4th Amendment – The Burning Platform

FROM AMERICAN DREAM TO AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

For most of the ninety years since James Truslow Adams coined the term American Dream, most Americans still believed the fairy tale of the American Dream, that no matter how humble your beginnings, everyone had a fair chance to become a success in America, based upon your individual talent, intelligence, work ethic and a society that rewarded those who exceled. Sadly, that dream is no longer achievable for most Americans. Our society has devolved into an oligarchy since The Epic of America was published in 1931, where a powerful few rule over a willfully ignorant many through propaganda, mistruth, fear, and an iron fist.

“But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position…

The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.” – James Truslow Adams – Epic of America – 1931

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WAS TRUMP THE MULE?

“Excellence, he is known as the Mule. He is spoken of little, in a factual sense, but I have gathered the scraps and fragments of knowledge and winnowed out the most probable of them. He is apparently a man of neither birth nor standing. His father, unknown. His mother, dead in childbirth. His upbringing, that of a vagabond. His education, that of the tramp worlds, and the backwash alleys of space. He has no name other than that of the Mule, a name reportedly applied by himself to himself, and signifying, by popular explanation, his immense physical strength, and stubbornness of purpose.” ― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation

In March 2017, a mere two months after the stunningly unexpected victory of Donald Trump over the Deep State hand picked representative of dark forces – Hillary Clinton, I wrote a three-part article based upon Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, attempting to connect Trump’s elevation as the Gray Champion of this Fourth Turning to the plot of Asimov’s masterpiece. The three articles: Foundation – Fall of the American Galactic Empire; Foundation and Empire: Is Donald Trump the Mule?; and Second Foundation: Empire Crumbling, landed with a dud, generating few views and not many comments.

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FOURTH TURNING DETONATION (PART TWO)

In Part One of this article, I discussed the dramatic events that shaped 2020 and will continue to have a major influence on the direction of this Fourth Turning moving forward. The immense power of Mordor on the Potomac seems to be unassailable, but the little people still have a chance if they utilize their skills and intelligence to the utmost.

Now that Trump has been defeated and cast into oblivion by the forces of Mordor on the Potomac, those who have some knowledge about generational theory and the course of previous Fourth Turnings have lamented Trump is not the Grey Champion and they were misled by believing he was their hero. How could he be the Grey Champion if he lost? I do not profess to be an expert, as I am just trying to understand the underlying forces driving this Fourth Turning towards its climax, but losing a battle in a long war does not disqualify Trump as a Grey Champion. The Grey Champion character was born from the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

“Who is this gray patriarch? His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. That stately form, combining the leader and the saint…could only belong to some old champion of the righteous cause, whom the oppressor’s drum had summoned from his grave.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

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WEEKS WHERE DECADES HAPPEN

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“A Crisis mood does not guarantee that the new governing policies will be well designed or will work as intended.

To the contrary: Crisis eras are studded with faulty leadership and inept management—from President Lincoln’s poor record of choosing generals to President Roosevelt’s colossal blunders with such alphabet soup agencies as the AAA, NRA, and WPA.

What makes a Crisis special is the public’s willingness to let leaders lead even when they falter and to let authorities be authoritative even when they make mistakes.

Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality. The risk of revolution is high—as is the risk of civil war, since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries. Leaders become more inclined to define enemies in moral terms, to enforce virtue militarily, to refuse all compromise, to commit large forces in that effort, to impose heavy sacrifices on the battlefield and home front, to build the most destructive weapons contemporary minds can imagine, and to deploy those weapons if needed to obtain an enduring victory.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The quote by Lenin has been reverberating in my conscience for the last few weeks. I believe the quote from Strauss & Howe provides context to what has happened and will happen as this Fourth Turning advances towards its climax. I began a new role in my organization two weeks ago, after only seven months in my previous role. I’ve been in non-stop crisis meetings, as this coronavirus pandemic has flipped everyone’s world upside down. As of Thursday, we were ordered to work from home.

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SCOTUS Nominee Brett Kavanaugh on the Fourth Amendment and Warrantless Bulk Data Collection

Via Reason

The Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution to protect Americans from facing unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. Yet according to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fourth Amendment suffers no violation when the federal government engages in the wholesale warrantless collection of every Americans’ telephone record metadata.

Kavanaugh expressed that view in the course of a 2015 statement concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc in Klayman v. Obama, which was then before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The case centered on the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s controversial information-gathering program, which involved the NSA collecting the telephony metadata of all Americans. “In my view,” Kavanaugh wrote, “the Government’s metadata collection program is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment.”

Kavanugh offered two principal explanations for why he considered the program to be constitutional. First, he invoked what’s known as the “third-party doctrine,” which says that if you voluntarily share private information with a third party, you no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. “The Government’s collection of telephony metadata from a third party such as a telecommunications service provider is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment,” Kavanaugh wrote.

But “even if the bulk collection of telephony metadata constitutes a search,” Kavanaugh continued, turning to his second justification, the program may still be approved because the Fourth Amendment “bars only unreasonable searches and seizures. And the Government’s metadata collection program,” he wrote, “readily counts as reasonable” because it “serves a critically important special need—preventing terrorist attacks on the United States.” He added: “In my view, that critical national security need outweighs the impact on privacy occasioned by this program.”

