Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

The Great Election Fraud: Manufactured Choices Make a Mockery of Our Republic

Posted: March 5, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.”—Gene Sharp, political science professor

The U.S. Supreme Court was right to keep President Trump’s name on the ballot.

The high court’s decree that the power to remove a federal candidate from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” rests with Congress, not the states, underscores the fact that in a representative democracy, the citizenry—not the courts, not the corporations, and not the contrived electoral colleges—should be the ones to elect their representatives.

Unfortunately, what is being staged is not an election. It is a mockery of an election.

This year’s presidential election, much like every other election in recent years, is what historian Daniel Boorstin referred to as a “pseudo-event”: manufactured, contrived, confected and devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.

For the next eight months, Americans will be dope-fed billions of dollars’ worth of political propaganda aimed at persuading them that 1) their votes count, 2) the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president, and 3) electing the right candidate will fix everything that is wrong with this country. 

Incredible, isn’t it, that in a country of more than 330 million people, we are given only two choices for president?

The system is rigged, of course.

Forcing the citizenry to choose between two candidates who are equally unfit for office does not in any way translate to having some say in how the government is run.

Indeed, no matter what names are on the presidential ballot, once you step away from the cult of personality politics, you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

The candidate who wins the White House has already made a Faustian bargain to keep the police state in power.

We’ve been down this road before.

Barack Obama campaigned on a message of hope, change and transparency, and promised an end to war and surveillance. Yet under Obama, government whistleblowers were routinely prosecuted, U.S. arms sales skyrocketed, police militarization accelerated, and surveillance became widespread.

Donald Trump swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.

Joe Biden has been no different. If his job was to keep the Deep State in power, he’s been a resounding success.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

With each new president, we’ve been subjected to more government surveillance, more police abuse, more SWAT team raids, more roadside strip searches, more censorship, more prison time, more egregious laws, more endless wars, more invasive technology, more militarization, more injustice, more corruption, more cronyism, more graft, more lies, and more of everything that has turned the American dream into the American nightmare.

What we’re not getting more of: elected officials who actually represent us.

No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people if all we’re prepared to do is vote.

After all, there is more to citizenship than the act of casting a ballot for someone who, once elected, will march in lockstep with the dictates of the powers-that-be.

Yet as long as Americans are content to let politicians, war hawks and Corporate America run the country, the police state will prevail.

“Total continuity” is how Chris Hedges refers to the manner in which the government’s agenda remains unchanged no matter who occupies the Executive Branch. “Continuity of government” (COG) is the phrase policy wonks use to refer to the unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.”

You can also refer to it as a shadow government, or the Deep State, which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who actually call the shots behind the scenes.

Whatever term you use, the upshot remains the same: on the national level, we’re up against an immoveable, intractable, entrenched force that is greater than any one politician or party, whose tentacles reach deep into every sector imaginable, from Wall Street, the military and the courts to the technology giants, entertainment, healthcare and the media.

This is no Goliath to be felled by a simple stone.

This is a Leviathan disguised as a political savior.

So, what is the solution to this blatant display of imperial elitism disguising itself as a populist exercise in representative government?

Stop playing the game. Stop supporting the system. Stop defending the insanity. Just stop.

Washington thrives on money, so stop giving them your money. Stop throwing your hard-earned dollars away on politicians and Super PACs who view you as nothing more than a means to an end. There are countless worthy grassroots organizations and nonprofits—groups like The Rutherford Institute—working to address real needs like injustice, poverty, homelessness, etc. Support them and you’ll see change you really can believe in in your own backyard.

Politicians depend on votes, so stop giving them your vote unless they have a proven track record of listening to their constituents, abiding by their wishes and working hard to earn and keep their trust.

It’s comforting to believe that your vote matters, but presidents are selected, not elected. Despite what is taught in school and the propaganda that is peddled by the media, a presidential election is not a populist election for a representative. Rather, it’s a gathering of shareholders to select the next CEO, a fact reinforced by the nation’s archaic electoral college system. In other words, your vote doesn’t elect a president. Despite the fact that there are 218 million eligible voters in this country (only half of whom actually vote), it is the electoral college, made up of 538 individuals handpicked by the candidates’ respective parties, that actually selects the next president.

