Free Republic

In his first interview since his supervised release from prison, the filmmaker behind “Innocence of Muslims” told The Daily Caller that he “has no regrets” and promises more films and books about Islam. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is the only person who has been imprisoned in the aftermath of the organized Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which the ambassador and three other Americans were killed. He was wholly unconnected to the attack and was imprisoned on technical probation violations. “The first reason I am writing this book is to tell the world we...

Cleveland police officials said Friday they're disciplining 75 of officers for their involvement in a police chase that ended in the shooting deaths of an unarmed man and woman, The Plain Dealer reports. The pair were shot at 137 times while in their car, parked in a middle school parking lot. No officers were injured in what police called a "full blown-out" firefight. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine told reporters in February that "there is nothing normal about this case. ... This is a tragedy." In November, about 60 police vehicles pursued the two suspects in a 25-minute chase spanning...

Surveillance Society: The government says spying on U.S. citizens is acceptable since it's merely a means of fighting foreign terrorists. But what if the government used espionage in investigations of common criminals? The program is so sneaky that officials are trying to cover it up. "Law enforcement agents," says Reuters, "have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin — not only from defense lawyers, but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges." Criminal investigations should be launched, and suspects deprived of liberty, only "when there's a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent...

The bad news is that governments do a lot of things they shouldn’t do. The good news is that I never run out of material.I’ve even created some sub-categories, such as my U.S. vs U.K. government stupidity contest and my great-moments-in-local-government series.But I never thought I would have a special category about bureaucrats vs. Bambi.1. Bureaucrats in Virginia filed three misdemeanor charges against a man for the horrible crime of rescuing a deer that was hit by a car.2. Bureaucrats in Maryland fined two men $90 each for not having life jackets when they had the gall to rescue a...

Illinois State Police have launched an investigation into why police in Park Forest shot a 95-year-old man with a bean bag round, leading to the man’s death. WBBM Newsradio’s John Waelti reports World War II veteran John Wrana met his demise at the hands of Park Forest police officers last week, after allegedly threatening nursing home staff and paramedics with a cane, butcher knife, and shoehorn at the Victory Centre assisted living center. But Wrana family attorney Nicholas Grapsas denied Wrana ever wielded a knife, and questioned why police needed to use force on an elderly man, when the staff...

The Fourth Amendment protects us from random invasions of our homes by police, right? We know we're secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" unless the cops demonstrate probable cause to a judge and get a warrant. Except... Except when they don't. The fact of the matter is that police have a lot of leeway to bust your door down and take a look around if they fear that waiting for a warrant could lead to loss of evidence or danger to people. Or lead to something, anyway. That end run around the Fourth Amendment is called "exigent circumstances,"...

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s dominant role as the nation’s spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say. -SNIP- “The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of...

RUTLAND — Joshua Severance says his Second Amendment rights to openly carry a firearm were violated, but Rutland police say they were following the law when they handcuffed and briefly detained the Milton man this week. In a case that appears destined to end in a courtroom, Severance, 26, says he was walking down a residential Rutland street Monday afternoon with his shirt off and his 9mm Beretta semiautomatic handgun holstered on his hip when a city police cruiser stopped in front of him and an officer ordered him to place his hands on the hood. “I figured they wanted...

Until Wednesday morning, you'd probably never heard of something called "XKeyscore," a program that the National Security Agency itself describes as its "widest reaching" means of gathering data from across the Internet. According to reports shared by NSA leaker Edward Snowden with the Guardian, is that in addition to all of the other recent revelations about the NSA's surveillance programs, by using XKeyscore, "analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the Internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used." David Brown, who co-authored the recent book "Deep State: Inside the...

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National Review Online. The correspondence suggests the discrimination of conservative groups extended beyond the IRS and into the FEC, where an attorney from the agency’s enforcement division in at least one case sought and received tax information about the status of a conservative group, the American...

The U.S. Department of Justice has revealed in a court filing it agrees with the philosophy of the German government that bureaucrats can punish homeschooling parents. The agency contended parental rights to keep children free from instruction that violates faith essentially are negligible when the government’s goal is an “open society.” The arguments were made in a pleading before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that urges the judges to send a German homeschooling family, the Romeikes, back to Germany where members likely would face persecution. “The goal in Germany is for an ‘open, pluralistic society,’” wrote the government’s...

