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Big Brother Is Watching You!
Of course all the confiscated property will go
on public auction and will go into the local police's funds. Be ready for
road blocks in your city soon. While opponents of mayor Giuliani actions
blasted him with his authoritarian policy, the mayor who was a former US
prosecutor who has variously cracked down on organized crime, nude dancing,
and jaywalking, dismissed his
critics saying, " It isn't punishment, it's remedial.
" The US Supreme Court ruled in April, 1999 6 to 3 that cops can now stop
your car at random with no search warrant and search it PLUS search
a person's purse. Toledo law professor states, " The court is focused on
giving law enforcement every possible tool to apprehend, seek out, and
find criminals and contraband. " Civil libertarians view it as I do that
people should not have their right to privacy violated merely because they
are driving in a car. Anyone knows that there are fascists, crooked cops
out there that will abuse this law and fall back on the old cliché'
of probable cause or some other lame excuse because they may not like the
person's race, sexual preference, or they have nothing better to do than
exploit their egotistic minds and exploit their authority just because
they can do it and get away with it.
Drug Testing Of Children Now Constitutional WithoutThe testing of children in United States Schools without parental consent is now law when The US Supreme Court upheld it's stand concerning the state of Indiana to randomly test students without parental consent. This in my view is the most ridiculous decision to date by the US Supreme Court. Students who participate in ALL after school activities from sports, chess clubs, school trip excursions are now subject to this type of Unconstitutional Loss of Freedom and Privacy. From schools in Center, Ohio to Cave City, Arkansas are subjecting students at random for urine drug tests, and many students are
Parental Consent
All this means is that our children of today are
being subjected to tests without any reason so that in the future they
will be brain washed into thinking that the government can do any tests
it want's too on it's citizens. The right of privacy and amendment
rights mean nothing and the future citizen will be subject to this branding
and marking of individuals like so many
cows are branded. If the government is so intent
on this type of Hitler and Orwellian testing then why stop at children?
Lets make mandatory drug testing of every teacher, law enforcement officer,
and government officials from senators, congressman, court judges! I mean
MANDATORY! I will agree drugs can kill, but many people who do smoke marijuana
does not make them a bad person. Alcohol and Nicotine from cigarettes have
killed a million times over than all the weed and drugs put together. In
September, 1999 a Pennsylvania judge has ruled that it is not unconstitutional
for a school to force students to undergo drug testing in order to participate
in activities or receive a parking permit. The judge mainly relied on a
U.S. Supreme Court case that found students' privacy interests were outweighed
by the school's concern with keeping drugs out of the school.
My point is not the right or wrong of drugs, but
the blatant testing of our children and in the near future of all Americans.
When will it stop! Is a person who is drug free but goes out commits rape
branded or tested a good citizen just because he passed a urine test? Will
the near future bring mandatory testing of everyone, not just drugs but
your freedom of thought? I have always felt the marking and testing
of all citizens is very near. But who will test the Testers? Also drug
testing is flawed as in the case of lie detector tests, which are no longer
admissible in court as evidence. A good example is a case involving a honor
student in Sunnydale, Utah. The student Travis Robinett who was a honor
roll, regional debate champion and star athlete
flunked his drug test. The student claimed his
innocence and his mother had Travis take two different drug tests at clinics
which showed his system was clean and void of any drugs. Never the less,
Travis was kicked off the baseball team and any hope of a college athletic
scholarship were diminished. I wish Mr. Thompson and the Supreme Court
would ask the Robinett family about their thoughts on this Orwellian testing
of human beings beginning with our own children. Taking a note from area
private schools, some public schools in New Orleans want locks of their
students' hair to test for marijuana, heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and
phencyclidine, or PCP. The Louisiana branch of the American Civil Liberties
Union announced it would challenge drug testing in the schools as a violation
of protections against unreasonable search and
seizure and invasion of privacy in both the federal
and state constitutions. But the district attorney for New Orleans said
that if approved, hair testing could be extended to every public school
in the state.