The only thing you’re accomplishing by taking part in the “reassurance ritual” of voting is sustaining the illusion that we have a democratic republic.

In actuality, we are suffering from what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately term an “economic élite domination” in which the economic elite (lobbyists, corporations, monied special interest groups) dominate and dictate national policy.

No surprise there.

As an in-depth Princeton University study confirms, democracy has been replaced by oligarchy, a system of government in which elected officials represent the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the average citizen.

As such, presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

So how do we prevail against the tyrant who says all the right things and does none of them? How do we overcome the despot whose promises fade with the spotlights? How do we conquer the dictator whose benevolence is all for show?

We get organized. We get educated. We get active.

Whether you vote or don’t vote doesn’t really matter. What matters is what else you’re doing to push back against government incompetence, abuse, corruption, graft, fraud and cronyism.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only road to reform is through the ballot box.

If you feel led to vote, fine, but if all you do is vote, “we the people” are going to lose.

If you abstain from voting and still do nothing, “we the people” are going to lose.

If you give your proxy to some third-party individual or group to fix what’s wrong with the country and that’s all you do, then “we the people” are going to lose.

If, however, you’re prepared to turn off the television, tune out the talking heads, untether yourself from whatever piece of technology you’re affixed to, wean yourself off the teat of the nanny state, and start flexing those unused civic muscles, then there might be hope for us all.

For starters, know your rights and then put that knowledge into action. What we desperately need is a concerted, collective commitment to the Constitution’s principles of limited government, a system of checks and balances, and a recognition that they—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the police, the technocrats and plutocrats and bureaucrats—answer to and are accountable to “we the people.”

Second, think nationally but act locally. Understand how your local government is structured. Who serves on your city council and school boards? What recourse does the community have to voice concerns about local problems or disagree with decisions by government officials? Are your locally elected officials accessible and open to what you have to say? Are your police chiefs being appointed from within your community? Who runs your local media? Does your newspaper report on local events? Who are your judges?

Third, don’t stop doing the hard work of holding your government accountable. Don’t let personal politics and party allegiances blind you to government misconduct and power grabs. This will mean holding all three branches of government accountable to the Constitution (i.e., vote them out of office if they abuse their powers). And it will mean making the president play by the rules of the Constitution.

Finally, don’t remain silent in the face of government injustice, corruption, or ineptitude. Speak truth to power.

A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay involved. It also takes a citizenry willing to do more than grouse and complain.

We must act—and act responsibly.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, any hope of restoring our freedoms and regaining control over our runaway government must start from the bottom up. And that will mean re-learning step by painful step what it actually means to be a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Source: https://tinyurl.com/45rca4et

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

Posted: February 27, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States (August 8, 1950)

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the government has become an expert at disregarding constitutional roadblocks intended to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When these end-runs don’t suffice, the government hides behind the covert, clandestine, classified language of national security; or obfuscates, complicates, stymies, and bamboozles; or creates manufactured diversions to keep the citizenry in the dark; or works through private third parties not traditionally bound by the Constitution.

This last tactic is increasingly how the government gets away with butchering our freedoms, by having its corporate partners serve as a front for its nefarious deeds.

This is how the police state has managed to carry out an illegal secret dragnet surveillance program on the American people over the course of multiple presidential administrations.

Relying on a set of privacy loopholes, the White House (under Presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden) has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

The government used a similar playbook to get around the First Amendment, packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security.

As the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed, the Biden administration worked in tandem with social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

Restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

Dare to voice politically incorrect views in anything louder than a whisper on social media and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love is what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners.”

Social media censorship runs the gamut from content blocking, throttling, and filtering to lockouts, shutdowns, shadow banning and de-platforming.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the government.

Yet what those who typically champion the right of corporations to be free from government meddling get wrong about these cases is that there can be no free speech when corporations such as Facebook, Google or YouTube become a front for—or extensions of—government censors.

This is the very definition of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technocensorship is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal: to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

This authoritarian impulse to censor and silence “dangerous” speech masquerading as tolerance, civility and a concern for safety (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.

You see, the government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court can see itself clear to recognizing that censorship by social media companies acting at the behest of the government runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Bottom line: either we believe in free speech or we don’t.

The answer to the political, legal and moral challenges of our day should always be more speech, not less.

