The year's biggest stories and the trend toward an American police state.
While some “journalists” would have you believe the biggest
stories of 2013 were about twerking celebrities and over-hyped real-life
courtroom sagas, much bigger events were happening with far more
lasting national significance. The foundation of an American police
state is already laid and making its existence known, while most of the
country remains blissfully focused on sports, reality shows,
establishment pseudo-news, and other distractions.
It would require an encyclopedia to cover all of the injustices,
scandals, and brutality that took place in 2013. This list is designed
to illustrate certain trends and significant stories from the past
year. If Americans don’t fix their apathy and disengagement toward
causes that matter, we can expect these trends to continue toward their
logical conclusions: an increasingly repressive police state dominating
the lives people inside these borders and beyond.
Checkpoints, Warrantless Searches Become a Way of Life
The state of the 4th amendment is in truly bad shape, given the
prevalence of warrantless checkpoints and warrantless bag searches being
used all around the country for various reasons. No longer restricted
to airport terminals, the unconstitutional tactics are now being used in
subways, bus stations, on bridges, at parades, and anywhere else the
government can get away with them. This is facilitated by the palpable
fear of terrorism and with financial incentives from the federal
government.
In what was dubbed “
Operation Independence,”
the federal government along with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department
staged a high-visibility terror drill in the LA subway this July.
Deputies dressed in paramilitary garb
teamed up with agents from the TSA and DHS to require travelers to open
up their bags and prove their innocence before being allowed to
commute. These tactics have sadly become commonplace in many major
cities.
Security measures at major events have gotten increasingly invasive. At the annual
‘Mackinac Bridge Walk’
in St. Ignace, Michigan, up to 40,000 walkers were subjected to
warrantless bag searches in the interest of event security. In Chicago,
warrantless bag searches were performed on public sidewalks during a
celebratory parade for the Blackhawks’ hockey championship, and were again performed along the 26-mile track of the
Chicago Marathon. A famous
parade in Pasadena, California, is used as an excuse to search the interiors of hundreds of vehicles who wish to park on public streets.
The “stop and frisk” phenomenon was alive and well in 2013. The
appalling practice involves police stopping pedestrians, usually pushing
them up against a wall and then patting them down, searching their
pockets, and opening up their purses and bags. The practice has been
notorious in New York City, which not only has aggressive enforcement on
the streets but also allows cops to
roam around inside private apartment buildings and search tenants. Stop and frisk is also work in
Philadelphia,
Detroit,
northwest Indiana, and other areas.
Sobriety checkpoints have been around a long time, but are increasing
in offensiveness. Checks for sobriety have turned into opportunities to
search people’s vehicles. People are sometimes being
forced off the roads into parking lots
and sniffed with dogs in order to be permitted to continue driving down
public streets. Some sobriety checkpoints are being dubbed
“no refusal”
because anyone who refuses to prove their innocence through a breath
test will be strapped down to a table and have their blood forcibly
taken from them. New
saliva swab analyzers
now allows police to detect and arrest people based on on them having
things like marijuana and prescription drugs in their systems while
driving.
Not to be outdone by local cops, the federal government is setting up checkpoints in reportedly 60 communities to
take blood and saliva samples from drivers in a multi-million dollar “survey.”
The reasons for warrantless searches is only limited by the imaginations of the police. There are now regular
license and vehicle inspection checkpoints,
fruit possession checkpoints,
firework possession checkpoints,
tampon possession searches, searches for
canned beverages, roadside
smog checkpoints, and more.
DoD Program 1033 Militarizing Local Police Departments
MRAP vehicles
Those who are paying attention are seeing the constant notices of
military equipment from overseas war-zones being dispersed to domestic
police departments. These giveaways are usually in the form of armored
vehicles (as far as the public knows). This is all made possible by
the Defense Department’s Program 1033. In place since 1997, the program
allows the DOD to give away the equipment — often free of charge — to
local police departments who apply for the equipment grants.