In 1999, welfare recipients including Tanya
Marchwinski of Michigan ,filed a suit to stop drug testing in Michigan
before a candidate may receive or continue to receive benefits .Under the
1996 federal welfare overhaul, the government permitted states to give
current and future recipients of welfare drug tests. Anyone who tests positive
MUST receive a state funded drug treatment rehab before they can
receive any benefits. The ideology behind this from the governments point
of view is that they
will not pay for a welfare recipients drug habit
and people who fail drug tests on job interviews will not be hired. Michigan's
Governor John Engler is forcing the law claiming that it's welfare recipients
has fallen to 82,000 in 1998 from 223,000 in 1992. Now this sounds benign
and wonderful but it is just another enforced law on a citizens privacy
and it is using the poor as it's guinea pigs. One welfare recipient stated,
" Just because we are poor, we are being singled out. " Michigan's Welfare
department stated they do not believe that public assistance program funds
should be used to support a drug habit. I agree with this, but lets
test the Governor and all the Welfare department employee's for drugs as
I don't agree on my tax dollars being paid to government/state employees
receiving my hard earned tax dollars in order to support their drug habits.
Parent's Fear Big Brother's Monitoring of Their ChildrenThe mother Danielle Littflefield of Fairfax County,VA. was appalled to learn about the plans for a $11 million computer
Judge Says Recording of Electronic Chats Legal
In 12 states, it is illegal to record your own
telephone conversations without the consent of the person at the other
end of the line. Now a judge in Washington, one of those privacy conscious
states, has ruled that the state's law does not apply to the new
world of e-mail and online chats. That decision, which appears to be the
first of its kind, represents a bad precedent for online privacy, some
legal experts say. But others argue that e-mail messages by their nature
are forwarded and stored on a recipient's computer, so e-mail users automatically
agree to the recording of their messages when they choose the medium. The
novel legal issue of how to characterize e-mail communication arose in
a recent criminal case in Washington's Spokane County. The police there
said they received information that 26 year old Donald Townsend was seeking
sex with minors that he met online. Setting up a sting operation on the
Internet, Detective Jerry Keller pretended to be a 13 year old girl named
Amber with a Hotmail e-mail account and a screen name of "ambergirl87,"
according to legal papers. Detective Keller, in the role of Amber, sent
messages to Townsend, kicking off an e-mail exchange between the two parties
-- about seven messages in all, said Deputy County Prosecutor Patti Walker.
In addition, "Amber" and Townsend had a series of electronic conversations
on ICQ, an Internet chat network owned by America Online that allows users
to communicate in real time. While ICQ can be used to create a public chat
room, the conversations that took place between Keller and Townsend were
private chats that were inaccessible to others, the legal papers say. Over
three days June, 1999 Townsend sent 86 ICQ messages to Keller, Walker
said in a telephone interview. In some of them, he "was setting up a date
with a fictitious 13 year old and trying to have sex with her," she said.
Keller saved the ICQ communications on his computer and later printed them
out for use as potential evidence in the case, after Townsend tried
to meet "Amber" in a bar. Keller also stored and printed out the e-mail
messages he received from Townsend. Townsend was eventually arrested and
charged with attempted rape of a minor, possession of child pornography
and other crimes. Before trial, three Spokane County public defenders made
a clever motion: they sought to suppress the use of the police print-outs
of the e-mail messages and ICQ chats. Under the Washington Privacy Act,
argued Mark Hannibal, Kathleen Moran and David Blair-Loy, there is a very
strong prohibition on the interception or recording of private communications
by phone, radio, telegraph or other device between two or more people
without the consent of all of the parties. This "all party consent"
rule makes Washington different than most other states, where recording
of a private conversation is lawful if just one party consents. In the
Townsend case, the lawyers said, Washington's privacy law clearly applied
to private communications via a computer, which should be regarded as a
"device" under the law. Also, since Kelly did not have a special court
order allowing him to record Townsend's online messages, and because Townsend
never gave his consent, the messages could not be used in a trial, they
said. In a ruling last month, Judge Kathleen M. O'Connor of Spokane County
Superior Court rejected those arguments. She reckoned that the Washington
privacy law does not apply to computer communications because the words
of the statute do not specifically mention computers as a covered device.
