US company gives glimpse into future of government surveillance

• 7 MINUTES AGO JULY 07, 2015 5:05AM

A US company is watching everyone. Source: Supplied

A SMALL private firm in the US has developed a surveillance system of Orwellian proportions that could very well be the future of big brother.

Thirty kilometres above a chosen city, a plane hangs out of sight of the thousands of people scurrying below — continuously circling the metropolis underneath. Every second, the plane takes a photo of the entire city and all the happenings within a 64sq km radius. The images are beamed down to a control centre where they create what is akin to a real-time Google map of everything taking place.

When a crime occurs, teams of analysts simply scroll back in time to the scene of the incident and identify those involved. From that point, they can follow the target by clicking forward through the images to the present moment and pinpoint their location.

Ostensibly, surveillance is about preventing and prosecuting crimes — and while it’s only been used in a handful of cities, Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) are designed to do just that.

The times it has been used on US soil, the tool has allowed authorities to solve crimes in a matter of minutes.

Images taken by PSS of cars identified in a murder. Source: Supplied

According to PPS founder Ross McNutt, the concept was conceived over a few beers at the pub, with the initial plans drawn up on the back of a napkin.

“We developed the system quickly to get an initial capability (within) about 18 months. We have since spent the last eight years perfecting it, lowering the cost, and increasing the effectiveness,” he told news.com.au.

It was thought up in an attempt to help the war effort in Iraq, which wasn’t looking good for the US in 2004.

“The IEDs (improvised explosive device) were killing many of our troops and our commander asked that we see what we could do to help,” he said.

Ross McNutt was teaching at the Airforce Institute of Technology at the time and the desire to aid US troops against the guerilla tactics used by those loyal to Saddam Hussein was felt strongly among faculty and students.

“We developed an idea that would allow us to track bombers back to the place they came from so we could then address the source of the bombs,” he said.

The idea proved immensely useful in capturing those planting IEDs and the air force has since spent more than $US1 billion ($A1.3 billion) to improve and enhance the system.

In fact, the results proved so compelling that it wasn’t long before the US military looked closer to home with thoughts of putting an eye in the sky over some of its own cities.

A still image captured from the plane. Source: Supplied

More sophisticated than it looks. Source: Supplied

With the success of the technology in Iraq, the US government has since used Persistent Surveillance Systems to address high crime rates in cities such as Dayton, Ohio.

For Mr McNutt, it’s simply an economic argument.

According to the National Institute of Justice, Dayton Ohio has 27,000 reported crimes per year, 70 to 80 per day and nearly 10,000 serious crimes, such as rape, murder and assault, which amount to a cost of $US3400 per person each year.

“PSS believes we will contribute to reducing the crime in Dayton by 20 per cent to 30 per cent,” Mr McNutt said. He said this would amount to a yearly saving of $US96 million to $US144 million.

After a five-day trial in June of 2012, the results proved exciting to law enforcement and the police chief recommended a permanent expansion of the services.

However the city decided to hold a public forum to debate the idea and only about 75 people turned up. Due to the high rates of crime, many were supportive of having the surveillance plane overhead. But others, a slightly smaller but very vocal group, were opposed and ultimately dissuaded the city from adopting the service. At least for the time being.

The company says it has about $US150 million in proposals and is waiting to hear if its services will be enlisted. It has negotiated with the cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, Moscow and London.

The company has also carried out a contract for a classified client to combat cartel violence in Mexico.

Analysts are observed to ensure they are only tracking criminals. Source: Supplied

As with all forms of surveillance, PSS ignites a debate about the trade off between civil freedoms and the lengths we should be willing to go to prevent crime. But Mr McNutt said they had made assurances to allay such concerns.

“We have developed a whole host of privacy policies and procedures that protect people privacies. In addition we have designed the system to be limited to one pixel per person, which only allows us to barely see a person and track them to a car. We only support reported crime investigation and ongoing criminal investigations,” he said.

But the fears will always remain.

In the wake of the National Security Agency leaks, US President Barack Obama made an address in which he reaffirmed the importance for a balance between surveillance and privacy.

“The power of new technologies means that there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do,” Mr Obama said in the 2014 address. “That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do,” he said.

And with companies like Persistent Surveillance Systems, those questions of what we shoulddo are becoming increasingly pertinent.