This year has been the year of the MRAP, or
Mine Resistant Armor Protected
vehicle. For the first time these fighting vehicles, costing an
upwards of $600,000 each, are being sent out to American cops, and in
rapid fashion. The hulking trucks, which come with armor plating, gun
ports, bullet-proof glass, and a gun turret on top, end up being used on
SWAT raids in residential America.
The program dispersed more than half a billion dollars worth of
equipment in 2012, and 2013 is expected to keep that pace, if not exceed
it. There is no oversight over Program 1033 and the Department of
Defense has never been audited, meaning there is overwhelming room for
fraud and abuse. The U.S. taxpayers have been burdened with purchasing
this equipment and now it is being given away without compensation;
without auction. And no one really knows the full scope of the project.
One does not have to look far for examples of local departments
becoming militarized. MRAP acquisitions have taken place in every
state, the latest including
Alabama,
Indiana,
Texas,
Idaho,
California,
New York,
North Carolina,
South Carolina,
Minnesota,
Michigan,
Illinois, and
Nevada.
To understand the implications of what a militarized police force is
capable of, consider the extravagant anti-terror drill performed by LAPD
this year at the National Homeland Security Association’s conference in
June. Gunfire echoed through downtown Los Angeles, bombs exploded, and
helicopters swooped low among tall office buildings in a demonstrated
response to two terrorists in a pickup truck. Paramilitary police
pulled up in a bomb-dropping armored vehicle, and engaged in a mock
firefight. Guests from around the nation and world attended the
conference to marvel at militarized law enforcement in action. The
performance was funded by the federal government and was designed to
inspire more departments to become militarized. Footage from the drill
is available below:
The TSA Continues to Expand Its Reach
The Transportation Security Administration had another year
characterized by abuse, theft, and violations of civil rights. There
was a steady stream of
children being tormented,
property being stolen, and
genitals being grabbed this year, as usual. Americans are being searched without probable cause or warrants while being
threatened with arrest over loudspeakers
if they talk back to the checkpoint agents. There are too many of
these stories to count and this behavior has been standard operating
procedure since the TSA was created. Some of the agency’s recent
advancements deserve to be mentioned, however.
Checkpoints are now involving a much deeper look into traveler’s
private personal information. Nothing short of a criminal background
check will allow a person to fly in America anymore. The new
security program
involves gaining access to travelers’ private employment information,
vehicle registrations, travel history, property ownership records,
physical characteristics, tax identification numbers, past travel
itineraries, law enforcement information, “intelligence” information,
passport numbers, frequent flier information, and other “identifiers”
linked to DHS databases. The TSA is allowing people to purchase the
title of “trusted traveler” if they willingly submit their biometric
fingerprint scans into a FBI database, submit to a criminal background
check, and
pay the TSA a fee of $85.00 for a five-year PreCheck membership.
The TSA has evidently expanded its reach to parking lots this year,
after encouraging and overseeing airport security plans that involve
opening up parked cars
and performing warrantless searches on their interiors. Although the
TSA may not be directly involved with performing these searches, they
are approved by the TSA and some airports claim they are mandated by the
TSA.
The response of may Americans is to avoid the TSA by ceasing air
travel. This is a shortsighted solution, as the TSA has never been
bound to airports. As one
TSA official pointed out,
“We are not the Airport Security Administration.” Indeed, avoiding the
TSA became more challenging in 2013, and is bound to become more
difficult in the future.
TSA agents are not making regular appearances on other modes of
transportation. Special armed TSA units — known as VIPR teams — are
showing up at public venues, sporting events, train terminals, music
festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations in order to “surprise” the
terrorists with
“suspicionless” searches.
“The security at airports has increased so the bad guys are now
traveling on the trains and buses,” said TSA agent George Robinson at a
surprise TSA “Spot Checks” at an Austin railway. The TSA was active in and around the
Superbowl this year, one of many places many never expected to see the TSA operating.
To soften their villainous image, the TSA has been spending taxpayer money to produce
cartoons designed to propagandize children
into accepting warrantless checkpoints. Getting searched by strangers
in uniformed is presented as fun and exciting — and vital to safety.