Judge O'Connor went on to conclude that even if the act applied in this
case, it could be said that the defendant implicitly consented to Keller's
recording of his e-mail and ICQ chat. After all, the judge said, Townsend
chose to "communicate via e-mail and/or ICQ . . . with the knowledge
that the computer itself is a transmission and recording device. " From
that knowledge, it may be presumed that the defendant knew that the intended
recipients of the conversation may retain and/or disseminate
messages received from the defendant," the judge
wrote. "In an age where millions of e-mails are sent daily, it is
unreasonable for a user to expect that a recipient will not save, transmit
and/or copy an e-mail or an ICQ (chat) communication." Hannibal,
one of the defense lawyers, said that if his client was convicted after
trial next month, he would appeal the denial of the move to suppress the
evidence. Walker, the deputy county prosecutor, said she was pleased
by the decision. She added that she argued before the judge that
if the all party consent privacy act applied to e-mail, it would "wreak
havoc" with e-commerce in the state. Marc Rotenberg, director of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group in Washington,
said he believed the court's ruling was slippery. " Obviously, from a privacy
viewpoint, the principle underlying the two party consent rule should be
applied on a technologically neutral basis," he said. "There is a
fairly clear line of federal cases that points to the continued protection
of personal communications, regardless of the technology at issue.
" But other experts disagreed. Andrew Grosso, a Washington lawyer who specializes
in Internet related matters and who was once an assistant federal prosecutor,
said that as a matter of common sense, e-mail messages are not the same
as a telephone call. "The [e-mail] medium automatically records what is
being communicated," he said. Clifford Fishman, a law professor at the
Catholic University of America in Washington and an expert on eavesdropping
and wiretapping laws, said he thought Judge O'Connor's decision was a good
one. "If I were the judge, and assuming the statute let me, I would rule
that what a person says on e-mail is like what a person says on a telephone
answering machine," Fishman said. "In both cases, the person knows that
the message is being preserved in a permanent form, and he can have no
expectation that what he has recorded will stay private. " Online chat
is by its nature a very unguarded kind of discussion, not at all like a
deliberative e-mail or a message left on a phone answering machine. "It's
a spontaneous, back and forth, written conversation, like a private conversation
at a party," he said. "That's exactly the kind of private conversation
the privacy law in Washington was designed to protect spontaneous
utterances that are nobody's business."
A divided New York appeals panel has ruled in a 1999 case, that 39 bags of illegal drugs seized from a suspect should have been admitted into evidence on the strength of the two arresting officers' testimony that they had been able to smell the drug, phencyclidine, or PCP. The two officers testified that, as they approached the suspect Terrence Darby, they detected "a distinctive, pungent odor" that they recognized as street level PCP. They said they were aware of the "very strong smell invariably associated with street level (PCP)" as a result of more that 50 prior arrests for the sale or possession of PCP, as well as their training at the Police Academy. Justice Saxe pointed out that Solomon did not contradict the officer's testimony about the smell of PCP customarily sold on the street, because he "merely stated that pure, unadulterated PCP has no smell, " and that he had "no familiarity with the chemical make-up of current 'street level' PCP."Court Supports Police 'Nose' for Drugs
US privacy groups have asked an appeals court in January, 2000 to overturn federal regulations that they say will let cops track Web browsing and email without a warrant. The civil liberties organizations say the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia should unceremoniously trash the privacy invading rules drafted by the Federal Communications Commission. In a 35 page brief filed Thursday, the groups said that the FCC's August 1999 response to a 1994 wiretap law goes too far, giving police too much surveillance authority and the ability to track mobile phone customers. " They want to get as much information as they can, even though it's not explicitly stated in the law," says Deborah Pierce, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Justice Department, which is defending the lawsuit on behalf of the FCC, says that packet communications, such as the Internet, should be open for police eavesdropping. The FCC's so called interim standard would allow law enforcement to receive packet communications only by convincing a judge that the info "likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by that agency." That's much too easy to do and doesn't adequately protect Americans' privacy, the civil liberties groups argued in their brief, also signed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Law enforcement could obtain Internet transmissions without a warrant simply by directing an [easier to acquire] order to the telephone company carrying the packets rather than by seeking a full warrant against the Internet service provider that receives those packets," the brief says. "The FBI is seeking surveillance capabilities that far exceed the powers law enforcement has had in the past and is entitled to under the law," said EPIC General Counsel David Sobel. "It is disappointing that the FCC resolved this issue in favor of police powers and against privacy." The government's response is due in March 2000 and oral arguments are scheduled for 17 May, EFF said. The Center for Democracy and Technology and the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association filed a related lawsuit in November 1999 that has been combined with this case.Wiretapping Unwarranted?
