POLICE STATE: After pointlessly groping countless Americans, the TSA is keeping a secret watchlist of those who fight back
“I need a witness!” exclaimed the security screener at
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Because I had forgotten to
remove my belt before going through a scanner, he explained, I must
undergo an “enhanced patdown.” I told him that if he jammed his hand
into my groin, I’d file a formal complaint. So he summoned his
supervisor to keep an eye on the proceedings.
I thought of this exchange last week when the New York Times revealed that
the Transportation Security Administration has created a secret
watchlist for troublesome passengers. The TSA justified the list by
saying that its screeners were assaulted 34 times last year, but did not
release any details about the alleged assaults.
Naturally, the TSA’s official definition of troublemaking goes well
beyond punching its officers. According to a confidential memo, any
behavior that is “offensive and without legal justification” can land a
traveler on the list, as can any “challenges to the safe and effective
completion of screening.” Anyone who has ever “loitered” near a
checkpoint could also make the list. So could any woman who pushes a
screener’s hands away from her breasts.
The memo would be more accurate if it stated that anyone who fails to
unquestioningly submit to all the TSA’s demands would be found guilty
of insubordination. As an attorney for the American Civil Liberties
Union, Hugh Handeyside, told the Washington Post,
the policy gives the agency wide latitude to “blacklist people
arbitrarily and essentially punish them for asserting their rights.”
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey) expressed similar worry. “I am concerned about the civil-liberty implications of such a list,” she said.
The watchlist would seem less perilous if the TSA were not one of
most incompetent agencies on Earth. After a series of undercover tests
at multiple airports across the country, the Department of Homeland
Security concluded last year that TSA officers and equipment had failed
to detect mock threats roughly 80% of the time. (In Minneapolis, an undercover team succeeded in smuggling weapons and mock bombs past airport screeners 95% of the time.) An earlier DHS investigation found
the TSA utterly unable to detect weapons, fake explosives and other
contraband, regardless of how extensive its pat-downs were.
Last week, a Portland, Oregon, family was having a private conversation in their Echo-equipped home. Among other things, they discussed hardwood flooring. Later, the man received a call from an employee of his who lives in Seattle, more than 170 miles away. The employee told him he had received a message with the audio of the conversation.
As KIRO 7 in Seattle reported, the couple initially did not believe him. The woman — who only went by Danielle in the interview to protect her privacy — said, “At first, my husband was, like, ‘no you didn't!’ And the (recipient of the message) said ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘oh gosh, you really did hear us.’”
They unplugged all of the Echo devices in their home. They had one in every room — including the bedroom — controlling lights, heating and air conditioning, music, and their security system. As The New American reported previously, Alexa is set to come standard with many new homes. As IoT devices become more and more a part of people’s lives, society is closer and closer to crossing a line into the panopticon.
Concerns about privacy have come up several times over IoT devices. As this writer reported in August 2015, a teenager in Issaquah, Washington, became so concerned about her mother's new Amazon Echo and its ability to listen in on all conversations in the living room that she removed it and hid it from her mother. Her mother told the New York Post, "I guess there is a difference between deciding to share something and having something captured by something that you don't know when it's listening.” Now — almost two years later — that statement has been punctuated by proof positive.
As this writer wrote in that 2015 article:
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Fine-Tuning The Surveillance State
We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state.
Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and practically abrogated.
The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, within the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.
Currently there are 22 states that have made a crime of what is referred to as “disturbing the school,” and this has led to thousands of arrests of students for such things as interrupting a teacher, or even belching in class.
Schools have an increased police presence; however, as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students.
Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the “troupe” of juveniles, driving the herd.
Collective, community thought is the mantra. Advertisements on the radio for high-school sports list all of the acceptable skills that sports convey: leadership, teamwork, cooperation, etc. Gone is personal development, let alone “fun,” the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective “consciousness” has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed... directed by authorities or “approved” controllers/managers. Such thought is supplemented by the actions of those authorities, mislabeled as “government” when the appropriate term is rule.
An article ran out of News 4, posted on NBC Washington on 5/17/18 entitled Potential Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over D.C., Md., Va. It is worth reading, as it details the Stingray technology (carried in a briefcase) that capture cellular telephones by tricking them into believing the devices are cell phone towers. This means the phones are tracked, and the government is taking information on them surreptitiously.
Joe Pinkstone wrote another article for Daily Mail entitled Google’s disturbing vision of TOTAL data collection, released on 5/18/18. The article is very informative, and it presents all of the information (in list form) collected both by Google and Facebook for their data files.
China has recently rolled out a new camera facial recognition system that can sift through a billion people in a matter of seconds. As written in previous articles, Bill Gates and other corporate investors plan to place 500 satellites into orbit and provide total global coverage in real-time with high-resolution cameras. Cameras and devices have been incorporated into appliances within people’s homes, with links to both law enforcement and private sector corporate monitors with ties to the government.
