This week has certainly
been one full of surprises for the American People. While we all wait to see
what is going to happen to the economy under the Obama Administration, it would
appear that there is more going on than anyone is letting on. Most especially
when it comes to America’s sovereignty and to American’s right to privacy and
rights against warrantless searches. While we were quietly watching in other
areas they did an end run on America and we are now having to face some REAL
threats that we must answer before we lose it all. The following are two
reports forwarded to me that all of you as free Americans need to see, and
understand the implications. Is America really free or are we already under United Nations Rule?
UN to Obama
Administration: Punish Washington and Colorado for Undermining Global Drug War
Posted by William Grigg
on November 20, 2012 04:23 PM
The “war on drugs” didn’t
begin with Richard Nixon. It is an outgrowth of a 1961 United Nations document
called the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which created the framework for
a global drug prohibition jihad.
In that same year, the
JFK administration published a proposal called “Freedom from War: The United
States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World,” also
known as State Department Document 7277. That proposal, which remains the
operational framework for U.S. arms control policy, called for the creation of
a nationalized, militarized “homeland security force” — in other words, exactly
the kind of overtly militarized law enforcement bodies that have been
prosecuting the “war on drugs.”
Residents of Washington and Colorado, expressing a winsome
and entirely unjustified faith in voting as a means of reining in the state,
approved measures decriminalizing recreational use of marijuana. In response,
Raymond Yans, head of the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board, has
called for Attorney General Eric Holder to ignore the law and continue cracking
down on marijuana use and possession. Decriminalizing marijuana use, Yans
insists, sends the “wrong message to the rest of the nation and it sends a
wrong message abroad."
Like other prohibitionist
Pharisees, Yans is willing to see people killed, kidnapped, and caged in order
to send a “message.” Most of the same conservatives who properly abhor the UN
and all of its works and pomps also support drug prohibition. Now that a
high-ranking UN functionary has offered an official directive to Washington
demanding that the Obama administration escalate its war against the American
people, will conservatives of that ilk finally come out in opposition to drug
prohibition?
Senate bill
rewrite lets feds read your e-mail without warrants
By Declan McCullagh |
CNET.com – 22 hrs ago...
A Senate proposal
touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten,
giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under
current law.
CNET has learned that
Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary
committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law
enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless
access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.
Leahy's rewritten bill
would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange
Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans'
e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages
without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more
authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts
without notifying either the owner or a judge. (CNET obtained the revised draft
from a source involved in the negotiations with Leahy.)
Revised
bill highlights
. Grants warrantless access to Americans'
electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is
required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause.
Permits
state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans'
correspondence stored on systems not offered "to the public,"
including university networks.
Authorizes
any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant -- or
subsequent court review -- if they claim "emergency" situations
exist.
Says
providers "shall notify" law enforcement in advance of any plans to
tell their customers that they've been the target of a warrant, order, or
subpoena.
Delays
notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to
"10 business days." This notification can be postponed by up to 360
days..
It's an abrupt
departure from Leahy's earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search
warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail
or other communications. The Vermont Democrat boasted last year that his bill
"provides enhanced privacy protections for American consumers by...
requiring that the government obtain a search warrant."
Leahy had planned a
vote on an earlier version of his bill, designed to update a pair of
1980s-vintage surveillance laws, in late September. But after law enforcement
groups including the National District Attorneys' Association and the National
Sheriffs' Association organizations objected to the legislation and asked him
to "reconsider acting" on it, Leahy pushed back the vote and reworked
the bill as a package of amendments to be offered next Thursday. The package (PDF)
is a substitute for H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has
approved.
One person
participating in Capitol Hill meetings on this topic told CNET that Justice
Department officials have expressed their displeasure about Leahy's original
bill. The department is on record as opposing any such requirement: James
Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, has publicly warned that
requiring a warrant to obtain stored e-mail could have an "adverse
impact" on criminal investigations.
Christopher Calabrese,
legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said requiring
warrantless access to Americans' data "undercuts" the purpose of
Leahy's original proposal. "We believe a warrant is the appropriate
standard for any contents," he said.
An aide to the Senate
Judiciary committee told CNET that because discussions with interested parties
are ongoing, it would be premature to comment on the legislation.
Marc Rotenberg, head of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that in light of the
revelations about how former CIA director David Petraeus' e-mail was perused by
the FBI, "even the Department of Justice should concede that there's a
need for more judicial oversight," not less.
Markham Erickson, a
lawyer in Washington, D.C. who has followed the topic closely and said he was
speaking for himself and not his corporate clients, expressed concerns about
the alphabet soup of federal agencies that would be granted more power:
❝ There is no good legal
reason why federal regulatory agencies such as the NLRB, OSHA, SEC or FTC need
to access customer information service providers with a mere subpoena. If those
agencies feel they do not have the tools to do their jobs adequately, they
should work with the appropriate authorizing committees to explore solutions.
The Senate Judiciary committee is really not in a position to adequately make
those determinations. ❞
The list of agencies
that would receive civil subpoena authority for the contents of electronic
communications also includes the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission,
the Federal Maritime Commission, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the National
Labor Relations Board, and the Mine Enforcement Safety and Health Review
Commission.
Leahy's modified bill
retains some pro-privacy components, such as requiring police to secure a
warrant in many cases. But the dramatic shift, especially the regulatory agency
loophole and exemption for emergency account access, likely means it will be
near-impossible for tech companies to support in its new form.
A bitter setback
This is a bitter
setback for Internet companies and a liberal-conservative-libertarian coalition,
which had hoped to convince Congress to update the 1986 Electronic
Communications Privacy Act to protect documents stored in the cloud. Leahy
glued those changes onto an unrelated privacy-related bill supported by
Netflix.
At the moment, Internet
users enjoy more privacy rights if they store data on their hard drives or
under their mattresses, a legal hiccup that the companies fear could slow the
shift to cloud-based services unless the law is changed to be more
privacy-protective.
Members of the so-called
Digital Due Process coalition include Apple, Amazon.com, Americans for Tax
Reform, AT&T, the Center for Democracy and Technology, eBay, Google,
Facebook, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, TechFreedom, and Twitter. (CNET was the first
to report on the coalition's creation.)
Leahy, a former
prosecutor, has a mixed record on privacy. He criticized the FBI's efforts to
require Internet providers to build in backdoors for law enforcement access,
and introduced a bill in the 1990s protecting Americans' right to use whatever
encryption products they wanted.
But he also authored
the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which is now
looming over Web companies, as well as the reviled Protect IP Act. An article
in The New Republic concluded Leahy's work on the Patriot Act "appears to
have made the bill less protective of civil liberties." Leahy had
introduced significant portions of the Patriot Act under the name Enhancement
of Privacy and Public Safety in Cyberspace Act (PDF) a year earlier.
One obvious option for
the Digital Due Process coalition is the simplest: if Leahy's committee proves
to be an insurmountable roadblock in the Senate, try the courts instead.
Judges already have
been wrestling with how to apply the Fourth Amendment to an always-on,
always-connected society. Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
police needed a search warrant for GPS tracking of vehicles. Some courts have
ruled that warrantless tracking of Americans' cell phones, another coalition
concern, is unconstitutional.
The FBI and other law
enforcement agencies already must obtain warrants for e-mail in Kentucky,
Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, thanks to a ruling by the 6th Circuit Court of
Appeals in 2010.
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