My colleague Jacob Sullum recently observed that while Kavanaugh has been “receptive to cases that challenge gun control laws on Second Amendment grounds,” he “seems to take a narrower view of the Fourth Amendment.” Kavanaugh’s endorsement of warrantless bulk data collection by the U.S. government would seem to reinforce that observation.

The future of the Fourth Amendment is one of the most pressing issues facing the Supreme Court. As the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee prepare for Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in the coming months, I encourage them to devote real attention to his possible shortcomings on the Fourth Amendment front.

Obama Feds Using Hidden Microphones to Record Conversations in Bay Area

Via CBS SF

OAKLAND (CBS SF) — Hidden microphones that are part of a clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the Bay Area has been exposed.

Imagine standing at a bus stop, talking to your friend and having your conversation recorded without you knowing. It happens all the time, and the FBI doesn’t even need a warrant to do it.

Federal agents are planting microphones to secretly record conversations.

Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent said, “They put microphones under rocks, they put microphones in trees, they plant microphones in equipment. I mean, there’s microphones that are planted in places that people don’t think about, because that’s the intent!”

FBI agents hid microphones inside light fixtures and at a bus stop outside the Oakland Courthouse without a warrant to record conversations, between March 2010 and January 2011.

Federal authorities are trying to prove real estate investors in San Mateo and Alameda counties are guilty of bid rigging and fraud and used these recordings as evidence.

Harp said, “An agent can’t just go out and grab a recording device and plant it somewhere without authorization from a supervisor or special agent in charge.”

The lawyer for one of the accused real estate investors who will ask the judge to throw out the recordings, told KPIX 5 News that, “Speaking in a public place does not mean that the individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy…private communication in a public place qualifies as a protected ‘oral communication’… and therefore may not be intercepted without judicial authorization.”

Harp says that if you’re going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. He says that was the original intention of the Fourth Amendment, but it’s up to the judge to interpret it.

US Government ‘Asks’ Tech Companies To Tweak Algos, Promote Certain Content

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

You probably had no idea, but representatives from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the U.S. government came together earlier this week to privately discuss how they could jointly fight ISIS propaganda online. Never mind the fact that ISIS is the child of reckless and inhumane preemptive wars of aggression perpetrated by the U.S. government. Such introspection naturally never crosses the mind of government bureaucrats ostensibly attempting to understand the epic disasters they created in the first place.

So who attended the meeting? We don’t know for sure because the plebes aren’t entitled to know such things. Fortunately, we have become privy to some information thanks to Buzzfeed News. Here’s what we learned:

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IRS possessed Stingray cellphone surveillance gear, documents reveal

Via the Guardian

Exclusive: Invoices reveal tax service, 13th federal agency to use secretive dragnet, upgraded device that pretends to be cellphone tower to gather metadata

An illustration of Stingray surveillance technology. — Often not much bigger than a suitcase, Stingray devices are easily portable in gathering information by imitating cellphone towers. Illustration: Electronic Frontier Foundation via Flickr

The Internal Revenue Service is the latest in a growing list of US federal agencies known to have possessed the sophisticated cellphone dragnet equipment known as Stingray, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.

Invoices obtained following a request under the Freedom of Information Act show purchases made in 2009 and 2012 by the federal tax agency with Harris Corporation, one of a number of companies that manufacture the devices. Privacy advocates said the revelation “shows the wide proliferation of this very invasive surveillance technology”.

The 2009 IRS/Harris Corp invoice is mostly redacted under section B(4) of the Freedom of Information Act, which is intended to protect trade secrets and privileged information. However, an invoice from 2012, which is also partially redacted, reports that the agency spent $65,652 on upgrading a Stingray II to a HailStorm, a more powerful version of the same device, as well as $6,000 on training from Harris Corporation.

Stingrays are the best-known example of a type of device called an IMSI-catcher, also known as “cell-site simulators”. About the size of a briefcase, they work by pretending to be cellphone towers in order to strip metadata and in some cases even content from phones which connect to them.

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Vampire Cops

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Apparently, our money’s not enough.

They want our blood, too.

You may have heard about this. In Texas – one of America’s, uh, “freest” states – the cops have got the power to throw you over the hood of a cruiser and forcibly extract your blood if you decline to take a Breathalyzer test. After having been forced to stop for no specific reason at a “sobriety” checkpoint. Your refusal to cooperate – that is, to prove your innocence (that’s how it works in America nowadays) to the satisfaction of a cop is all the provocation necessary. Roll down your sleeve.

Or else.

Count (oops, Police Chief) Art Acevedo of the Austin PD wants to expand what had been a “pilot” program – weekends only – to a full time regular operation.

To make this routine. News story here.

Inevitably, other states will follow. Oregon already has. At some point, the Supreme Court will “affirm” the “constitutionality” of these blood draws. Why not? It has already affirmed the “constitutionality” of all sorts of obviously not constitutional practices – including the random and probable cause-bereft stopping of motorists to force them to prove they aren’t guilty of pretty much everything in the motor vehicle code (e.g., you’re forced to prove you have a license, the mandatory insurance, that your car is registered and has all the demanded stickers, that you are buckled up for “safety”, etc.). If these fishing expeditions are reasonable (as demanded by the Fourth Amendment) then what constitutes an unreasonable search?

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