The Justice Department has agreed to pay $4.1 million to a California college student left in a Drug Enforcement Administration holding cell last year, according to two people familiar with the case. Daniel Chong was detained in an April 2012 drug raid in San Diego and left in a windowless holding cell for four days without food or water. He says he drank his own urine to stay alive. The people familiar with the case spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the settlement before it is officially announced. His attorney filed a $20 million claim against the government...

It’s been a rough couple of days for any freedom loving American. Two big stories broke in relation to the NSA scandal and neither bodes well for the future of privacy in this country. Yesterday’s big story came from CNET. That is significant in and of itself because CNET is not exactly what you would call a site for political news junkies. CNET is more for the computer savvy techies. They are reporting that the feds are applying intense pressure to gather passwords. CNET reports: The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users’ stored passwords, according to...

A young man was exercising his Second Amendment and Wisconsin Constitutional rights in Wisconsin when he was stopped by police, questioned and arrested for Obstruction of Justice and Disorderly Conduct.  Police allege that initial reports of Mr. Hoffman placed him within 1,000 feet of a school.  It is not clear if Mr. Hoffman was within a 1,000 feet of a school when he was accosted. At opencarry.org, MKEgal has written some cogent comments: 3) Since the WI Supreme Court has ruled that it is NOT obstruction to refuse to give your name, or to remain silent, that charge is bogus...

A new Cook County Sheriff’s team is crisscrossing the suburbs to seize guns from thousands of people whose Firearm Owner’s Identification Cards have been revoked. More than 3,000 people in Cook County have failed to surrender their revoked FOID cards to the state. Sheriff Tom Dart said he thinks many of them continue to possess firearms.

Full title: "Bank Breaks Into Ohio Woman’s Home, Repossesses Her Belongings – But That’s Not the Most Shocking Part of the Story"Having your belongings repossessed by a bank is an awful experience, but it’s probably a lot worse when it’s done by accident. That’s what one central Ohio woman claims happened to her. “Katie Barnett says that the First National Bank in Wellston foreclosed on her house, even though it was not her bank,” 10TV.com reports. “They repossessed my house on accident, thinking it was the house across the street,” Barnett explained. Barnett added that she was away when the...

Confiscation? What are you talking about? We would never….. Posted on July 22, 2013 by Miguel Part of a letter from the friendly folks at NYPD, Licensing Division to NY City Gun Owners: See? If you surrender your weapon (under threat of coming down on your sorry ass with all the power that the City of NY and Mayor Bloomberg can exercise) , it cannot be confiscation! Now, who are you gonna believe? Us or them paranoid rednecks from the NRA? Related Article on Gun Watch: Gun Registration is Gun Confiscation 

Wyoming --(Ammoland.com)- The war on freedom is hitting much closer to home, Platte County Wyoming to be exact. Like you, I am outraged at the actions of President Obama, Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein’s attempt to repeal the Second Amendment. And just as in Washington D.C. — the control freaks are at work right here in Wyoming. Remember during the last session when WY state “educators” stormed the capitol in Cheyenne — demanding that our pro-gun legislation was killed in committee?Well now they are scheming at the “local” level to rob you and me of our God-given rights.The Platte County...

After reporting that she'd been raped to Dubai police, a 25-year-old Norwegian woman who was on a business trip to the United Arab Emirates city found herself being jailed on "suspicion of having sex outside of marriage." Following the report of her rape to police, the 25-year-old had her passport and personal possessions seized and was immediately placed in a jail cell. It took three days before she was able to gain access to a phone and contact her family to let them know what had happened to her. ... the 25-year-old was given a sentence of 16 months

It may turn out that within the IRS abuse of Tea Party, conservative, Jewish and other groups was another layer of abuse: women. Catherine Engelbrecht so far has the most harrowing story to tell, of abuse by multiple executive branch agencies after she founded the grassroots election security watchdog True the Vote. Now former Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell is naming names, saying that her tax information was compromised the very day she announced her Senate candidacy. That same day, the IRS slapped a lien on a house that it believed she owned, only to withdraw that lien when...