Americans treated as if 'terrorsits' by USA 'border patrol checkpoints

MAN GETS 8 MONTHS IN FEDERAL PRISON FOR DRIVING AWAY FROM INTERNAL CHECKPOINT

BORDER AGENTS FOUND 'ANTI-GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA' IN HIS CAR!!!!!

by Steve Watson | InfoWars | July 3, 2015

---

A man from Florida has been sentenced to eight months in prison after he calmly refused to answer questions at an internal border patrol checkpoint and drove away.

The incident, which occurred in October last year, was captured on video from both CCTV and a dashcam within Michael Sophin’s car.

The footage shows Mr Sophin approaching a checkpoint approximately 20 miles from the border of Mexico on I-10 near Sierra Blanca, Texas. When the Border Patrol Agent asked Sophin if he is an American citizen.  He replied with a dry comment:

“You know, I was going to tell you that I wasn’t going to take any questions today, and then I realized that… if Obama is letting everybody in the country, what difference does it make?” Sophin said.

The agent wasn’t playing games and replied that it “makes all the difference.”

At that point Sophin refused to cooperate any further, calmly stating “I don’t want to answer any questions, O.K.? Thanks. Have a good night” as he drove away at regular speed from the checkpoint.

The agent is heard yelling “Hey, you’re not free to go!” as Sophin drives away.

Agents drove after Sophin and eventually flagged him down and ordered him out of his vehicle at gunpoint.

Sophin was arrested and taken back to the checkpoint where his vehicle was searched without a warrant or probable cause.

In addition to Sophin’s legally owned firearms and shooting accessories, the agents found what they described as “anti-government propaganda”. The two items given this description were a copy of The New American Magazine, a freedom and Constitution oriented publication owned by The John Birch Society, and a copy of a book called “Freedom”, written by journalist and activist Adam Kokesh.

Sophin was thrown in jail in El Paso for a whole 18 DAYS before he was released on bond.

He was first charged with “High speed flight from immigration checkpoint”, a felony which carries a sentence of up to 5 years in prison. However, this charge was dropped as it became clear that Sophin never broke the speed limit, only agents chasing him were guilty of that.

So, with one charge dismissed, the state tried a fresh approach by charging Sophin with “Assault on a Federal Agent.”

Sophin’s firearms were also confiscated by the BATF, under the agency’s asset forfeiture program.

Eventually, when the case came to trial, Sophin was sentenced to eight months in federal prison with credit for time served. He is currently out on bond pending appeal.

During the trial, a juror explained why the decision was made to convict Sophin, despite the clear evidence that no crime was committed. “He should have to answer questions just like the rest of us,” the juror said. In other words, because he decided to stand up for his Constitutional rights, Sophin had to be made an example of.

The website Photography is Not A Crime contacted both The New American and Adam Kokesh to get their thoughts on the case and the description of their literature by the state as “anti-government propaganda” – here’s what they had to say:

The New American

“Classifying ‘The New American’ magazine as anti-government propaganda demonstrates either ignorance or complicity. ‘The New American’ is published by American Opinion Publishing Inc., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of The John Birch Society.

The mission of The John Birch Society is ‘To bring about less government, more responsibility, and — with God’s help — a better world by providing leadership, education, and organized volunteer action in accordance with moral and Constitutional principles‘…

…Let’s remember that many agencies in the federal government, especially the Department of Homeland Security, and many left-wing advocates, especially the Southern Poverty Law Center, have taken a dangerous tact of classifying law-abiding constitutional advocates (many returning military veterans) as potential domestic terrorists. See ‘Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008′ (2012), ‘Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment’ (2009), and ‘MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement’ (2009) for further details. If an agency of the federal government is claiming ‘The New American’ magazine is ‘anti-government propaganda,’ then this demonstrates it continuing down an unconstitutional and un-American path that tramples the freedom of speech.”

Adam Kokesh on Freedom

“FREEDOM! is only anti-government propaganda if government is anti-freedom, which it is. This is why my book is also banned in US prisons. By banning my book, government has again revealed itself to be intellectually and morally bankrupt, nothing more than an elaborate scheme to steal for the super-rich. Freedom is a good idea, and good ideas don’t require force. Government, on the other hand, uses force to prevent the free flow of ideas because good ideas are a threat to all who profit from bad ideas. Fortunately, the more that agents of government declare themselves so clearly anti-freedom, the more people will hear the message.”