To Joe Cook, executive director of the Louisiana American Civil Liberties Union, the Louisiana State Penitentiary is a placeBig Brother's Prison Scanner
March 23,2000
In 1995, The Good O' Boy Round Up which was held in East Tennessee held by Government ATF agents were greetedThe ATF Good O' Boy Round Up
Pretty much wherever you go, hidden Web bugs track what you see, where you go, what you click on, which games you play and even what movies you buy. They hide behind 1 by 1 pixel dots, about the size of a pinpoint, the smallest image you can put on a screen. The only way to tell they're there is to call up the site's underlying computer code and look for them, line by line. While consumers have long known that many Web sites and online ads use small files called "cookies" to identify users and show them personalized content, few are aware that even when no ad is in sight, many commercial sites are peppered with these tiny bugs, which track your wanderings for Web sites, as well as for marketing and advertising networks such as Double Click, Match Logic and Avenue A. If you visit Procter & Gamble's Metamucil and Oil of Olay sites, for example, you're being tracked by Match Logic. When you stop by the Alta Vista search site, you're tracked by Double Click. Your kids want to play games on Nabisco World.com? Avenue A was tracking them until Friday, when a promotional plan ended. Eric Schmitt, a senior researcher with analyst firm Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., calls the bugs a double edged sword. "Like most technology, when used correctly they can make things easier on everyone, the end user included. When used incorrectly, they can violate people's privacy." Web bugs also can be placed on Web enabled e-mail, which generally contains pictures, images and possibly sound. The bugs report back to the sender if and when the recipient opens the e-mail and tell whether the recipient can handle advanced graphic and sound files. The bugs also are known as tags, clear GIFs (for graphic image file) or transparent GIFs. The concept has been around for about three years, says privacy advocate Jason Catlett of Junkbusters.com. But in the past year they've become more prevalent as a tracking device.
It's real life spy vs. spy, tucked away in a quiet northern section of Broward County, Florida. Audio Intelligence Devices, a super secret Coral Springs, Fla., company that sells surveillance equipment and operates secret agent training courses to lawBig Brother's Little Secrets
In 1911, Caesar Cella became the first person convicted through the use of finger prints in New York City. SinceBig Brother's Little Minions
In 2000, Agents from the New York General Accounting
Office decided to test the security at the the most sensitive US
Government Agencies using false identification.
By using false IDs these bogus agents were able to access 18 of 21 of the
most
sensitive secure agencies of the United States
on the first try. On the second try they were able to gain entry into all
of them including the FBI, CIA , The Pentagon, Department of Justice ,
Department of State and many more. Information brokers freely buy information
form credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian. Even as of the year 2000
your own state in which you live in would sell information such as
your drivers license ,which in many states has your social security number
on it. In the real world, it's a crime to open someone's mail ,on the Internet,
your e-mail may be read by anyone without your knowledge and it is perfectly
legal. It is estimated that in the year 2000 over 400,000 citizens will
become victims of identity theft. In many cases, you are your own worst
enemy by providing such information via electronic commerce or simply filling
out online web forms at your favorite site. Crackers( password thieves
), hackers ,scam artists and crooked cops will always be around as well
as Big Brother, so treat all your online computer activities as if Big
Brother was right there looking over your shoulder, tracking each keystroke
and peering at your monitor, because he already is.
