guidelines are impractical and too expensive.

Shortly afterward, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be issuing new guidance next week “that will give all new tools to our schools.” The advice will keep students safe, he said, but “the president said today we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough.”

Trump is going to hold school children, teachers and parents hostage to his desire to show that the pandemic is under control-- "Either your kids physically go back to school or your school gets it!" That's about a despicable as it gets. And of course, Trump and his first ass-kisser are going to press the CDC to revise their guidance to line up with Trump's orders.

Along similar lines, Trump and his Minister of Xenophobia are using the threat of deportation to force colleges to have in-person classes. It's all about getting people to pretend that there is no pandemic to worry about.
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Trump's indoor virus spreadathon in Tulsa did just that.
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Meanwhile, the goons in Customs have been using their drones to spy on protesters. Customs denied that their surveillance drones were being used for surveillance, which is about as nonsensical a denial as one can get.

“The worst part for me is when we’re made out to be storm troopers,” said David Fulcher, the deputy director for air operations at the National Air Security Operations Center in Grand Forks. “We believe in peaceful protests.”

That is laughable. CBP has been playing at being the nation's storm troopers for years, and now they're not happy about it? GMAFB.

Pro tip: If you don't want people to call you storm troopers, don't act like storm troopers.

And it's also funny that, after all these years of them bragging how good the optics are on those drones, that they're now claiming that they aren't really that good.
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China is quietly carrying out a campaign of genocide against the Uighurs:

A new report in Foreign Policy says that China's suppression of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other chiefly Muslim ethnic minorities in northwest China now meets the United Nations definition of genocide, mass sterilization, forced abortions and mandatory birth control part of a campaign that has swept up more than 1.5 million people and what researcher Adrian Zenz calls probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.

The very same people who get so outraged over Israel's treatment of Palestinians have not uttered a peep about China's genocidal campaign against its Muslim minorities. Because Chinese gold buys a lot of closed moths and averted eyes.

And yes, Trump approves. He always has when the Chinese Communists use force against their own people.

Cops in Oakland Go Full Stormtrooper

Squads of sheriff’s deputies in military fatigues and riot gear arrived just before dawn Tuesday outside the old three-bedroom house on Magnolia Street in West Oakland, Calif. A BearCat armored vehicle rolled down the still-sleepy residential street. Officers broke through the reinforced front door with a battering ram and sent a small, camera-equipped robot into the home to check for any potential threatsFSB,.

When the deputies finally entered the home, they called out for the occupants to surrender. They did, saying they wanted the standoff to end peacefully.

But the tense, militarized raid didn’t target anti-government zealots or drug traffickers. Instead, deputies aimed to arrest a small coalition of homeless parents who were trying to live inside the long-uninhabited home without paying rent.
...
Days after the judge’s ruling, sheriff’s deputies in military gear arrived at 5:15 a.m. Tuesday to pull the families out of the home.

The "knock on the door on the middle of the night" is the hallmark of a police state. Against four families that evinced no intent to resist by force, the cops rolled up in the dark with all of their paramilitary toys on full display.

Gregory Ahern, the sheriff is of Alameda County, needs to hire on with a law enforcement agency that is in tune with his ideas of policing. My respectful suggestion is that he submit an application to the FSB (or the ATF).

I cannot think of an eviction that I have either done or heard of where the sheriff's department rolled out a bunch of paramilitary goons with drawn firearms and an armored vehicle. It's unheard of when the eviction is being carried out on single-parent families headed by women.

My suspicion is that this one was driven by the vulture capitalists who bought the house. They now are saying that they'll do something minor to help the local community, which no doubt will be just eyewash.

On Your Phone: Shut Off Everything Google

The fuzz are using Google to find everyone within the vicinity of a crime. Doesn't matter if you were in the coffee shop getting a cup of Joe and a cruller across the street when someone took advantage of the Stop & Rob, they want to know where you were.

So make sure that any Google apps are set for local only while using. Shut them off if you aren't using them.

But, if you have an Android phone, you may be SOL.

Snowflakes with Badges, Our National Surveillance State and DoJ Looks for Lawyers With No Ethics

Starbucks apologized after an employee reportedly asked six police officers to leave or change their location in one of the company’s shops in a Phoenix suburb because another customer reported feeling unsafe.

From the amount of press coverage that this has generated, one might have thought that the cops at that Starbucks had all been shot at.

Stop the Presses! Somebody was mean to some cops!

How this is a national story, much less one that is getting prominent airing on the news shows, is baffling.

There seems to be less outrage in the press over the fact that the FBI and ICE have been using all of our DMV photos for facial recognition.

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.

They always cite the same trite rationale: "We're violating your privacy to keep you safe".

Meanwhile, the DoJ is bringing in their "ethics, schmethics" legal team to continue to argue for Trump's census question, a question that the Supreme Court has already shot down. The government has, in the past, used census data to round up people. Anyone who thinks that Trump and Miller wouldn't do the same needs to reach down, grab their ears, and pull hard until they can see daylight.