The case(s) serves as a reminder of how the rights of everyday Americans are being violated en mass every day.
Using the excuse of attempting to apprehend illegal immigrants, Border Patrol agents have set up a network of internal checkpoints inside the United States. As InfoWars has documented, in some cases the checkpoints are as much as 100-200 miles from the border.
Despite what a Supreme Court ruling says, since the checkpoints are situated far away from the Mexican border, they are clearly a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Of course, the Supreme Court also once ruled that black people in America were slaves.
The ACLU has dubbed the area in which the checkpoints have been positioned as the “Constitution-free Zone,” noting that 2 out of 3 Americans live within this buffer zone – around 190 million people in total.
There is no law that says refusing to comply with Border agents and/or police at such checkpoints gives probable cause to search an individual’s vehicle. It certainly does not provide probable cause for agents to force their way into vehicles, particularly if the occupants are not being aggressive or confrontational in any way.
This is just the latest in a series of confrontations caught on video showing Americans standing up to the checkpoints.
In this video, Border Patrol agents in California forcefully pull a man out of his car and drive off with his distressed wife and 4-year-old son simply because he refused to tell them where he was driving to.


http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=691_1426702524


Being routinely stopped at a permanent checkpoint close to 200 miles away from the border by Homeland Security agents, another freedom loving American decided enough was enough recently and stood up to them on video. The self declared “free roamer” was laughed at by the agents before being sent on his way.





Last year, a man in Texas was dragged from his vehicle by border patrol agents who smashed through his window after he refused to answer their questions at a checkpoint more than 50 miles away from the Southern border.
(The exchange with the agents begins at around 6 mins into the video)

 

InfoWars previously reported on the case of Steven Anderson, who refused to show his papers at another Border Patrol checkpoint while traveling through California.

Anderson provided a sterling example of how to stand up for your rights in such a situation. When Border Patrol agents attempted to detain him for questioning, Anderson refused, citing his right as an American citizen to “go free on my way.”





In another incident in 2012, a truck driver who passed through a checkpoint in Texas, 30 miles from the Mexican border, stood up for his Fourth Amendment rights by refusing to answer questions and eventually driving away.





These videos and hundreds of others like them  accentuate the fact that Americans are not required to answer Border agents’ questions (usually starting with “Are you a United States citizen?”). Nor are Americans required to consent to any searches at such checkpoints.
Visit www.checkpointusa.org/blog to learn more about this program. By actively “flexing” their rights, these brave citizens expose the techniques DHS and Border Patrol agents (and police in general) use to trick and intimidate citizens into compliance.
Not all Americans who refuse to have their rights violated have been as successful as those in the videos above. In 2008, retired San Diego social worker Vince Peppard and his wife had their car ransacked after refusing to consent to being searched.
Alex Jones has also encountered similar “interior checkpoints” on numerous occasions, including the incident documented in the video below.


—————————————————————-
Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.


http://www.infowars.com/video-man-gets-8-months-in-federal-prison-for-driving-away-from-internal-checkpoint/ 


Visit www.checkpointusa.org/blog

The Real Reason for the Anti-Confederate Flag Hysteria

The Real Reason for the

Anti-Confederate Flag Hysteria


By Thomas DiLorenzo

June 27, 2015

Every couple of years the totalitarian socialist Left in America (a.k.a., the Democratic Party and all of its appendages) pretends to be indignant about the existence of the Confederate flag somewhere.  The lapdog cultural Marxist media fall in line, treating the siting of the flag in the same way they would treat the siting of an Ebola victim in a large crowd.  Americans are reminded once again by the New York/New England/Ivy League-educated presstitute class that they should hate Southerners and all things Southern.  As Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart recently whined in faux horror, Southerners “waged war against the United States” government!  Waaaaaaaaah!

The anti-Confederate flag hysteria is only one small part of the Left’s general strategy, however.  It is part of their overriding strategy of diverting the public’s attention away from all the grotesque failures of leftist interventionism, from the welfare state to the government takeover of education to the war on drugs and beyond.  The neocons who run the Republican Party are usually complicit in all of this.

The welfare state has decimated the black family and is hard at work destroying the white family as well by eliminating the stigma against a man’s abandoning his wife and children with welfare checks (See Charles Murray, Losing Ground).  What does the Confederate flag have to do with this?  The welfare state has destroyed the work ethic of millions of Americans. What does the Confederate flag have to do with this?  The Fed caused the biggest depression since the Great Depression with its latest boom-and-bust-cycle act.  What does the Confederate flag have to do with this?

The rotten inner city government schools have enriched uneducated “teachers” and school bureaucrats but have ruined the lives of untold numbers of black children with fraudulent “education.” What does the Confederate flag have to do with this?

The war on drugs has had a horrific racial effect in that it has caused the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of mostly young black men from the inner cities while creating the reasons for drug-gang violence and all the death that is associated with it. What does the Confederate flag have to do with this?

