Indeed, the one area not impacted in the least by a government shutdown will be the police/surveillance state and its various militarized agencies, spying programs and personnel. Take a look at the programs and policies that will not be affected by a government shutdown, and you’ll get a clearer sense of the government’s priorities – priorities which have, as I point out in my new book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, little to do with serving taxpayers and everything to do with maintaining power and control, while being sold to the public under the guise of national security.

Domestic surveillance. On any given day, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. Police have been outfitted with a litany of surveillance gear, from license plate readers and cell phone tracking devices to biometric data recorders….

NSA domestic programs. Government shutdown or not, the National Security Agency (NSA), with its $10.8 billion black ops annual budget, will continue to spy on every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone using programs such as PRISM and XKEYSCORE. By cracking the security of all major smartphones, including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices, NSA agents harvest such information as contacts, text messages, and location data. And then there are the NSA agents who will continue to use and abuse their surveillance powers for personal means, to spy on girlfriends, lovers and first dates.

So, today you can feel safe because the essential parts of government still are working for you. They are making sure that any dangerous thoughts you have are being recorded, so you can be corrected in the future. The government is making sure that the government still is in charge of our lives, so the government can keep protecting us and providing for us.

Nothing to worry about. Move along.

By Chris Reed

A while back, I came upon the amazing stories of Daniel J. Saulmon, a Southern California man who has used video and audio recorders to document vast evidence of police misconduct. Here we go again, with what appears to be the worst abuse of power yet, this time in the L.A. suburb of Hawthorne:

A California man was jailed for four days for attempting to record police officers on a public street.

Daniel J. Saulmon was charged with resisting, delaying and obstructing an officer but the video shows he was standing well out the way of a traffic stop and was only arrested when he failed to produce identification to an approaching officer.

And there is no law in California that requires citizens to produce identification. And even if there was, it would require the officer to have a reasonable suspicion that he was committing a crime.

Will Hawthorne cop Gabriel Lira be thrown off the force?

Nah. This is California. He probably just boosted his chances for a promotion.

By Katy Grimes

Legislators have just involved themselves in professional sports. A bill was passed in the Assembly Thursday requiring all owners of all professional stadiums and sports arenas to post signs displaying the text message number and phone number to contact arena security in order to report a violent act.

Whatever, right?

But the bill started out as something very different.

AB 2464 by Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Silver Lake, originally would have required stadiums and arenas to develop and maintain a list of individuals to be excluded or ejected from all professional sports arenas if they had been involved in a “violent act” at an arena or stadium.

Before being amended, the bill stated, “the banned persons list may include any person
whose presence in a professional sports arena is determined by the courts to pose a threat to the well-being and safety of those in attendance at professional sporting events.”

How creepy–especially in this era of very subjective ideas of “violence.” Daring to question a cop in many cases can bring about an arrest.

And, the bill was far too broad in its inclusion of nearly every serious felony including a special section just on child and sexual offendser.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the bill was it would have allowed a list of the addresses of the banned persons to be published. The bill’s analysis said, “The banned
persons list would be name-based, not biometric, and therefore there would be no definitive way to identify a person on the list. This could leave the DOJ open to litigation were the wrong person may be banned from sports arenas because he or she has the same name or is similar in appearance to a banned person.

Ironically, the Assembly just passed a bill yesterday that will allow public safety professionals to keep their property addresses hidden from the public.

Both bills were sponsored by the California Police Chiefs Association, a group that is becoming more and more aggressive about increasing police authority, and lessening the rights of private citizens.

Fortunately, AB 2464 was so bad, it was dramatically amended and became just a nuisance bill for arena and stadium owners, with the signage requirement.

But, the reason I point this bill out is because I want people to see the kind of personal rights violations and liberty reducing legislation lawmakers think is a good idea. Here is the bill, in its original form, as well as the original legislative analysis pointing out the gross flaws and legal issues.

Take the time to read the bill, and please leave me your comments. I have provided the link to all versions of the bill, as well as all of the analyses.

Thanks to a little-discussed state Supreme Court decision in January, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures” don’t necessarily apply in California anymore.

Yet few of our fellow citizens have been upset about this sad loss of our liberties, the state’s law enforcement officials have been happy about the new latitude they’ve been granted to search our most personal information without limits, and efforts to roll back the decision are facing uncertainty — including a governor so closely allied with police unions that he might veto a bill restoring lost civil liberties.