The Surveillance State, Revealed
(Warner Brothers)
This year we experienced a lot of mainstream discussion about the
breadth of the Federal Government’s domestic surveillance grid, in large
part due to the revelations from NSA contractor-gone-rogue, Edward
Snowden. Snowden discovered over the course of his employment with the
NSA that the American public was completely unaware of the extent of
spying being performed by the government on its own people, and felt
compelled to go public. In June, Snowden went to journalist Glenn
Greenwald with up to 200,000 NSA documents to prove what the government
was up to. Greenwald has since released a series of damning articles
exposing the NSA spy grid, which have received international attention.
Now officially charged by the U.S. government with espionage, Snowden
has been in hiding overseas for over 6 months. But his leaks have
provided valuable insight into the operation of the government. Its a
bit ironic that the man exposing the spy program is labeled the spy, but
I digress.
Greenwald’s articles have revealed that the NSA’s
modus operandi is to “
collect it all,” meaning every collectible form of communication or data. To this end, the NSA has been utilizing what it calls the
Prism program,
under which the agency has obtained direct access to the systems of
Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. With this access
to internet traffic, the NSA uses a program called
XKeyscore,
which is surveillance tool that collects “nearly everything a user does
on the internet.” One presentation of XKeyscore claims the program
collects the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well
as their metadata.
“I, sitting at my desk,” Snowden said, could “wiretap anyone, from
you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I
had a personal email”.
Another recent leak revealed that the NSA is “
getting vast volumes” of records of individual’s physical
locations from their cell phones
— faster than it can process and store — as the agency surveils the
nation’s mobile phone networks. It goes deeper than that though.
Greenwald reported that the NSA is collecting
information about phone calls
from millions of Americans daily. Such information includes the
numbers of both parties on the call, their locations, the time, and the
duration of all calls made on the network.
Border Security as Oppressive as Ever
Vehicles are searched indiscriminately at a border checkpoint. (Source:
Eric Gay/AP Photo)
A constant barrage of stories of abuse from U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol have arisen in 2013. These did not only occur at the physical
borders, but at the numerous domestic checkpoints that appear all over
U.S. roadways across the southwest. Up to 100 miles into the country,
permanent roadblocks exist where travelers are asked by federal agents
to prove their citizenship and often subjected to searches and other
harassment.
At one such internal checkpoint in California, a man named
Robert Trudell
decided he was going to remain silent in his car until the agents let
him continue traveling down the roadway. As he calmly sat in his car
and photographed the scene, agents bashed in his window with a club and
extracted him from his car. Police State USA has viewed numerous other
videos of harassment at border patrol checkpoints, and find their
prominent existence on U.S. highways to be very disconcerting.
Earlier this year, the official watchdog over civil rights for the Department of Homeland Security gave the green light for
“suspicionless” seizure of any electronics
they encounter from travelers crossing the border. Thousands of
laptops, cell phones, and other personal property has been confiscated
by customs agents, forcing the owner to spend lots of time and money to
attempt to reclaim the items — not to mention the loss of privacy
suffered by the owners.
Border Patrol and DHS has taken an interest in harassing small
aircraft pilots as well, as we have seen multiple such stories this
year.
Reports follow a pattern:
CBP agents approach pilots, request aviation paperwork, and conduct an
extensive searches of their aircraft, often including removal of all
contents. Agents have been tight-lipped about the reason or
justification for these warrantless searches. Taking the harassment up a
notch, DHS ordered one hobbyist glider pilot named
Robin Fleming to the ground for a search. He says he was threatened with being shot down from the sky.
The Destructive Drug War Wages On
The War on Drugs has been the source of incomprehensible levels of
injustice, government corruption, brutality, and abuse for decades in
the United States. Although year 2013 represents no marked difference
from the status quo, these Drug War abuses constitute far too great a
threat to go unmentioned in this list.