The company known as Raytheon which produces snooping software to governments and industrial corporations is makingYou Can't Run From Big Brothers Silent Runner
JUNE 2000:A federal court ruling may slap a leash on federal cyber agents looking for online predators whose fetishes cross from the bizarre into the criminal. Freeing a man convicted of trying to have sex with children, a divided 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that Mark Douglas Poehlman was entrapped by federal agents who -- through an America Online persona named Sharon -- overstepped their bounds in luring the cross dressing Air Force veteran to be a "special man teacher" to Sharon's three imaginary girls. " There is surely enough real crime in our society that it is unnecessary for our law enforcement officials to spend months luring an obviously lonely and confused individual to cross the line between fantasy and criminality," wrote Judge Alex Kozinski, who was joined by Senior Judge Betty Fletcher. Senior Judge David Thompson dissented, saying that whether the judges would have ruled differently from the jury is irrelevant. " Our task as an appellate court is not to reweigh the evidence but to uphold the jury's verdict so long as substantial evidence supports it," Thompson wrote. Poehlman was divorced from his wife and discharged from the Air Force after 17 years, when he could no longer keep his foot fetish and impulse to dress in women's clothing a secret. Alone and working at a retail electronics store, he began trolling Internet chat rooms for a like minded woman. Having been rebuffed at every turn, he responded to an online ad from "Sharon" seeking a man with a military background who would not judge her family by society's norms. Correspondence ensued and Sharon implied -- but never said outright -- that Poehlman should have sex with her children, even going so far as to suggest it was a condition of further correspondence. " Sharon repeatedly held her own relationship with Poehlman hostage to his fulfilling the role of special man teacher," Kozinski noted in a footnote. It clearly took Poehlman a while to catch on, but he eventually began sending graphic responses to Sharon's request to outline what he had in mind for her children. After traveling to California to meet Sharon in a Los Angeles hotel room, he was arrested by local and federal agents. Poehlman plead no contest to state charges of attempted lewd acts with a minor and was given time served plus three years' probation. With six months' probation left, he was indicted on federal charges of crossing state lines to have sex with a minor. A judge sentenced him to 10 years.Feds' Online Sex Lure Ruled Entrapment. Are You Next?
July 2000: Restricted by law from eavesdropping on American citizens, the super secret National Security Agency nevertheless drafted policies for dealing with communications intercepted from or about Hillary Rodham Clinton, former President Jimmy Carter and unidentified candidates for national office in 1996, agency memos show. NSA officials deny any wrongdoing, insisting that the memos were written by in house lawyers merely to help agency personnel comply with laws that forbid spying on U.S. citizens who aren't directly involved in foreign intelligence matters. But privacy advocates say the agency memos indicate the NSA intercepts large numbers of innocent conversations in its mission to eavesdrop on phone calls, faxes and other communications linked to terrorists and other national security risks. The National Security Agency memos are essentially instruction sheets telling NSA employees what to do in the event they intercept communications to or from certain prominent people. Privacy advocates say they reflect the large number of innocent conversations the NSA intercepts in its mission to counter national security threats: One of the documents is a December 1994 memo that deals with Carter's visit to Bosnia that year: " Any reports that reflect either his travels to Bosnia or his participation in efforts to end the war may identify him only as a 'U.S. person,'" officials wrote. "Only if Former President Carter eventually becomes an official envoy of the U.S. Government in this activity, could he then be identified as a 'former U.S. President.' "NSA officials also urged caution in dealing with reports about the first lady in a July 1993 memorandum: Mrs. Clinton may be identified in reports only by title (currently Chairperson of the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform) without prior approval when that title is necessary to understand or assess foreign intelligence and when the information being discussed relates to her official duties," they wrote. "As with other senior officials of the Executive Branch, no reports may be published concerning Mrs. Clinton's private life or activities absent evidence of criminal wrongdoing and even then only after review by senior NSA management and the (Office of the General Counsel ) ." NSA officials gave similar warnings regarding congressional campaigns in 1996. " We anticipate that as the 1996 election