Any individual or group—prominent or not—who is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

To ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers the government and its corporate operatives are allowed to claim now will eventually be used against the populace at large.

These social shunning tactics borrow heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”

This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

As Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

The problem is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us, and we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”

What this means is championing the free speech rights of those with whom we might disagree.

That’s why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. He understood that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The government has no tolerance for freedom or free speech of any kind that challenges its chokehold on power.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “disinformation,” “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or speech transgression or other.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

Ultimately, the government’s war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is—is a war that is driven by a government fearful of its people.

As President John F. Kennedy observed, “[A] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Source: http://tinyurl.com/24ejau2y

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

COVID-19 Tested Our Commitment to Freedom. Three Years Later, We’re Still Failing

Posted: February 21, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The remedy is worse than the disease.”—Francis Bacon

The government never cedes power willingly.

Neither should we.

If the COVID-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”

Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.

We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.

Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding their powers, abusing their authority, and further oppressing their constituents, there’s something being concocted in the dens of power.

The danger of martial law persists.

Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lockdown the nation again.

You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

COVID-19 was a test to see how quickly the populace would march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked, and how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

“We the people” failed that test spectacularly.

Characterized by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” the government’s COVID-19 response to the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self and private property.

In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used COVID-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:

“Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.”

Truly, the government’s (federal and state) handling of the COVID-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc.

What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of an unknown virus (and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios) quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

There was talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dared to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

It was even suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and “ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

Those tactics were already being used abroad.

In Italy, the unvaccinated were banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and faced suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France banned the unvaccinated from most public venues.

In Austria, anyone who had not complied with the vaccine mandate faced fines up to $4100. Police were to be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

In China, which adopted a zero tolerance, “zero COVID” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—were forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract COVID-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to COVID quarantine centers?

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.

You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger signs are everywhere.

COVID-19 was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.

Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has become part of the government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers should the need arise.

What we should be bracing for is: what comes next?

Source: http://tinyurl.com/3n4f8cz2

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

The Global Deep State: A Fascist World Order Funded by the American Taxpayer

Posted: February 13, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“The madmen are in power.”— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.

At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.

What is going on?

The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.

It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.

All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

Global Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.

This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

“It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

Global Surveillance

Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

“The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

Global War Profiteering

War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

Global Policing

Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

Are you starting to get the picture now?

The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.

Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State. It’s too busy selling us to the highest bidder.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/mr2u4ew5

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Wearing a MAGA Hat or a Taylor Swift Shirt to the Polls Could Get You Barred from Voting

Posted: February 2, 2024 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court has given government officials the green light to obstruct citizens from voting at polling places based on the content of speech displayed on their clothing.

By refusing to hear an appeal in Ostrewich v. Hudspeth, the U.S. Supreme Court has laid the groundwork for citizens to be prevented from voting merely by wearing something expressive on their clothing that might relate to an item on a ballot. In a joint amicus brief with Justice and Freedom Fund and World Faith Foundation, The Rutherford Institute warned against electioneering laws that give government officials too much discretion to engage in viewpoint discrimination of voters. Conceivably, just the act of wearing a MAGA hat, a Taylor Swift t-shirt, or other apparel that could be perceived by a poll worker as sending a political message could get one criminally prosecuted or prevented from voting in some states.

“These polling place laws can be so vague as to prohibit citizens from voting merely for wearing clothing with images of Martin Luther King Jr. or John Lennon that could be considered ‘relating to’ an item on the ballot” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Yet political speech, especially speech critical of the government, is a constitutional virtue, not a harm. These bans on the passive act of displaying speech, political or otherwise, at a polling place are an affront to the right to political free speech protected by the First Amendment.”

Free expression at polling places has become a contentious issue in recent years, with controversies over “ballot selfies,” the wearing of political apparel to polling places, and even apparel that does not explicitly reference candidates, ballot issues, or politics. For example, when Linda McMahon, the wife of World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon, ran for the U.S. Senate, there were questions over whether voters in Connecticut could be turned away for wearing WWE merchandise. In Georgia, a man was ordered to remove his NRA hat while going to vote. In Texas, it is a criminal misdemeanor for a person to merely wear a badge, insignia, emblem, or other similar communicative device “relating to” a candidate, measure, or political party appearing on the ballot, or to the conduct of the election, within the polling place or within 100 feet of any outside door through which a voter may enter.