We saw countless people imprisoned for non-violent, victimless
crimes. I say countless because the numbers are truly unknown when
considering all of the federal, state, county, and city-level jails
housing inmates for drugs. What we do know is that there
1,571,013 prisoners in state and federal prisons in 2012, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Of the federal inmates, around
half of the prisoners
are being locked up because of the War on Drugs. The number of lives
ruined in the name of prohibition cannot possibly be tallied. Many are
going to prison for decades — even life imprisonment — without ever
having committed a violent offense. One such example was the case of
Jerry Duval,
a farmer who was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for growing
marijuana for medicinal use in the manner he was licensed to in the
state of Michigan.
The Drug War gives the government the perfect vehicle for expanding
its ability to legally steal from citizens, and this year has been no
exception. Thanks to a legal maneuver known as
Civil Asset Forfeiture,
government agents can confiscate property and cash from anyone that
they merely “suspect” of being involved in the drug trade. Thanks to
recent advancements in domestic spying capabilities, the
DEA has managed to double its amount of seizures
since 2001. The owners of the seized property don’t even have to be
charged with a crime, but often have to spend a small fortune in court
to prove their innocence and get their possessions back. This practice
varies across the country, but the prospect of keeping seized property
provides a direct incentive for confiscation in any agency where it is
used. For
Darren Kent,
a disabled widower in New Jersey, Drug War forfeiture could allow
police to confiscate his house, his bank account, his 2 vehicles, and
other property — all because of illegal plants he allegedly grew in his
basement.
The
enforcement of these silly drug laws has become increasingly aggressive
and brutal. When someone is suspected of committing a non-violent drug
offense, there is often a team of masked, paramilitary SWAT agents sent
in the middle of the night to break down the doors and windows of their
home, hold the occupants at gunpoint, and
shoot any family pets
that dare to challenge their presence. As one could imagine, this
insane policy of “no-knock raids” over drugs leads to an unending
torrent of violence and bloodshed inside people’s homes. In 2013, Los
Angeles Sheriff’s deputies gunned down 80-year-old
Eugene Mallory in his bed during a legal home-invasion to investigate if he was making meth. Earlier this month, police negligently shot
Krystal Barrows, mother of three, in the head during a drug raid in Chillicothe, Ohio.
In case its not obvious, prohibition laws leave open the legal
doorways for many innocent people to feel the brunt of the police
state. In 2013, a family of
maple syrup farmers in Illinois was raided on suspicion of making meth. The
Harte family of Kansas
says that after buying hydroponics equipment for their indoor garden,
police stormed their house in a manner that reminded them of Navy SEALs
storming the bin Laden residence. Urban garden advocate
John Kohler, of GrowingYourGreens.com,
had his home searched because police thought he might be growing
illegal plants in his house. One does not have to look far for more
examples of drug raids gone bad.
Not even the elderly can escape from the harassment of strident drug
enforcers have. Tennessee police pulled over and harassed an elderly
couple because their car had a
Ohio State University bumper sticker
that the police officer thought might represent a marijuana leaf. A
Utah man’s final moments with his recently-deceased wife were rudely
interrupted when police barged into his home to
confiscate her prescription painkillers.
It should be obvious that drug prohibition gives perverts and sexual
predators a convenient place to legally abuse citizens while getting
paid to do so. In June, a story broke about a female driver being asked
to
lift her shirt and shake her bra
multiple times for a police officer who wanted her to prove she didn’t
have drugs packed in it. In Texas, two bikini-clad women were given
cavity searches on the side of the highway. “You’re going to go up my
private parts?”
Brandy Hamilton
asked the officer. “Yes, ma’am,” the officer responded, before jamming
a finger into each of their crotches with the same glove.
These forced cavity searches were a regular occurrence in 2013, in
what can only be described as cases of legal rape. After rolling a
stop sign,
David Eckert of Deming, Utah,
was detained and taken to a hospital, and for hours he was subjected to
manual finger probes of his anus, forced to take an enema and defecate
in front of police officers, forcibly X-rayed, and ultimately given a
full-blown colonoscopy to attempt to find drugs in his colon. And this
case is not unique. An
American woman returning to the United States
from Mexico was detained at the border near El Paso, chained to a
hospital bed and given a forcible gynecological exam, involving finger
penetration, forced defecation, and X-rays and a CT-scan. A 26-year-old
Oregon man named
Jason Barnes was forcibly catheterized by police after he was stopped by police for riding a bicycle without lights.