campaigns go on, there may be instances when references to political parties and candidates will be necessary to understand foreign intelligence or assess its importance. In such cases, unless you have prior approval for specific identification in accordance with (law), refer to the U.S. identity in generic terms only: a U.S. political party, a U.S. presidential candidate, a U.S. Senate candidate, etc. Remember that even when such terms are used, the context of the report could constitute an identification. " The Electronic Privacy Information Center obtained the memos, which were part of a lawsuit filed last year, under the Freedom of Information Act. The suit seeks information about the NSA's compliance with laws that forbid domestic surveillance. Republican. Robert Barr, Georgia., says the House Committee on Government Reform will examine the memos as part of larger hearings this summer into NSA activities. " I'm troubled by this," he says. "This information that we see today is only the tip of the iceberg of the vast number of conversations that are apparently picked up by the NSA. " Barr has spent the last two years looking into allegations that an NSA surveillance system popularly known as "Echelon" is scooping up millions of phone, fax and e-mail messages every hour. His inquiry follows a report in 1997 by the European Parliament that says that Echelon can monitor all such communications in Europe simultaneously. Barr once worked in the Central Intelligence Agency's office of legislative affairs, where he rose to assistant legislative counsel before leaving in 1978. But NSA officials emphasize that the memos show NSA operatives ignore information about U.S. citizens unless a court order authorizes its analysis. Even with a court order, they say, the NSA must show that the information is relevant to a matter of national security that crosses national borders. " NSA operates in strict accordance with U.S. laws and regulation in protecting the privacy rights" of Americans, the agency said in a statement. "Our activities are conducted with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards. " EPIC attorney David Sobel says the scope of NSA surveillance alone should give American citizens pause, " They are collecting a massive amount of information that affects a great many people," he says. "If a lot of what we have heard recently is true, it's not just a former president, it's not just the first lady, it's probably all of us. This is the first time real names have been added to what has been a theoretical discussion. It puts a real face on this issue. " Jeffrey Richelson, senior fellow at George Washington University's National Security Archive, says the release marks the first time in 25 years the NSA has revealed the identity of any American who was or may have been monitored by the agency. " There have been recent allegations that the intelligence community, through NSA, has improperly directed our signals intelligence capabilities against the private conversations of U.S. persons," Tenet testified. "I will say to this committee unequivocally that this is simply not the case. " The Defense Department's NSA traces its origins to the uniformed intelligence services that cracked numerous ciphers used by the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Now, as then, the NSA is widely believed to have the best surveillance technologies anywhere available. Most of its estimated 38,000 employees today are still members of the armed forces. But given that eavesdropping and deception are part of the agency's everyday existence, civil libertarians and the intelligence community have long regarded each other with suspicion. The NSA and its predecessor agencies, after all, routinely violated U.S. law from 1945 to 1975 by persuading telegraph carriers to let them copy cables they sent and received overseas. The nation first learned of those activities through hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee, then under the direction of Sen. Frank Church, also discovered that the NSA had used its powers to spy on anti-war activists like Jane Fonda and Benjamin Spock - again in violation of U.S. law. Before 1975, "there were really no legal constraints on NSA," says James Bamford, who documented the story of the NSA from inception to the 1980s in his 1982 bestseller The Puzzle Palace. Bamford, for his part, remains concerned that many of the 170 pages of materials submitted to EPIC have been censored. Nonetheless, "those documents really didn't suggest to me they have gone back to the bad old days," he says. The European Parliament has issued two reports in the last three years that say the United States, together with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, eavesdrop on virtually every phone call, fax, e-mail and satellite signal in Europe. Chief among NSA goals, the reports say, is industrial espionage for U.S. companies. NSA officials say they spy on foreign companies to reveal cases of bribery and corruption, but nothing else.U.S. Spy Agency Under Fire
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