The intentional erosion of public privacy is no accident. It’s not merely a simplistically stupid overreaction to the dangerous world we live in either. It is a very deliberate and nefarious plan being intentionally implemented by the American oligarchy; i.e., the super rich and the super powerful. This is precisely why the establishment freaked out about the Edward Snowden revelations, and it is why every single minor event is immediately manipulated into an excuse to give the government and intelligence agencies more power.
While we already know a lot about the NSA’s unconstitutional and fascist policies when it comes to the web, the decimation of the 4th Amendment is also being eagerly practiced at a more local level by police departments across the country. USA Today published a very important article on this topic earlier today. Here are some excerpts:
WASHINGTON — At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.
Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person’s house without first obtaining a search warrant.
Complete and total lawlessness.
Current and former federal officials say the information is critical for keeping officers safe if they need to storm buildings or rescue hostages. But privacy advocates and judges have nonetheless expressed concern about the circumstances in which law enforcement agencies may be using the radars — and the fact that they have so far done so without public scrutiny.
Should the primary concern of society be to keep police officers safe, when many officers have absolutely zero regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to the public? They signed up for a dangerous job, whereas these poor souls were just their innocent victims:
19-Month-Old Toddler in Critical Condition After Cops Throw Flash Bang Grenade into Playpen
Video of the Day – This Is What Happens When You Call the Cops
Now, back to the USA Today piece.
Agents’ use of the radars was largely unknown until December, when a federal appeals court in Denver said officers had used one before they entered a house to arrest a man wanted for violating his parole. The judges expressed alarm that agents had used the new technology without a search warrant, warning that “the government’s warrantless use of such a powerful tool to search inside homes poses grave Fourth Amendment questions.”
Other radar devices have far more advanced capabilities, including three-dimensional displays of where people are located inside a building, according to marketing materials from their manufacturers. One is capable of being mounted on a drone. And the Justice Department has funded research to develop systems that can map the interiors of buildings and locate the people within them.
The radars were first designed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent the latest example of battlefield technology finding its way home to civilian policing and bringing complex legal questions with it.
More evidence that the “war on terror” is coming home, and the targets will be average citizens engaged in non-crimes.
Those concerns are especially thorny when it comes to technology that lets the police determine what’s happening inside someone’s home. The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that the Constitution generally bars police from scanning the outside of a house with a thermal camera unless they have a warrant, and specifically noted that the rule would apply to radar-based systems that were then being developed.
Still, the radars appear to have drawn little scrutiny from state or federal courts. The federal appeals court’s decision published last month was apparently the first by an appellate court to reference the technology or its implications.
But yeah, USA! USA!
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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Let’s not forget this one as well. The 4th gettin’ slammed today ain’t it?
http://fee.org/freeman/detail/youll-never-guess-whos-trying-to-hack-your-iphone
“Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
In legal terms the United States is currently in a State of War, thus constitutional rights are suspended if the Sovereign deems necessary (under these extraordinary circumstances, actions carried out by the Executive branch cannot be overseen by Congress or the Judiciary). Additionally, ordinary Americans are utterly ignorant about their own legal system and most of them don’t even know the contents of the Constitution.
Consequently, Mike Krieger’s post is pure bullshit, period.
This comment right here is exactly why I write everything I do. Perfectly describes the fascist mentality of the power structure and also highlights why the never-ending “war on terror” is such a dangerous sham. It allows little Nazis like this person to justify tyranny and authoritarianism.
4th, 5th, 6th…!
😮 http://humansarefree.com/search?q=police
….and we taxpayers are paying for all these clowns to spy on us as in to “protect and serve” and if that’s not enough we’re also buying all these damned “toys” while they violate our 4th Amendment rights. Wake up America….how damned stupid do we have to be? G
i had read about this technology a few years ago when they were developing it. i hadn’t heard anything about it for a while, and i was suprised to hear that domestic police were being allowed to use it.
pretty impressive. this is really quite a technology. unfortunately there is no upside to this technology whatsoever. it’s purely for hunting human beings. it is in fact going to be popularized and justified on the grounds of ‘saving lives’ by helping police prepare for confrontations .
but just like tasers, it will not be used to the effect of saving lives, simply of being one more tool in the toolkit of subduing a human.
there is a lot of research and development now into shallow ground penetrating radar. the israeli’s are developing this in response to the large number of tunnels they had to deal with in the gaza operation.
whether being done by israel or others, ground penetrating radar has existed for many decades in the gas and oil industries but it is not optimized for shallow depths ( above 100meters in depth) .
the upside to this radar is massive in the non-police state fields as a massive technology bonanza will be realized in the field of anthropology, biology, shallow ground research in geology/hydrology (water flow).
in fact, i am antcipating a truly massive array of basic science and discoveries as a result of the perfection of shallow ground radar.
this technology already does exist in some ways with boat deployed sonar for ocean floor sensing. however, it’s simply not really been developed to the resolution and reliability necessary for the kind of revolution one might expect.
soon, the very ground beneath our feet will yeild many many discoveries because of this awesome technology. unfortunately, the motives behind building the technology are military. this seems to be a pattern in the history of technology. and its existence is often overemphasized to rationalize massive miltary expenditures on tech. however, in some cases, wehther you like it or not, military technology truly does revolutionize the civilian sector and helps develop basic sciences.
if not for much of the encryption of work of turing and others, funded by militaries in the west, you’d never have gotten bitcoin so quickly! and mike i know how much you love bitcoin despite it’s recent price crash:)
Supporting Article –
Ron Paul: Who Does the US Empire Serve? 🙁
http://humansarefree.com/2015/01/ron-paul-who-does-us-empire-serve.html
Another supporting article 😉
The Government Is Spying On Us Through Our Computers, Phones, Cars, Buses, Streetlights, At Airports And On The Street, Via Mobile Scanners And Drones, Through Our Smart Meters, And In Many Other Ways!
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/the-government-is-spying-on-us-through-our-computers-phones-cars-buses-streetlights-at-airports-and-on-the-street-via-mobile-scanners-and-drones-through-our-smart-meters-and-in-many-other-ways.html