Stories from 2013 also should have made it glaringly obvious how easy
it is to wrongly convict people and ruin innocent lives. In February,
the
U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled
that “a court can presume” an alert by a drug-sniffing dog provides
probable cause for a search, even if the dot is not fully trained and
lacks any documentation of its accuracy record. If animals deciding
your fate is not disconcerting enough, consider what happens when the
government agents decide to say you possessed contraband when you
actually didn’t. Tens of thousands of drug cases may have been
corrupted by a Massachusetts crime-lab chemist named
Annie Dookhan who collaborated with prosecutors to achieve more convictions. A
Georgia judge
ordered police officers to frame a woman with drugs after she refused
to have sex with him. The potential for abusing “possession” laws are
endless.
Schools Groom Children for Life in Police State USA
Police execute a lockdown at a government school. (Source:
Yuma Sun / AP)
Government schools have always been the source of indoctrination and
inadequate education, but the rise of security hysteria and
zero-tolerance policies has made them into veritable conditioning
centers for life in the American police state.
As a matter of policy in most compulsory government schools, students
are subjected to warrantless searches of their bags and lockers, dog
sniffs, and are even being forced to give urine samples without probable
cause. Drug enforcement and education takes on a variety of
different forms. In Indiana, police officers subjected a class of
5th graders to a “simulated drug raid”
in a “drug awareness” event that resulted in one student getting
attacked by the police dog that was demonstrating how it might search
children for drugs if the police were crashing a party at someone’s
home.
With modern technology, they are being watched and listened under
sophisticated surveillance systems, sometimes which are fed directly to
police departments. Some schools are making students carry
RFID badges or use
biometric scanners to track attendance and movement. Their bodies are forced to
endure mass-medication at earlier and earlier ages.
Many schools use what have been known as
“isolation booths” for children who misbehave, which in practice are tantamount to solitary confinement in a dark closet.
Parking lots are subject to warrantless searches; some so draconian that high school students are getting
felonies for leaving pocket knives
locked in their cars. In fact, it is common to have police officers
regularly in school so administrators can outsource discipline to courts
and jails. An
undercover cop disguised as a high-schooler in Temecula, California, befriended an autistic boy and convinced him to purchase marijuana in order to arrest him.
The curriculum is unsurprisingly pro-statism, with recent (and glaring) examples involving students being asked to
justify repealing amendments out of the Bill of Rights and being taught that
government is like “family” and should be obeyed.
In addition, schools are being
locked down at every possible opportunity. A school in Idaho went into “full prison mode” when a student brought a
folding shovel. A Long Island school went into lockdown when a child had a
lime green Nerf toy.
The lockdowns are becoming so routine that
police departments and schools are running terror drills to make sure
they run smoothly. The
El Paso SWAT team
staged a “surprise” terror drill in a school in which police charged
into the school, used simulated gunfire, and detonated concussion
grenades while they took over the school — to the surprise of everyone
except for the principal. A similar terror drill was conducted in a
Chicago school “in an effort to provide our teachers and students some familiarity with the sound of gunfire.” An
Oregon school
hired a man to wear a mask and carry a realistic gun into a faculty
meeting and surprise teachers with realistic sounding gunfire in order
to test their “readiness.” In Ohio, a
mock hijacking was staged on a school bus containing children so that the SWAT team could practice its explosive rescue techniques.
More Dangerous Decisions from the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court
SCOTUS made a few rulings in 2013 regarding the police state. While
certainly not the worst court decisions we’ve endured, they can be added
to a long list of bad ones. This year again made it clear that justice
appointees from neither party are dedicated to constitutional
principles and proper legal interpretations.
