The slide into the surveillance state picks up the pace as TSA to expand facial recognition scanners from 30 to over 400 US airports

 TSA Expands Facial Recognition Scanners to 400+ Airports...

 “The CAT-2 units are currently deployed at nearly 30 airports nationwide, and will expand to more than 400 federalized airports over the coming years,” the TSA official said, noting that it is currently optional for travelers to participate in facial recognition screenings. Those that decline to do so can notify a TSA agent and go through the standard ID verification process instead. ... During a discussion at the South by Southwest festival in March 2023, TSA Administrator David Pekoske said “eventually we will get to the point where we will require biometrics across the board because it is much more effective and much more efficient.”

Currently optional, eventually required.

Divided Democrats help more divided Republicans pass record high $886 billion NDAA which extends 5.2% pay raise to U.S. military, leaves woke policies intact, authorizes four more months of domestic spying authority

Congress passes $886 billion defense policy bill, Biden to sign into law :

 Congress has passed an NDAA for 63 straight years.

The roll call vote is here. 

 

Police state: two-thirds of the FBI's current investigations are focused on Trump supporters

 

FBI Targets Trump Followers as the 2024 Election Nears

William Arkin, Newsweek

Police state Democrat Kamala Harris gonna have blood on her hands if she becomes president

Trump expands infrastructure of the coming police state, body scanners coming to LA subway system

This will be in mass transit countrywide before you know it, and then in every public building and on every roadway. And then on your street, and on your house. There will be no escape from the surveillance of Big Sis.

If you object to the surveillance, you won't be able to ride or eventually do other things you take for granted now under the free republic. In effect this will be no different than the Chinese social credit system, which denies travel, and other "privileges", to people who receive low scores for not cooperating with the state's demands in matters of politics or religion.

From the story here:

Los Angeles' subway will become the first mass transit system in the U.S. to install body scanners that screen passengers for weapons and explosives, officials said Tuesday.

The deployment of the portable scanners, which project waves to do full-body screenings of passengers walking through a station without slowing them down, will happen in the coming months, said Alex Wiggins, who runs the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's law enforcement division.

The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person's body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour. ...

Signs will be posted at stations warning passengers they are subject to body scanner screening. The screening process is voluntary, Wiggins said, but customers who choose not to be screened won't be able to ride on the subway.

Islam silent as China continues persecution of up to 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang: Because they're on the payroll

Islamic Leaders Have Nothing to Say About China’s Internment Camps for Muslims:

Hundreds of thousands of Uighur have been detained without trial in China's western region of Xinjiang. Internment camps with up to a million prisoners. Empty neighborhoods. Students, musicians, athletes, and peaceful academics jailed. A massive high-tech surveillance state that monitors and judges every movement. The future of more than 10 million Uighurs, the members of China’s Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, is looking increasingly grim.

As the Chinese authorities continue a brutal crackdown in Xinjiang, the northwest region of China that’s home to the Uighur, Islam has been one of the main targets. Major mosques in the major cities of Kashgar and Urumqi now stand empty. Prisoners in the camps are told to renounce God and embrace the Chinese Communist Party. Prayers, religious education, and the Ramadan fast are increasingly restricted or banned. Even in the rest of China, Arabic text is being stripped from public buildings, and Islamophobia is being tacitly encouraged by party authorities. ...

Part of the answer is that money talks. 

Mark Levin: Obama's police state used intelligence services to spy on Trump campaign and leak the info

Here:

"We absolutely know this is true, the FBI did a preliminary criminal investigation based on a potential connection between a server in Trump Tower and a couple of Russian banks. That turned out to be a dry hole, but one of the most outrageous things I've ever seen... totally uncovered by the media. Instead of closing the investigation, the Obama administration tried to turn it into a FISA court investigation in June [2016]. Apparently the first application they submitted named Trump."

"Even the FISA court said no. There wasn't enough evidence to make out probable cause involving Donald Trump," he said. "In the middle of the campaign the administration was actively having Trump investigated."

Obama can negotiate with Iranian terrorists and visit the communist police state of Cuba . . .

. . . but Trump can't talk to the president of independence-minded Taiwan or invite the pusher-killing president of the Philippines to visit the White House.

Got it.

Your choice America: Donald Trump and The Wall or open borders and a Brussels-style police state

Nat Hentoff Says Obama Wasn't Fully Qualified To Teach Constitutional Law At The University of Chicago

Here, but that's just for starters:

Hentoff called this the worst state the country has ever been in, “Even worse than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.” Compounding the problem he says, is the digital age, which has allowed the president to engage in unprecedented domestic spying with the apparatus of the National Security Agency. WND asked if Obama really posed such a threat, considering he was a professor of constitutional law. “People forget, he taught a course that he was not fully qualified to teach. But nobody seemed to care,” Hentoff observed.