One of the greatest problems with all of this is the fostered dependency on these electronic gadgets where many (if not most) people believe they cannot do without them: cell phones, computers, and social media outlets. Every week a new report or story surfaces that shows just how far the government and the corporate interests are pushing this electronic dependency, while the schools are shaping the consciousness of the public and making it ever more malleable. Toward what end? Toward the one that recurs throughout history. We have been warned by Orwell, by Solzhenitsyn, and many others.
Whether we will heed those warnings and take preventative measures remains to be seen. The definition of tyranny can be measured and defined within the words of the Declaration of Independence.
We are seeing such a state metastasizing by the day, as the surveillance state is fine-tuned for the final act...a performance that has not happened but is entirely predictable by any who examine the course of history and our past.
Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and practically abrogated.
The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, within the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.
Currently there are 22 states that have made a crime of what is referred to as “disturbing the school,” and this has led to thousands of arrests of students for such things as interrupting a teacher, or even belching in class.
Schools have an increased police presence; however, as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students.
Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the “troupe” of juveniles, driving the herd.
Collective, community thought is the mantra. Advertisements on the radio for high-school sports list all of the acceptable skills that sports convey: leadership, teamwork, cooperation, etc. Gone is personal development, let alone “fun,” the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective “consciousness” has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed... directed by authorities or “approved” controllers/managers. Such thought is supplemented by the actions of those authorities, mislabeled as “government” when the appropriate term is rule.
An article ran out of News 4, posted on NBC Washington on 5/17/18 entitled Potential Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over D.C., Md., Va. It is worth reading, as it details the Stingray technology (carried in a briefcase) that capture cellular telephones by tricking them into believing the devices are cell phone towers. This means the phones are tracked, and the government is taking information on them surreptitiously.
Joe Pinkstone wrote another article for Daily Mail entitled Google’s disturbing vision of TOTAL data collection, released on 5/18/18. The article is very informative, and it presents all of the information (in list form) collected both by Google and Facebook for their data files.
China has recently rolled out a new camera facial recognition system that can sift through a billion people in a matter of seconds. As written in previous articles, Bill Gates and other corporate investors plan to place 500 satellites into orbit and provide total global coverage in real-time with high-resolution cameras. Cameras and devices have been incorporated into appliances within people’s homes, with links to both law enforcement and private sector corporate monitors with ties to the government.
One of the greatest problems with all of this is the fostered dependency on these electronic gadgets where many (if not most) people believe they cannot do without them: cell phones, computers, and social media outlets. Every week a new report or story surfaces that shows just how far the government and the corporate interests are pushing this electronic dependency, while the schools are shaping the consciousness of the public and making it ever more malleable. Toward what end? Toward the one that recurs throughout history. We have been warned by Orwell, by Solzhenitsyn, and many others.
Whether we will heed those warnings and take preventative measures remains to be seen. The definition of tyranny can be measured and defined within the words of the Declaration of Independence.
We are seeing such a state metastasizing by the day, as the surveillance state is fine-tuned for the final act...a performance that has not happened but is entirely predictable by any who examine the course of history and our past.
Amazon Echo Story Illustrates Dangers of Putting Surveillance Devices in Your Home
With the report that Amazon’s Echo recorded a family’s private conversation and sent the audio file to a person in the family’s contact list, privacy concerns about the Internet of Things (IoT) are in the news again. And while Amazon is downplaying this example, the reality is that Alexa — Echo’s voice assistant — like many other IoT platforms and features, is a very real threat to privacy.Last week, a Portland, Oregon, family was having a private conversation in their Echo-equipped home. Among other things, they discussed hardwood flooring. Later, the man received a call from an employee of his who lives in Seattle, more than 170 miles away. The employee told him he had received a message with the audio of the conversation.
As KIRO 7 in Seattle reported, the couple initially did not believe him. The woman — who only went by Danielle in the interview to protect her privacy — said, “At first, my husband was, like, ‘no you didn't!’ And the (recipient of the message) said ‘You sat there talking about hardwood floors.’ And we said, ‘oh gosh, you really did hear us.’”
They unplugged all of the Echo devices in their home. They had one in every room — including the bedroom — controlling lights, heating and air conditioning, music, and their security system. As The New American reported previously, Alexa is set to come standard with many new homes. As IoT devices become more and more a part of people’s lives, society is closer and closer to crossing a line into the panopticon.
Concerns about privacy have come up several times over IoT devices. As this writer reported in August 2015, a teenager in Issaquah, Washington, became so concerned about her mother's new Amazon Echo and its ability to listen in on all conversations in the living room that she removed it and hid it from her mother. Her mother told the New York Post, "I guess there is a difference between deciding to share something and having something captured by something that you don't know when it's listening.” Now — almost two years later — that statement has been punctuated by proof positive.
As this writer wrote in that 2015 article:
So, was [the teenager’s] decision to hide
the device and keep her mother from using it reasonable? While some may
think she went too far, this writer is not sure she has gone far
enough. The Echo is simply the most recent (though certainly not the
most egregious) example of the myriad of ways the Internet is used to
spy on ordinary people living ordinary lives. Back in February, The New American reported
on the ability of smart TVs to do the same type of spying. In the case
of the TVs, though, it is even worse, because many of them also have a
built-in camera.