In 2018, Jillian Ostrewich, the wife of a firefighter, was prevented from voting while wearing a shirt that contained a union logo and the words “Houston Fire Fighters” because the ballot contained a proposition to guarantee Houston’s firefighters pay parity with the city’s police officers. In order to vote, Ostrewich had to turn her shirt inside-out. Ostrewich subsequently filed suit, alleging that she was unconstitutionally censored and that Texas’s electioneering laws chilled her right to free speech. However, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found the laws to be constitutional. Although the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 to strike down as unconstitutionally vague a Minnesota law that banned political speech on any badge, button, shirt, or hat worn at election polling stations, the Court refused to hear the appeal in Ostrewich, letting that ruling stand and thus allowing for such laws with a slightly narrower scope than Minnesota’s to continue to be enforced.

Attorneys Deborah J. Dewart and James L. Hirsen of the Justice and Freedom Fund helped advance the amici arguments in the Ostrewich v. Hudspeth brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/55u6fxk9

Terror by Night: Who Pays the Price for Botched SWAT Team Raids? We Do

Posted: January 31, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“We’re all potential victims.”—Peter Christ, retired police officer

Sometimes ten seconds is all the warning you get.

Sometimes you don’t get a warning before all hell breaks loose.

Imagine it, if you will: It’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is in darkness. Your household is asleep. Suddenly, you’re awakened by a loud noise.

Barely ten seconds later, someone or an army of someones has crashed through your front door.

The intruders are in your home.

Your heart begins racing. Your stomach is tied in knots. The adrenaline is pumping through you.

You’re not just afraid. You’re terrified.

Desperate to protect yourself and your loved ones from whatever threat has invaded your home, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, a baseball bat, or that licensed and registered gun you thought you’d never need.

You brace for the confrontation.

Shadowy figures appear at the doorway, screaming orders, threatening violence, launching flash bang grenades.

Chaos reigns.

You stand frozen, your hands gripping whatever means of self-defense you could find.

Just that simple act—of standing frozen in fear and self-defense—is enough to spell your doom.

The assailants open fire, sending a hail of bullets in your direction.

In your final moments, you get a good look at your assassins: it’s the police.

Brace yourself, because this hair-raising, heart-pounding, jarring account of a SWAT team raid is what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us or our loved ones.

Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day.

SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of so-called criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.

Police have also raided homes on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers, fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols.

These raids, which might be more aptly referred to as “knock-and-shoot” policing, have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned means of giving heavily armed police the green light to crash through doors in the middle of the night.

No-knock raids, a subset of the violent, terror-inducing raids carried out by police SWAT teams on unsuspecting households, differ in one significant respect: they are carried out without police even having to announce themselves.

Warning or not, to the unsuspecting homeowner woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, there is no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by criminals as opposed to a police mob. In many instances, there is little real difference.

According to an in-depth investigative report by The Washington Post, “police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.”

While the Fourth Amendment requires that police obtain a warrant based on probable cause before they can enter one’s home, search and seize one’s property, or violate one’s privacy, SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

In addition to the terror brought on by these raids, general incompetence, collateral damage (fatalities, property damage, etc.) and botched raids are also characteristic of these SWAT team raids.

In some cases, officers misread the address on the warrant. In others, they simply barge into the wrong house or even the wrong building. In another subset of cases, SWAT teams have conducted multiple, sequential raids on wrong addresses; executed search warrants despite the fact that the suspect is already in police custody; or conducted a search of a building where the suspect no longer resides.

That appeared to be the case in Ohio, when a botched SWAT team raid in pursuit of stolen guns at a home where the suspects no longer resided resulted in a 17-month-old baby with a heart defect and a breathing disorder ending up in the ICU with burns around the eyes, chest and neck. In that Jan. 10, 2024, incident, police waited all of six seconds after knocking on the door before using a battering ram to break in and simultaneously launch two flash-bang grenades into the home. The baby’s mother, having lived in the house for a week, barely had time to approach the door before she was grabbed at gunpoint, handcuffed and hustled outside. Only later did police allow her to enter the home to check on the baby, who had been hooked up to a ventilator near the window that police shattered before deploying the flash grenades. 