He also pointed out that Obama was the only editor of the Harvard Law Review to never publish an article, something that went virtually unnoticed when voters considered his qualifications. “See, that was a case of affirmative-action and people feeling, ‘Hey we ought to do something important, symbolically, and here’s a black guy, and he’s articulate, so we’re gonna do this.’”

Hentoff mentioned that former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, the man Time Magazine once called “the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court,” once personally lectured him that “Affirmative-action on a racial basis is a total violation of the 14th Amendment, no doubt about it.” And, referring to Obama’s presidency, the journalist said, “That’s what that kind of affirmative-action did for us.”

He told WND that he firmly believed the president does not care about due process, the separation of powers, the concept of a self-governing republic or many other basic American ideals. And that’s why, he said, “What Obama is doing now is about as un-American as you can get.” Hentoff wanted to make sure no one thought he was engaging in hyperbole. He said it was literally true that Obama is “the most un-American president we’ve ever had.” And just to make sure everybody heard him, he added, “I hope the FBI got all of that.”

Bill Binney, 32-Year Veteran And Critic Of NSA, Says America Is Now A Police State

Too bad he had to say that here, where they believe 9/11 was an inside job:

The main use of the collection from these [NSA spying] programs [is] for law enforcement. ... [N]one of the NSA data is referred to in courts – cause it has been acquired without a warrant. [Law enforcement agencies] have to do a “Parallel Construction” and not tell the courts or prosecution or defense the original data used to arrest people. This I call: a “planned program[m]ed perjury policy” directed by US law enforcement. ... [T]his also applies to “Foreign Counterparts.” This is a total corruption of the justice system not only in our country but around the world. ... This is a totalitarian process – means we are now in a police state.

Mark Levin Only Just Discovers TSA VIPR Program Tonight

Mark Levin's recent discovery of TSA VIPR operations reinforces his interpretation of the developing police state, but it's just old news to us.

Welcome anyway, Mark.

The Redcoats Are Already Here: Proof Ordinary Americans Are Spied-On Online By The Police State Right Now

She googled "pressure cookers", he googled "backpacks". Weeks later the police showed up and interrogated him and searched their house for 45 minutes, without a warrant:

"45 minutes later, they shook my husband’s hand and left. That’s when he called me and relayed the story. That’s when I felt a sense of creeping dread take over. What else had I looked up? What kind of searches did I do that alone seemed innocent enough but put together could make someone suspicious? Were they judging me because my house was a mess (Oh my god, the joint terrorism task force was in my house and there were dirty dishes in my sink!). Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do."

I wonder what happens when you don't agree to let them search your house? Face down on the floor in handcuffs? The m/o of the tyranny is to intimidate you into relinquishing your rights. The Redcoats aren't coming. They're already here.

The story was related here in full, and here in part.

Incompetent Government Couldn't Stop Tsarnaev Or Find Him Afterwards

Our incompetent government, after spending billions of our dollars to stop terrorists and shredding our liberties in the process through surveillance of email and cellphone traffic and body searches at airports, couldn't stop yet another massacre by a couple of determined punks.

And afterwards it couldn't find the last suspect, even though the rights of a free people were trampled with the imposition of a police state and the shut down of a great American city:

"Up until the younger man's capture, it was looking like a grim day for police. As night fell, they announced that they were scaling back the hunt because they had come up empty-handed," it was reported here.

Maybe we should rethink who we let in here and why, instead of what we are doing, which is acting more like the unfree world from which immigrants to our country flee.

Americans Are Pretty Much OK With The Fascist Police State

Poll here.

Dead Lefty Accused Obama Of Complicity With The Right And Ethnic Cleansing

It's a fascinating paper delivered by one Robert Fitch, here, shortly after Obama's election in 2008.

He paints a history of Obama you've probably never heard, one which doesn't fit the neat little categories of Left and Right because Obama's Third Way politics, going back at least to Bill Clinton's Hope VI program, is really about the partnership between the status quo, especially the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector, and government.

Fitch wrote about the same phenomenon in Democrat-controlled New York, which gives you an idea why he was kind of a man without a constituency, especially since he thought the American labor movement got co-opted for the enterprise.

We used to call that sort of partnering fascism, and unfortunately, Robert Fitch is dead and we can no longer ask him to think about it that way.

But we should call it that, and we should still think about it that way if we're ever going to escape the police state which looms on the horizon and is in many respects already here:

"When the Third Way advocates insist that we share a common good; when they refuse to recognize that the interests of the oppressed and the interests of the oppressors don't exist on the same moral plane; when they counsel us to stop being partisans of those interests -- they're not being non or post partisan; they're siding with the powers that be.

