Free Republic

A Texas lawmaker's proposal to establish a 25-foot "buffer zone" around police engaged in keeping the peace is drawing fire from both legal experts and law enforcement groups, but for different reasons. Dallas-area House representative Jason Villalba introduced HB 2918, which would make it a misdemeanor to photograph police within 25 feet -- raising serious concerns that the bill, if passed, would violate the First Amendment and prevent individuals from holding police accountable. For Texans legally carrying a firearm, the buffer zone required would be 100 feet under Villalba's proposal. Villalba reportedly said police approached him about creating the legislation,...

Most of the likely Republican presidential candidates are supportive of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. But Americans who identify as Republican or lean that way appear to disagree. That’s according to a new survey from Pew Research, released on Monday, gauging post-Snowden attitudes on digital privacy and surveillance. Of respondents who were familiar with the NSA spying revelations, 70 percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican said they were losing confidence that the agency’s surveillance programs served the public interest. Just 55 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic said they had lost faith.... But the strong majority of...

The Truth About Cars has followed the use of license plate recognition and storage technology by local law enforcement agencies, a practice that has raised alarms from civil liberties activists because of constitutional concerns over broad surveillance and the ability to reconstruct one’s movements from license plate data. Now it appears that United States Postal Inspection Service, the USPS’ own law enforcement agency has also, at least at one post office in Colorado, been collecting similar data from drivers. Though the device had apparently been operating for at least a few months, within an hour of Chris Halsne, of Denver’s...

DENVER — Within an hour of FOX31 Denver discovering a hidden camera, which was positioned to capture and record the license plates and facial features of customers leaving a Golden Post Office, the device was ripped from the ground and disappeared.FOX31 Denver investigative reporter Chris Halsne confirmed the hidden camera and recorder is owned and operated by the United State Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement branch of the U.S. Postal Service.The recording device appeared to be tripped by any vehicle leaving the property on Johnson Road, but the lens was not positioned to capture images of the front door,...

Within an hour of FOX31 Denver discovering a hidden camera, which was positioned to capture and record the license plates and facial features of customers leaving a Golden Post Office, the device was ripped from the ground and disappeared. FOX31 Denver investigative reporter Chris Halsne confirmed the hidden camera and recorder is owned and operated by the United State Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement branch of the U.S. Postal Service. The recording device appeared to be tripped by any vehicle leaving the property on Johnson Road, but the lens was not positioned to capture images of the front door,...

On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it is suing the US National Security Agency and Department of Justice over surveillance. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind web-based encyclopedia Wikipedia, has teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and eight other organizations to fight the NSA's mass surveillance program. The suit was filed on Tuesday at a Maryland federal court claiming the NSA and DoJ violated the First and Fourth Amendments with "large-scale search and seizure of internet communications" or "upstream surveillance." This surveillance tactic allows the NSA to collect data on Internet users who communicate with "non US...

YORK --- A woman in York called law enforcement last week to report a very unusual peeping tom. The woman told the York County Sheriff's Office she woke up around 2 a.m. on Feb. 11, and saw a light outside her window on Lomita Road. When she got up to investigate, she saw that the light was attached to what the incident report describes as a flying "drone." The drone then flew away from the woman's home toward a Duke Energy building. By the time the woman contacted sheriff's deputies on Monday, she said she had already contacted Duke as...

Unfortunately, privacy as we once knew it is dead. “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984 None of us are perfect. All of us bend the rules occasionally. Even before the age of overcriminalization, when the most upstanding citizen could be counted on to break at least three laws a day without knowing it, most of us have knowingly flouted the law from time to time.Indeed, there was a time when most Americans thought nothing of driving a few...

We at Walking In The Desert would like to let our readers know about a documentary that a friend and I are working on. This is our first documentary but we hope that this documentary will be a success and will promote the usage of the Tridentine Mass (Extraordinary Form) A friend and I are in the process to create a documentary that will promote the usage of the Latin Mass. We want to be able to do a video documentary that will interview priests and lay people who attend or celebrate the Latin Mass. We want to ask them...

When the United States rejected former Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli’s request for spying equipment to eavesdrop, U.S. diplomats feared, on his political enemies, the former supermarket baron turned to another source: Israel.Now scores of Panama’s political and social elite are learning that the eavesdropping program that Martinelli’s security team set in place sprawled into the most private aspects of their lives – including their bedrooms. Rather than national security, what appears to have driven the wiretapping was a surfeit of the seven deadly sins, particularly greed, pride, lust and envy.Nearly every day, targets of the wiretapping march to the prosecutors’...