Aiyana Jones is dead because of a SWAT raid gone awry. The 7-year-old was killed after a Detroit SWAT team—searching for a suspect—launched a flash-bang grenade into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire, hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The cops weren’t even in the right apartment.

Exhibiting a similar lack of basic concern for public safety, a Georgia SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into the house in which Baby Bou Bou, his three sisters and his parents were staying. The grenade landed in the 2-year-old’s crib, burning a hole in his chest and leaving him with scarring that a lifetime of surgeries will not be able to easily undo.

The horror stories have become legion in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals.

That’s exactly what happened to a 16-year-old Alabama boy. Mistaking a pre-dawn SWAT team raid for a home invasion, the boy grabbed a gun to protect his family only to be gunned down by police attempting to execute a search warrant for drugs. The boy’s brother, not home at the time of the raid, was later arrested with 8 grams of marijuana.

Then there was Jose Guerena, the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.

All too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for those targeted with little consequences for law enforcement.

The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

A study by a political scientist at Princeton University concludes that militarizing police and SWAT teams “provide no detectable benefits in terms of officer safety or violent crime reduction.” The study, the first systematic analysis on the use and consequences of militarized force, reveals that “police militarization neither reduces rates of violent crime nor changes the number of officers assaulted or killed.”

SWAT teams, designed to defuse dangerous situations such as those involving hostages, were never meant to be used for routine police work targeting nonviolent suspects, yet they have become intrinsic parts of federal and local law enforcement operations.

There are few communities without a SWAT team today.

In 1980, there were roughly 3,000 SWAT team-style raids in the US.

Incredibly, that number has since grown to more than 80,000 SWAT team raids per year, often for routine law enforcement tasks.

In the state of Maryland alone, 92 percent of 8200 SWAT missions were used to execute search or arrest warrants.

Police in both Baltimore and Dallas have used SWAT teams to bust up poker games.

A Connecticut SWAT team swarmed a bar suspected of serving alcohol to underage individuals.

In Arizona, a SWAT team was used to break up an alleged cockfighting ring.

An Atlanta SWAT team raided a music studio, allegedly out of a concern that it might have been involved in illegal music piracy.

And then there are the SWAT team raids arising from red flag gun laws, which gives police the authority to preemptively raid homes of people “suspected” of being threats who might be in possession of a gun, legal or otherwise.

With more states adding red flag gun laws to their books, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.

At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother. The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window. Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.

No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.

So, what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?

According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”

Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and acted like battle-crazed warriors.

This is what happens when you use SWAT teams to carry out routine search warrants.

These incidents underscore a dangerous mindset in which the citizenry (often unarmed and defenseless) not only have less rights than militarized police, but also one in which the safety of the citizenry is treated as a lower priority than the safety of their police counterparts (who are armed to the hilt with an array of lethal and nonlethal weapons).

Yet it wasn’t always this way.

There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, safe and secure from the threat of invasion by government agents, who were held at bay by the dictates of the Fourth Amendment, which protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The Fourth Amendment, in turn, was added to the U.S. Constitution by colonists still smarting from the abuses they had been forced to endure while under British rule, among these home invasions by the military under the guise of “writs of assistance.” These writs gave British soldiers blanket authority to raid homes, damage property and wreak havoc for any reason whatsoever, without any expectation of probable cause.

We have come full circle to a time before the American Revolution when government agents—with the blessing of the courts—could force their way into a citizen’s home, with seemingly little concern for lives lost and property damaged in the process.

If these aggressive, excessive police tactics have also become troublingly commonplace, it is in large part due to judges who largely rubberstamp the warrant requests based only on the word of police; police who have been known to lie or fabricate the facts in order to justify their claims of “reasonable suspicion” (as opposed to the higher standard of probable cause, which is required by the Constitution before any government official can search an individual or his property); and software that allows judges to remotely approve requests using computers, cellphones or tablets.

This sorry state of affairs is made even worse by the U.S. Supreme Court, which tends to shield police under the guise of qualified immunity. As Reuters concluded, “the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense.”

Rubber-stamped, court-issued warrants for no-knock SWAT team raids have become the modern-day equivalent of colonial-era writs of assistance.