"In the same way, Obama's notion of change claims to transcend the politics of interest while it steers sharply to the right. ...

"What we see is that the Chicago core of the Obama coalition is made up of blacks who've moved up by moving poor blacks out of the community. And very wealthy whites who've advanced their community development agenda by hiring blacks. Will this be the pattern for the future in an Obama administration? I can't read the envelope. But I do believe that if we want to disrupt the pattern of the past we have to make some distinctions: between the change they believe in and the change we believe in; between our interests and theirs; between a notion of community that scapegoats the poor and one that respects their human rights -- one of which is not to be the object of ethnic cleaning. Between Hope VI and genuine human hope."

In the same way, one can't help but think that the broader impoverishment of America's home-owning classes was intentional, that the powers that be saw all that wealth locked-up in decades-long built-up home equity and wanted to unleash it, skim it, and junk it so that they could take it over one day, enrich themselves and their friends, and install themselves in power permanently.

Your Fascist Police State At Work: More Than 9,300 Unannounced Checkpoints Run in 2011

So says the story here.

And the LA Times here:

TSA teams are increasingly conducting searches and screenings at train stations, subways, ferry terminals and other mass transit locations around the country.

"We are not the Airport Security Administration," said Ray Dineen, the air marshal in charge of the TSA office in Charlotte. "We take that transportation part seriously." ...

In Tennessee in October, a viper team used radiation monitors and explosive-trace detectors to help state police inspect trucks at highway weigh stations throughout the state. Last month in Orlando, Fla., a team set up metal detectors at a Greyhound bus station and tested passengers' bags for explosive residue.

In the Carolinas this year, TSA teams have checked people at the gangplanks of cruise ships, the entrance to NASCAR races, and at ferry terminals taking tourists to the Outer Banks.

The instruments of fascism are slowly being introduced, and the American people accept it like sheep.

They deserve everything they're going to get.

President's Slaves in Congress Vote to Give Him Sweeping Powers Over You

Based entirely on his discretion, the president now gets to decide as commander in chief if you, an American citizen, are a terrorist. He can then send the US military against you here on American soil, and detain you indefinitely here or abroad without trial and without a lawyer.

American citizenship, American law, and the American constitution now really do mean nothing at all, courtesy of Republicans and Democrats alike. It may have started under President Bush and The Patriot Act, but the liberal savior Barack Obama is all too happy to have the sweeping new powers, powers which he has already arrogated to himself, without opposition from his slaves, by targeting and killing American citizens working for terrorists abroad. All this is being done under justification of the law of war, even though our Congress, long ago made subservient to the Executive, has never had the courage to vote to declare war.







The American fascist police state is now complete.

Welcome to tyranny.

And have a pleasant holiday.

Stories here, here, here, here and here.

The Constitution Was in a Shambles Long Before Obama Came on the Scene

So says Lawrence Hunter here, who thinks the expedient of a Bill of Rights was only a parchment barrier to begin with:

The Founders gave us The War Power Clause of the Constitution vesting the exclusive power to declare war with Congress. Politicians replaced it with The War Powers Resolution and presidential wars of whim.

The Founders gave us myriad constitutional restrictions on the powers of the federal government both explicit and implicit. Politicians and judges replaced them with a series of court rulings, on the Commerce Clause for example, so sweeping in their expansion of the federal government’s regulatory powers beyond the Constitution’s writ that, in the words of Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson, “The Commerce Clause has proven voracious enough to swallow the rest of the Constitution. Any scraps left over will be devoured by the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.”

The Founders gave us habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, protecting against arbitrary arrest and guaranteeing that people would be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. Politicians replaced them with The Patriot Act and the Homeland Police State, preventative detention, rendition, unauthorized wiretaps, secret searches and seizures and TSA.

The Founders gave us the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing the people protection against over-reaching police and prosecutors, forced self-incrimination and double jeopardy, and against laws that would confiscate private property without due process and just compensation. Courts and Politicians gave us a series of rulings and legislation allowing the police, prosecutors and judges to act arbitrarily in the name of the general welfare, public safety and national security without regard to the cherished Rights of Englishmen that were passed down to us through the United States Constitution.

The Founders gave us the Eighth Amendment protecting the people against the imposition of excessive fines and infliction of cruel and unusual punishments. PB&J gave us RICO, prosecutorial charge stacking, extortionate plea bargaining, lawless and pathological judicial/prosecutorial misconduct, GITMO and water boarding.

TSA VIPR Units Search Trucks at 5 Interstate Locations in Tennessee Tuesday 10/18/11

Whatever happened to probable cause?

The American fascist police state expands its operations, in the ever so co-operative Bible Belt.

Two bus stations were also targeted, as reported here.

Random searches of cars cannot be far behind.