Are you starting to forget just how creepy government agencies can be when they decide to spy on average (law abiding) citizens? Well, this should help refocus your distrust of big government. According to AP News:The Drug Enforcement Administration abandoned an internal proposal to use surveillance cameras for photographing vehicle license plates near gun shows in the United States to investigate gun-trafficking, the agency's chief said Wednesday.Um, good… Also: “What the heck?”So the DEA was planning on tracking everyone that went to a gun show? Wow… Nothing like being innocent until proven guilty, right? It might be time to start borrowing...

Over a year ago we brought you the story of Mr. Filippidis and his family, a Florida Driver who was pulled over by law enforcement in Maryland. The traffic stop would have been typical except for the fact the responding officer demanded, at random, Mr. Filippidis’s firearm. Mr. Filippidis did not have his legally owned -CCW permitted- hand gun, it was home in Florida. Nor did Mr. Filippidis ever say he had a firearm – yet the officer was insistent Mr. Filippidis owned one, handcuffed Mr. Filippidis, and strip searched his vehicle on the side of the road. Numerous Maryland...

In the race for more tax money-- and government solutions-- the Feds and the states are invading your privacy with increasing regularity. Several states, including Colorado, Oregon and California are studying proposals today to equip cars with GPS tracking devices so that they can tax drivers by the mile they drive. In part this is happening as gas tax revenues are going down because the government insists on: 1) raising the gas tax to discourage driving and 2) establishing fuel efficiency standards that have people using less gasoline. So states, which use gas tax money to build roads, now claim...

Eyewitness News has learned of a second investigation underway involving a hidden camera discovered in a Chicago bedroom.  The camera was hidden inside a smoke alarm in the man's Bucktown apartment. The victim, who wished to conceal his identity, says he found a card containing recordings of 56 separate incidents over the previous two months, including numerous private and intimate moments. "I don't know where the videos went, what's being done with them, so it's extremely upsetting," the victim said. He was new to Chicago when he moved into the Bucktown apartment last November. But in a matter of days,...

Barack Obama And David Cameron Fail To See Eye To Eye On Surveillance British prime minister takes tougher line on internet companies than US president at White House talks on Islamist threats Barack Obama and David Cameron struck different notes on surveillance powers after the president conceded that there is an important balance to be struck between monitoring terror suspects and protecting civil liberties. As Cameron warned the internet giants that they must do more to ensure they do not become platforms for terrorist communications, the US president said he welcomed the way in which civil liberties groups hold them...

MADISON, Wis. – Almost five months after the Government Accountability Board quietly ended its role in a politically charged investigation into dozens of Wisconsin conservative groups, the agency has yet to return property seized from people caught up in the probe. “I would think that because it’s not an ongoing investigation, then it seems to me they should get their stuff back,” said constitutional law expert Rick Esenberg. Investigators seized paper files, computers and other electronic devices, including the electronic equipment of targets’ family members, among other property, in raids in October 2013. They aren’t likely to see their things...

Former CBS News reporter sues Justice Department for $35 million alleging her family was put under surveillance while she covered Benghazi A former reporter with CBS News is suing the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging she was illegally spied on and digitally monitored. Sharyl Attkisson's lawsuit alleges that the illegal surveillance took place while she covered stories on Benghazi and the Fast and Furious gunwalking case and refers to three forensic exams conducted on computers. She is suing over alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, and her husband and daughter are named as co-plaintiffs. Attorney General Eric Holder,...

Washington, D.C.-area public school districts have deployed more than 30,000 surveillance cameras inside school buildings, according to a review of security records by News4.

The National Security Agency may have violated U.S. law for over a decade with the unauthorized surveillance of U.S. citizens' overseas communications, according to new reports on the agency's intelligence collection practices released by the NSA on Wednesday. The U.S. spy agency released the highly confidential reports in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). According to documents posted on the NSA website on Christmas Eve, the examples of violations include sending data on Americans to unauthorized recipients, storing such data on unprotected computers and retaining them after they were meant...

In light of the KNOWN Jihadist in Australia taking hostages and using a gun (guns are banned there) causing innocent people to be killed and wounded, we need a list of known Jihadists to be immediately set up and accessible to the public (including gun owners) just like the list of sex offenders. The American people have a right to know who all of these evil people are and where they live just like the right we have to know all of the sex offenders are and where they live. It is time to out all of these bastards so...