Given President Biden’s determination to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention at taxpayer expense, our privacy, property and security may be in even greater danger from government intrusion.

Be warned: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the American police state has become a powder keg waiting for a lit match.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/yurfnxub

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

Watchlisted: You’re Probably Already on a Government Extremism List

Posted: January 23, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”—Hunter S. Thompson

According to the FBI, you may be an anti-government extremist if you’ve:

a) purchased a Bible or other religious materials,

b) used terms like “MAGA” and “Trump,”

c) shopped at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, or Bass Pro Shops,

d) purchased tickets to travel by bus, cars, or plane,

e) all of the above.

In fact, if you selected any of those options in recent years, you’re probably already on a government watchlist.

That’s how broadly the government’s net is being cast in its pursuit of domestic extremists.

We’re all fair game now, easy targets for inclusion on some FBI watch list or another.

When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

Clearly, you don’t have to do anything illegal.

You don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

This is how easy it is to run afoul of the government’s many red flags.

In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

We’re all presumed guilty until proven innocent now.

It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

For instance, a so-called typo in a geofence search warrant, which allows police to capture location data for a particular geographic area, resulted in government officials being given access to information about who went where and with whom within a two-mile long stretch of San Francisco that included churches, businesses, private homes, hotels, and restaurants.

Thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s sprawling spy network of fusion centers, we are all just sitting ducks, waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape.

Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

These fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censors and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

It’s a setup ripe for abuse.

For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peacebuilding summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

This is how the burden of proof has been reversed.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider some of the many ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.

Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.

Thought crimes programs. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Security checkpoints. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots.

Surveillance and precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime.

Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts.

Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether.

Biometric databases. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level with a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

Limitations on our right to move about freely. At every turn, we’re tracked in by surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles in real time.

The war on cash. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme.

These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

In this way, the groundwork is being laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.

What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/yckcwa35

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

Government’s Cancel Culture Efforts to Censor, Ostracize & Shun Politically Unpopular Viewpoints on the Rise

Posted: January 19, 2024 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Rutherford Institute is warning against a growing cancel culture mindset within government agencies across the political spectrum that seeks to censor, ostracize and shun those with opposing, disfavored, or politically unpopular viewpoints.

Weighing in before the U.S. Supreme Court with an amicus brief in NRA of Am. v. Vullo, The Rutherford Institute, FIRE, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association are challenging efforts by a New York state regulator to circumvent the First Amendment and indirectly penalize the National Rifle Association by pressuring regulated insurance companies to disassociate from and stop offering certain services to the pro-gun advocacy group.

“Knowing what we know about the government’s tendency to attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, these efforts to ostracize those with politically unpopular viewpoints should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Whatever government-driven censorship we tolerate now are destined to serve as the building blocks for greater acts of tyranny.”

In October 2017, the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) opened an investigation into an NRA-endorsed insurance program called “Carry Guard,” which provided coverage for losses caused by licensed firearm use, including criminal defense costs resulting from the intentional use of a firearm in wrongdoing, which was a violation of New York law. DFS Superintendent Maria Vullo met with one of the insurance companies under investigation, which was facing millions in fines, and explained how the company could come into compliance, including by no longer providing insurance to gun groups like the NRA. Vullo also sought the company’s aid in DFS’s campaign against gun groups following the February 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Later, Vullo called upon banks and insurance companies doing business in New York to consider the risks, including reputational risks, which might arise from doing business with the NRA, urging them to join others that had discontinued their associations with the NRA. Multiple entities publicly severed their ties or determined not to do business with the NRA.

In response, the NRA filed a First Amendment lawsuit against Vullo. While the district court would have allowed that claim to proceed to trial, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the case to be dismissed. Noting that government officials can address issues of public concern as long as they do not use their regulatory powers to coerce entities into refraining from protected speech, the Second Circuit concluded that Vullo did not appear to have crossed the line between proper attempts to convince and improper attempts to coerce. But pointing to Vullo’s words, the perception of a threat for companies continuing to do business with the NRA, and the power of DFS’ regulatory authority as factors showing improper coercion to indirectly censor the NRA, the amici are urging the Supreme Court to make clear that government officials cannot sidestep the First Amendment by framing censorship demands as informal requests.