In
Salinas v. Texas,
the court ruled 5-4 that when a suspect doesn’t answer a question
during an interrogation, his silence can be used as evidence in court to
demonstrate guilt. Genovevo Salinas was convicted of a 1992 murder.
Salinas cooperated with detectives in answering some questions, but
refrained from answering others. He remained silent when questioned
about the murder weapon. Prosecutors used his silence as evidence of
guilt during trial, which has now been upheld by both Texas courts and
the U.S. Supreme Court. Critics say that this decision has compromised a
person’s right to remain silent.
The second case being called to attention is
Bowman v. Monsanto.
An Indiana farmer named Vernon Bowman was sued by agri-giant and
seed-modifier Monsanto for purchasing seeds from a grain elevator and
planting them in his fields. Monsanto claimed that planting those seeds
violated the corporation’s patent rights over them, since they were
genetically-modified and considered Monsanto’s intellectual property.
Since Bowman “replicated” the company’s intellectual property, he was
sued for nearly $85,000.00 in damages. Bowman contended that existing
patent law did not cover life forms, and that he had broken no laws. “
If they don’t want me to go to the elevator and buy that grain, then Congress should pass a law saying you can’t do it,” said Bowman.
The Supreme Court took up the Bowman case, and disappointingly sided
9-0
with Monsanto. Rather than accurately declaring that the 120-year-old
patent law did not offer any legal coverage of self-replicating seeds as
they reproduce in perpetuity, the court made a landmark decision and
changed the mechanics of patent law forever without an act of Congress.
This was the very definition of legislating from the bench, and gives
corporations the leverage they need to punish consumers for “breaking”
laws that don’t really accurately cover modern technologies like
genetically-modified lifeforms and computer software.
Lastly was the
Maryland v. King
case, in which the Supreme Court affirmed 5-4 that a police department
may seize DNA as a part of a standard booking procedure — like
fingerprinting — for people arrested and accused of a crime. The DNA
may then be put into a database, stored indefinitely, and compared to
existing cases, despite the fact that the accused person had not yet
been convicted of any crimes.
Health Care Law Threatens Individual Rights & Privacy
The Obamacare logo
There are a lot of reasons to object to the compulsion of all
individuals to purchase corporate services — also known as the
“Affordable Care Act.” For brevity and relevance, we will focus here on
the aspects that increase the power of the police state.
2013 was the last year that Americans could live and breathe in the
United States legally without being compelled to insurance packages from
private corporations. Should a person fail or refuse to purchase
insurance, he will be subjected to some hefty fines from the federal
government, enforced by the IRS.
The fines have been subject to quite a bit of disinformation, and are
more significant than most people realize. A common talking point is
that the fines are “only” $95, being spread by disinfo agents on the
internet and even official radio ads released by the government. The
part that is being omitted by these people is that the $95 fine is only
valid for a small group of low-income taxpayers, for the first year
(2014) only. The fines increase dramatically if the person has an
average income or has a family, as well as increasing in stages in 2015
and 2016.
Police State USA discussed the details of the fines in a
previous article. We consider the mandates to be a very serious breach of liberty that come with widespread implications.
We also learned this year that the upcoming health care law will
include a considerable amount of privacy concerns. With the creation of
the “
Federal Data Services Hub,”
a trove of personal information will be collected on all customers and
shared among several agencies. The information “includes, but may not
be limited to”: Social Security numbers, income, family size,
citizenship and immigration status, gender, ethnicity, email addresses,
incarceration records, enrollment status in other health plans, tax
information, employment information, patient medical records, pregnancy
status, list of disabilities, welfare information, and demographic data
(e.g. address, birthdate, physical description…).
All this personal information will be accessible by bureaucrats
ranging from the Social Security Administration, the IRS, the Department
of Homeland Security, the Veterans Administration, Office of Personnel
Management, the Department of Defense and the Peace Corps. And that is
in addition to the Medicaid databases linked to the Hub. To be forced
into a system such as this by is indeed a great detriment to personal
freedom.