It’s understandable why the case, involving a run-of-the-mill arrest of a low-level drug dealer in Ventura County, hasn’t garnered much attention. But the result of the decision is that if you are ever arrested for any reason, police can rummage through your cellphone and gather every piece of personal information and data available through that phone. Your most secret information — passwords, medical information, finances, love letters, photographs, Web searching history, etc. — are available for police inspection with no limits beyond the curiosity of the police, a real threat given that a smart phone really is a sophisticated computer.

The state high court found in People vs. Diaz that police officials had every right to search, without a warrant, the personal effects of a person who has been arrested, including that person’s cellphone.

A deputy sheriff arrested Gregory Diaz after he drove a drug dealer to a site where the dealer sold Ecstasy to a police informant. Diaz denied involvement in the deal. So after he was taken to the sheriff’s station officials searched his cellphone and found text messages that confirmed his involvement. Diaz sued to throw out the evidence found from the cellphone, arguing that the search was in violation of the Constitution.

Court Ruling

The state Supreme Court found otherwise. California justices cited the U.S. Supreme Court, which has long allowed warrantless searches of people who have been arrested and taken into police custody because the arrested person might have a weapon that could be used against the officer or have evidence that would be quickly destroyed.

“We hold that the cellphone was ‘immediately associated with (the defendant’s) person’ and that the warrantless search of the cellphone therefore was valid,” the court ruled, noting that a cellphone is a form of personal property no different than a cigarette package found in a defendant’s pocket.

The latter point turns an otherwise ho-hum case about a low-level drug dealer into a blockbuster assault on Californians’ most basic freedoms. The justices made no distinctions between items police find on an arrested person. How can justices construe that a cigarette box is no different from a smart phone, which contains unlimited files, photographs, voice recordings, contacts and even offsite file servers that are accessed through these hand-held computers?

The pre-Diaz rules didn’t impose any undue burden on police. If certain cellphone information was relevant to the case, then police were required to do what is typically done in free societies. They would ask a judge for a warrant. But post-Diaz, if you are, say, arrested for public drunkenness, then the police can take your smart phone and just rifle through all the files looking for any information that could implicate you in any crime or simply embarrass you.

“(A) search of a modern mobile device is more like a search of an arrested person’s home or business than it is like a pack of cigarettes, or wallet,” explained an analysis of the decision by Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who introduced SB 914 to roll back the Diaz ruling.

Leno’s bill, slated to come before the full Senate after the Legislature’s recess, includes amendments to protect police, who are allowed to search a cellphone without a warrant in a case of imminent danger.

Police unions and their allies argue that defendants will quickly destroy evidence from their phones. But police can take the phones and then get a warrant. They just can’t go on fishing expeditions.

Basically, the unions and their supporters don’t want to give up new powers they’ve been granted. The law-and-order crowd wants us to blindly trust government officials. But we know from reading news stories that governments abuse their power.

Police State

Police officials often misbehave. Government agencies do not have an exemplary record with protecting personal information. I’m tired of this “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear” mentality, which is the mentality of a police state.

The decision allows police agencies to evade the state’s journalistic Shield Law, which protects disclosures of sensitive information. So now if a sheriff arrests a reporter for any reason, his office has access to all the files and newsroom servers available on the reporter’s smart phone. But anyone with a smart phone — not just journalists — should support the Leno bill.

The Fourth Amendment assures us: “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. … ”

This was a fundamental concern to America’s founders. In her dissent, Justice Kathryn Werdegar (then-Justice Carlos Moreno concurred) decried the decision that allows “police carte blanche, with no showing of exigency, to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information. … The majority thus sanctions a highly intrusive and unjustified type of search, one meeting neither the warrant requirement nor the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment.”

When this comes to the floor next month, California legislators, and the governor, will have a chance to restore the Fourth Amendment in California. How can this even be controversial?

— Steven Greenhut

By JOHN SEILER

Editor’s note: This article was rewritten to reflect more recent information, which corrected some of what was reported.

The evidence that America now is a full-blown police state keeps pouring in. Governments short of revenue even are assaulting those with alleged school-loan problems.

In Stockton, original reports were that local police launched an assault on a man’s house, searching for his wife. Her offense: she didn’t make her federal student-loan payments.

