Free Republic

This is a battlefield, a war zone—if you will—governed by martial law and disguised as a democracy “Police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”—Kristian Williams, activist and author If you don’t want to get probed, poked, pinched, tasered, tackled, searched, seized, stripped, manhandled, arrested, shot, or killed, don’t say, do or even suggest anything that even hints of...

The U.S. government’s growing surveillance of Americans has transformed the nation into an “electronic concentration camp,” top civil-liberties attorney John W. Whitehead says. “It’s moving so rapidly you have to feel creepy because you're being watched. Everybody has a file if you do anything electronically,” Whitehead, author the new book “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,” told Newsmax TV. … Whitehead—who founded the Rutherford Institute in Virginia, which helps promote civil liberties and human rights—has been researching the growth of the National Security Agency since the 1980s. The agency has been under fire for its collection of...

The parents of 10 year-old J.C. Cox have sued a North Carolina public school district for allegedly strip-searching their son in search of a $20 bill lost by another student.J.C. had twice told school officials he did not have the missing money, which was later found in the school cafeteria, attorneys for the Rutherford Institute said announcing the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.Institute attorneys charge that a former Union Elementary School assistant principal violated J.C.'s Fourth Amendment rights when she allegedly ordered the fifth grader to disrobe down to his underwear...

Rutherford Institute Attorneys Win Civil Rights Victory for Pennsylvania Pro-Life Activist William Depner PITTSBURGH—Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute won a civil rights victory for pro-life activist William S. Depner, a resident of McKeesport, Penn. After Institute attorneys filed an appeal on Depner’s behalf, a Court of Common Pleas judge acquitted Depner of harassment charges for photographing girls who appeared to be underage as they entered a local Planned Parenthood facility. Depner claims he was concerned that girls under the age of 18 were being treated by Planned Parenthood without parental consent and believed photographs were the best way to prove...