Robert Corn-Revere, Ronald G. London, Will Creeley, and Joshua A. House with FIRE advanced the arguments in the amicus brief in NRA v. Vullo.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/yv2vjaby

Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent

Posted: January 17, 2024 in Uncategorized
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“No president from either party should have the sole power to shut down or take control of the internet or any other of our communication channels during an emergency.”—Senator Rand Paul

What’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?

After all, it’s happening all over the world.

Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.

As the Guardian reports, “From Ukraine to Myanmar, government-run internet outages are picking up pace around the world. In 2021, there were 182 shutdowns in 34 countries… Countries across Africa and Asia have turned to shutdowns in a bid to control behaviour, while India, largely in the conflict-ridden region of Jammu and Kashmir, plunged into digital darkness more times than any other last year… Civil unrest in Ethiopia and Kazakhstan has triggered internet shutdowns as governments try to prevent political mobilisation and stop news about military suppression from emerging.”

In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.

Tyrants and would-be tyrants rely on this “cloak of darkness” to advance their agendas.

In Myanmar, for example, the internet shutdown came on the day a newly elected government was to have been sworn in. That’s when the military staged a digital coup and seized power. Under cover of a communications blackout that cut off the populace from the outside world and each other, the junta “carried out nightly raids, smashing down doors to drag out high-profile politicians, activists and celebrities.”

These government-imposed communications shutdowns serve to not only isolate, terrorize and control the populace, but also underscore the citizenry’s lack of freedom in the face of the government’s limitless power.

Yet as University of California Irvine law professor David Kaye explains, these kill switches are no longer exclusive to despotic regimes. They have “migrated into a toolbox for governments that actually do have the rule of law.”

This is what digital authoritarianism looks like in a technological age.

Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”

For those who insist that it can’t happen here, it can and it has.

In 2005, cell service was disabled in four major New York tunnels, reportedly to avert potential bomb detonations via cell phone.

In 2009, those attending President Obama’s inauguration had their cell signals blocked—again, same rationale.

And in 2011, San Francisco commuters had their cell phone signals shut down, this time, to thwart any possible protests over a police shooting of a homeless man.

With shutdowns becoming harder to detect, who’s to say it’s not still happening?

Although an internet kill switch is broadly understood to be a complete internet shutdown, it can also include a broad range of restrictions such as content blocking, throttling, filtering, complete shutdowns, and cable cutting.

As Global Risk Intel explains:

“Content blocking is a relatively moderate method that blocks access to a list of selected websites or applications. When users access these sites and apps, they receive notifications that the server could not be found or that access was denied by the network administrator. A more subtle method is throttling. Authorities decrease the bandwidth to slow down the speed at which specific websites can be accessed. A slow internet connection discourages users to connect to certain websites and does not arouse immediate suspicion. Users may assume that connection service is slow but may not conclude that this circumstance was authorized by the government. Filtering is another tool to censor targeted content and erases specific messages and terms that the government does not approve of.”

How often do most people, experiencing server errors and slow internet speeds, chalk it up to poor service? Who would suspect the government of being behind server errors and slow internet speeds?

Then again, this is the same government that has subjected us to all manner of encroachments on our freedoms (lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, shadow banning, etc.) in order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, preserve the integrity of elections, and combat disinformation.

These tactics have become the tools of domination and oppression in an internet-dependent age.

It really doesn’t matter what the justifications are for such lockdowns. No matter the rationale, the end result is the same: an expansion of government power in direct proportion to the government’s oppression of the citizenry.

According to Global Risk Intel, there are many motives behind such restrictions:

“For instance, the kill switch serves to censor content and constrain the spread of news. This particularly concerns news reports that cover police brutality, human rights abuses, or educational information. Governments may also utilize the kill switch to prevent government-critical protestors from communicating through message applications like WhatsApp, Facebook, or Twitter and organizing mass demonstrations. Therefore, internet restrictions can provide a way of regulating the flow of information and hindering dissent. Governments reason that internet limitations help stop the spread of fake news and strengthen national security and public safety in times of unrest.”

In this age of manufactured crises, emergency powers and technofascism, the government already has the know-how, the technology and the authority.

Now all it needs is the “right” crisis to flip the kill switch.