Reported News10.net on Thursday (the link includes a video):

The resident, Kenneth Wright, does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe why what he thought was a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 in the morning.

“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said.

As Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts, he said the officers barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.

“He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there,” Wright said.

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children, ages 3, 7, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house.

“They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids,” Wright said.

Later Reports

However, later reports told a slightly different story. Reported FoxNews.com:

A California man who initially claimed to a local television station that he was roughed up by “SWAT team” members who allegedly battered down his front door to execute a search warrant related to his estranged wife’s unpaid student loans was targeted due to an ongoing probe into alleged financial aid fraud.

The search allowed for the seizure of any student financial aid documents, W2 forms and electronic communications….

One of Wright’s neighbors, a woman who identified herself only as Becky, saw the raid, which started at 6:45 a.m. and lasted until at least 10:45 a.m., she said.

“They surrounded the house; it was like a task force of SWAT team,” she told the station. “They all had guns. They dragged him out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him.”

Multiple calls to a Stockton Police Department spokesman were not returned on Wednesday. According to ABC 10/KXTV, the Stockton Police Department said it was asked by federal agents to provide one officer and one patrol car for a police presence when executing the search warrant.

“All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door,” Wright said.

It may be some days before the exact nature of what happened becomes clear. However, we do know already:

1. A raid occurred involving numerous heavily armed officers who assaulted Wright’s home as if he were a Taliban member in Afghanistan.

2. Given that he was not an armed criminal, only allegedly involved in a financial impropriety, the size and potency of the assault on his home was far in excess of what was necessary to arrest him. Just a few years ago, this situation would have been dealt with by plain close officers knocking on his door and issuing him a subpoena or a search warrant.

3. Governments at all levels refuse to disclose what really was going on even to respected members of the meida.

Federalization

This raid also shows how the federal government now has completely taken over our lives. Localism is dead. A federal program that seems to most people to be benign, promoting learning and jobs skills, turns out to be another police-state enforcement agency. Maybe more people now will wish that President Ronald Reagan had fulfilled his 1980 campaign promise to complete abolish the U.S. Department of Education (De-Ed).

What America’s founders feared, that state and local governments would be dissolved into a gigantic edifice of oppression, has occurred — enforced even against alleged student loans improprieties.

It’s worth noting that student debt has gotten out of hand. Student debt is the latest “asset bubble” that soon could burst, following the real-estate debt bubble, which burst in the mid-2000s, and the dot-com bubble, which burst in 1999.

Too many kids go to school for too many worthless degrees. They waste four or more years that they could use building a career and piling up experience and savings, but instead end up with a pointless diploma and a mountain of debt.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000.

It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single $53,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.

“Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn’t look at the fine print,” Dr. Bisutti says. “But this is just outrageous now.”

Let’s note that number: $550,000. That’s not a home loan that you might pay off over 30 years while you live in the place. It’s an unsecured loan. And there’s worse:

Unlike other kinds of debt, student loans can be particularly hard to wriggle out of. Homeowners who can’t make their mortgage payments can hand over the keys to their house to their lender. Credit-card and even gambling debts can be discharged in bankruptcy. But ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection agency gets involved. Although lenders may trim payments, getting fees or principals waived seldom happens.

One of the reasons America’s economy developed rapidly was because people could go bankrupt. They could make mistakes and start over. By contrast, in Europe, even to this day, it’s hard to get out of bad debts. You effectively become an indentured servant, a slave, to the banks.

Now the same has happened in America to federal-backed loans to students. You become the government’s slave — for your whole life. Because unless you win the lottery, there’s no way you can pay back that $550,000 loan. The education you thought would free you into a life of a well-paying, interesting vocation, instead enslaves you.

And could bring a SWAT team barging into your home, guns pointed at your nose.

Here’s another viewpoint on “Big Sis” Janet Napolitano’s Heimat Security Police state:

Feb. 20, 2011

The ACLU is fighting an Orwellian scheme in Contra Costa to microchip preschoolers, as if they were dogs.

You have to wonder what kind of people would enslave kids like that. Think back to your own childhood. Wasn’t part of the fun of it wandering away from your parents and doing something dangerous? It’s called growing up.

But the real intent here is to get us  used to being microchipped ourselves. After all, if preschoolers need microchips, then so do grade schoolers … and middle schoolers … and high schoolers … and college students … and everybody.