Planning on Coming to America?

Think hard about deleting all of your social media accounts.

Visa applicants to the United States are required to submit any information about social media accounts they have used in the past five years under a State Department policy that started on Friday.

Such account information would give the government access to photos, locations, dates of birth, dates of milestones and other personal data commonly shared on social media.

Other nations, no doubt, will follow suit. So if you plan to travel across a non-Schengen border, you may want to delete all of that shit, now.

"General Electric: We Bring Evil to Life," or "If You Want to Live Under Constant Surveillance, Move to San Diego"

San Diego has installed over three thousand GE-made streetlights that record both audio and video.

Though the council and the public were not given further specifics, a January 2018 report by IEEE Spectrum revealed that each so-called smart streetlight is packed with high-tech spyware, including “an Intel Atom processor and half a terabyte of memory; Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios; two 1080p video cameras for video, still images, and computer vision analytics; two acoustical sensors; and environmental sensors that monitor temperature, pressure, humidity, vibration, and magnetic fields. Much of the data gathered will be processed on board, with selected events or streams of data uploaded to GE’s Predix cloud through AT&T’s LTE network.”

When you are out in public, you can begin assuming that the cops can watch everything that you do and hear everything that you say.

The future is getting suckier and suckier. You can try to fight back by not owning any computer device that listens or looks. If you have "hey siri" or Alexa or any of those things, you've invited the spies into your house. One can argue that you have no expectation of privacy if you have some device listening to you.

The Stasi would have been envious.

NY Times Wants the Banks and/or the Government to Spy on Gun Owners

The New York Times reviewed hundreds of documents including police reports, bank records and investigator notes from a decade of mass shootings. Many of the killers built their stockpiles of high-powered weapons with the convenience of credit. No one was watching.

Whether the NY Times is advocating requiring credit card companies to monitor purchases of guns and ammunition or suggesting that the credit card companies refuse to process such transactions is open to interpretation.

I'm pretty sure that the Times participated in the public freakout of Admiral Poindexter's plan to monitor all credit card transactions (and everything else) in 2003. But when it's something that the Times disapproves of, they seem to have no compunction in having the Feds spy on folks without probably cause.

They should be careful of what they ask for. Watch who orders porn? Or wine? Or who uses credit cards at bars? Maybe Trump could have credit cards monitored to see who subscribes to the Times or the Washington Post. Once you open the door to monitoring lawful transactions because one group disapproves of the subject matter, there is no telling how far that will go.

It's OK to Pee in the Bathroom on an Airliner or Snooze in Your Seat, Again

Last summer, the story broke that doing such things could result in the Air Fuzz following you around. Probably because the Inflight Goons don't have that much to do, so they invented a little program to justify their existence.

[TSA] officials told the [Boston] Globe that air marshals no longer document the minor movements and behavior of these travelers, such as whether they fidget in the airport, go to the bathroom during the flight, or seem, according to the agency’s own checklist, to have a “cold, penetrating stare.”

The agency said it has also stopped following passengers through baggage claim and no longer compiles extensive reports on travelers who failed to rouse suspicions.

“Any routine passenger behaviors on a plane that would be seen as a normal behavior we are no longer capturing that,” said David Kohl, the new director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, in an interview.

About fucking time. The idiot who came up with this idea should get a RIP, if not a RIF.

Republicans Hate Liberty and Freedom

President Trump’s repeated cries of “fake news” and attacks on journalists as “enemies of the American people” have resonated with his base, with 43 percent of Republicans saying he “should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” ... The survey also showed that just 36 percent of GOP voters disagreed with that statement.

Let's be clear about this: Trump regards news outlets that "engage in bad behavior" as those which publish anything that is less than flattering about El Trumpo, his spawn or his current wife.

This country is defined by our liberties, freedoms and civil rights. Without those, we are nothing more than a collection of assholes with the military and economic power to back up our assholishness. In effect, we'd be no different from being a more powerful variant of Putin's Russia.

That Trump's base would be so willing to trash our constitutional if Trump said so suggests that to them, the Constitution is a meaningless piece of paper. The Pledge, to them, is like praying in church: Meaningless words that have no relevance once uttered.

They are faithless Americans. They are, in point of fact, traitors to the principles that our forefathers fought for.

Late For Your Flight? Nervous About Flying? Sleep on the Plane? Use the Biffy?

Then you may have a Federal Air Marshal following you around.

Federal air marshals have begun following ordinary US citizens not suspected of a crime or on any terrorist watch list and collecting extensive information about their movements and behavior under a new domestic surveillance program that is drawing criticism from within the agency.

The previously undisclosed program, called “Quiet Skies,” specifically targets travelers who “are not under investigation by any agency and are not in the Terrorist Screening Data Base,” according to a Transportation Security Administration bulletin in March.

I guess that the Air Fuzz don't have enough to do, so they're following people in order to justify filling their rice bowels.

I'll restate this: If you can go from where you are to where you want to be in a day, then drive.