The minimum wage law has always had a disproportionately harmful effect on black teenage unemployment.  What has the Confederate flag have to do with this?  High taxes, onerous regulations, and uncontrollable government spending by all levels of government have sucked resources out of the job-creating private sector only to fatten the government bureaucracy, depriving all Americans of job opportunities.  What has the Confederate flag have to do with ANY of this?  ALL of this was done under the auspices of the U.S. flag.

The ideological lynchpin of the cultural Marxists who dominate so much of American politics, the media and the universities is the argument that there is one and only one reason why there still exists a “black underclass” (mostly) in American cities, namely, “white privilege” and “the legacy of slavery.”  To cultural Marxists, nothing else matters, or should even be allowed to be discussed.  The welfare/warfare state, the war on drugs, the public schools, etc. cannot possibly have had anything but good effects, they say, because they were all undertaken with the best of intentions.  It’s all the fault of “white privilege,” say privileged white politicians, privileged white university administrators, and privileged white media talking heads.  

The Confederate flag, they claim, is the banner of white privilege, the sole cause of all the problems of the “underclass”; hence, all the extreme torches-and-pitchforks-type behavior over the flag in recent days.  The cultural Marxist Left views it all as an assault on “white privilege,” the source of all evil in the world.

Another defining characteristic of the cultural Marxist Left is its hatred of free speech by those who disagree with it.  Free speech should only be enjoyed by the victims of white (heterosexual male) oppression, they say.  Allowing white male oppressors to have free speech simply leads to even more “oppression” of the oppressed (which now includes everyone who is not a white heterosexual male).  This is why so many university administrators proudly crack down on academic freedom with campus speech codes, tolerance of riotous disruptions of conservative or libertarian campus lecturers, and even the libeling and slandering of such speakers when they are allowed to speak.  It makes them popular among the cultural Marxist faculty in the humanities and social sciences, and therefore makes their jobs and lives more pleasant.  It also helps to cement into place the cultural Marxist mantra that “white privilege” is the one and only source of all the world’s problems.

I offer as a personal example of this phenomenon the malicious libeling of Professor Walter Block several years ago by one Brian Linnane, the president of Loyola University Maryland, an ugly event that many readers of LewRockwell.com will recall.  At my invitation, Professor Block presented a lecture to the undergraduate Adam Smith Club on the evening of their annual dinner.  His topic was the economics of discrimination, a very mainstream topic that is addressed in all principles of economics textbooks (I recommend Walter Williams’ new book on the subject, Race and Economics: How Much Does Discrimination Explain?).  Professor Block is known as an iconoclast, but in this instance he presented a very mainstream talk consistent with the ideas of his old graduate school dissertation chairman, the late Gary Becker, author of The Economics of Discrimination, which I believe was Becker’s own dissertation at the University of Chicago way back when.

Professor Block did his usual fabulous job of explaining how racial or sexual discrimination in the workplace is penalized in a free, competitive market by creating profit opportunities for competitors.  For example, if an employer pays a white male employee $50,000/year, and an equally-qualified black or female employee $25,000 for the same job for which each employee is capable of producing say, $60,000 in revenue for the employer, the black or female employee is bound to be scooped up by a competitor.  The competing business person can offer them say, $35,000 and make $25,000 on the deal ($60,000 in revenue minus $35,000 in salary).  Then another competitor may offer $40,000, or $50,000, etc., depending on the intensity of competition.  If there is enough competition, the “pay gap” will disappear altogether.  This is how free-market competition penalizes racial or sexual discrimination in the workplace and causes it to diminish or disappear.  The lecture was met with applause by the students.

But the whole thing was a set-up by the campus cultural Marxists, led by the university president, Brian Linnane.  They sent a single black student to the lecture who supposedly complained (not to me, the sponsor of the lecture, but to the gang of cultural Marxist faculty and administrators on campus known to some students as the “social justice crowd”)  that Professor Block’s remarks were “insensitive.” That was seven years ago.  To this day, no one associated with the Loyola University Maryland administration has ever revealed just what Professor Block said that was “insensitive,” or why their students should be treated like imbecilic little infants whose ears must be protected from ”insensitive” speech such as Gary Becker/University of Chicago-style economics.  They even refused to answer the question when a Baltimore Sun reporter asked them about it.

The libeling occurred when Brian Linnane sent an email to all of the university’s students, faculty, and alumni apologizing for the “insensitivity” of Professor Block’s speech, which he did not personally hear, along with a sanctimonious proclamation of how devoted he was to the cause of anti-discrimination.  He clearly wanted his readers to think, incorrectly, that Professor Block must have uttered some kind of racist epithet.