This particular kill switch can be traced back to the Communications Act of 1934. Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Act empowers the president to suspend wireless radio and phone services “if he deems it necessary in the interest of national security or defense” during a time of “war or a threat of war, or a state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency, or in order to preserve the neutrality of the United States.”

In the event of a national crisis, the president has a veritable arsenal of emergency powers that override the Constitution and can be activated at a moment’s notice. These range from imposing martial law and suspending habeas corpus to shutting down all forms of communications, restricting travel and implementing a communications kill switch.

That national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

The seeds of this ongoing madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.“

Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a perceived national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the president.

The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

The internet kill switch is just one piece of the government’s blueprint for locking down the nation and instituting martial law.

There may be many more secret powers that presidents may institute in times of so-called crisis without oversight from Congress, the courts, or the public. These powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.

Given the government’s penchant for weaponizing one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security, it’s only a matter of time before this particular emergency power to shut down the internet is activated.

Then again, an all-out communications blackout is just a more extreme version of the technocensorship that we’ve already been experiencing at the hands of the government and its corporate allies.

Packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security, restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the police state.

Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

“The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.“

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these censors are laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, whatever the reason might be, will at some point in the future be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

By the time you add AI technologies, social credit systems, and wall-to-wall surveillance into the mix, you don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/3xteeb7c

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact staff@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

Census Bureau Wants to Question Citizens About Mental Health, Psychosocial Disabilities in Mandatory Survey

Posted: January 11, 2024 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, DC —The Rutherford Institute is once again pushing back against the U.S. Census Bureau’s efforts to amass sensitive private information about individual citizens and their property through its mandatory American Community Survey (ACS).

In addition to the already extensive and invasive list of personal questions included on the ACS, the Census Bureau issued a notice of proposed information collection seeking to add questions about each household member’s level of certain disabilities, including mental disabilities, and whether they have psychosocial, cognitive, or speech disabilities. The Bureau also seeks to ask about possession of electric vehicles, use of solar panels, type of sewage disposal, and other matters.

Previously, the Bureau sought to ask about each person’s sexual orientation and gender identity. Institute attorneys submitted formal public comments in opposition to the Bureau mandating that people answer the ACS and these additional questions, arguing that the Bureau’s threats and intimidation tactics to force people to respond to the ACS seeks to compel speech in violation of the First Amendment and violates the right to privacy from government intrusion under the Fourth Amendment.

For individuals alarmed by the U.S. Census Bureau’s efforts to collect and track private information about the citizenry, their home life and personal habits, The Rutherford Institute has made its updated “Constitutional Q&A: American Community Survey” guidelines available. The Institute has also provided a form letter of complaint for lodging objections to the ACS with the Census Bureau.

“In an age when the government has significant technological resources at its disposal to not only carry out warrantless surveillance on American citizens but also to harvest and mine that data for its own dubious purposes, whether it be crime-mapping or profiling based on race or religion, the potential for abuse is grave,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Any attempt by the government to encroach upon the citizenry’s privacy rights or establish a system by which the populace can be targeted, tracked, and singled out must be met with extreme caution. The American Community Survey qualifies as a government program whose purpose, while seemingly benign, raises significant constitutional concerns.”

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a highly invasive, ongoing monthly survey issued by the U.S. Census Bureau to collect detailed housing and socioeconomic data from about 3.5 million households each year. The ACS requires recipients to provide the government with extensive and sensitive information about each and every person in their household, including their work schedules, their physical disabilities and limitations, the number of automobiles kept at the residence, and their access to phone-service and the internet. The information collected by the ACS is not anonymous: the survey is to contain the name, age, sex, race, and home address of each person at the residence, along with their relationship to the person who fills out the form and that person’s phone number. There are so many questions on the ACS that it is estimated the average household will have to take 40 minutes to answer the questions.

When people do not respond online or by mail, the Census Bureau repeatedly sends field representatives to their homes at unannounced times to harass and interview them until they answer the survey. People have reported that field representatives remained outside their houses for hours while waiting for them to arrive home or come out, have walked around their homes, and have talked to minor children when parents were away. The questions on the ACS are so invasive that many initially think the survey is a phishing scam to steal their personal information. Institute attorneys warn that the data collected and amassed by the Census Bureau through the ACS would be a goldmine for criminals.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Source: http://tinyurl.com/5t4wtfex

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