The real reason for the malicious libeling of Walter Block by the Loyola University administration was revealed (to me, at least) by a statement that one of the undergraduate students in the room made at the end of Professor Block’s lecture.  “But we want to talk about the legacy of slavery,” he sheepishly complained, in good politically-correct fashion.  Outside of the economics students in the room, who knew better, the other students like this one were thoroughly brainwashed in the cultural Marxist “white privilege” mantra along with the notion that all other discussions of the possible causes of black/white wage differences, unemployment, or anything else, should be censored by any means possible.  They are incapable of even engaging in a question-and-answer session with someone like Professor Block, since that would require the use of logical thought.   All they had been taught, for the most part, was how to mouth left-wing political platitudes and slogans.

Thus, the purpose of Brian Linnane’s malicious libeling of Walter Block was  to send the rest of the campus the message that such non-cultural Marxist talk would no longer be tolerated on “his” campus, and that anyone who attempted it would be smeared as a racist or worse.  Something like this scenario has been played out at numerous other American universities.  It is all part and parcel, along with the Confederate flag hysteria, of the cultural Marxist crusade against “white privilege” in their campaign of denial of the grotesque failures of “liberalism.”

Thomas J. DiLorenzo { TDilo@aol.com } is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; ; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

the “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” one form of government

         


  “Third National Flag of the Confederacy”

Mr. Lincoln's War

An Irrepressible Conflict?

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions…are the general opinions of the English nation.”
Front Page: —London Times, November 7, 1861

“The preservation of the union is the supreme law.”
—Andrew Jackson, December 25, 1832

 

Summary Standard for Review

“A Plegiarism of the FACTS”

The Civil War was the greatest tragedy ever to befall the nation. Brother slew brother. Six hundred thousand of American’s best and bravest died of shot, shell, and disease. The South was bled to death, invaded, ravaged by Union armies, occupied for a dozen years. Under federal bayonets, her social and political order was uprooted and the 11 states that had fought to be free of the Union were “reconstructed” by that Union. America’s South would need a century to recover.
Thirteen decades after Appomattox the questions remain: Was it “an irrepressible conflict”? Was it a necessary war? Was it, as Churchill wrote, “the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass-conflicts of which till then there was record”? Was it a just war? What became of the great tariff issue that had divided and convulsed the nation equally with slavery in the decades before the war? Are there lessons for us in this most terrible of tragedies where all of the dead were Americans?
After any such war, it is the victors who write the history. That has surely been true of the Civil War. Among the great myths taught to American schoolchildren has been that the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln, was elected to free the slaves from bondage, that America’s “Civil War” was fought to end slavery in the United States.
 This is fable. Even the name given this terrible war is wrong. A civil war is a struggle for power inside a nation like the War of the Roses, or the horrible war between Bolsheviks and Czarists in Russia, “Reds” and “Whites,” after Lenin’s October Revolution. The combatants from 1861-1865 were not fighting over who would govern the United States. The South had never contested Lincoln’s election. The South wanted only to be free of the Union.
The war was not over who would rule in Washington, but who would rule in South Carolina, Georgia, and the five Gulf states that had seceded by the time of Fort Sumter. From the standpoint of the North, this was a War of Southern Secession, a War to Preserve the Union. To the South this was the War for Southern Independence.

The Birth of a Myth
At the dedication of Gettysburg Battlefield, on November 19, 1863, three years after Lincoln’s election, the Great Myth was born. There, Abraham Lincoln declared that the war had been, all along, about equality.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent,

 a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition

that all men are created equal.

 

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or

any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

But four score and seven years before Lincoln spoke was 1776. The “new nation” may have been “conceived” in 1776, but it was not born until 1788 after the ninth state had ratified the Constitution. In that Constitution, freemen, black and white, were equal. But slavery, the antithesis of equality, was protected. By Benjamin Franklin’s compromise, slaves were to be considered as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House. Painful to concede, it is more truthful to say that slavery, the essence of inequality, was embedded in the Constitution of the new nation.

 

Moreover, in reaching back to 1776, Lincoln had invoked, in defense of a war to crush a rebellion, the most powerful brief every written on behalf of rebellion.

The Declaration of Independence is not about preserving a union. It is a declaration of secession; it is about the “Right of the People to alter or to abolish” one form of government “and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers on such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” It is about a person’s right “to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”