Free Republic

The United States Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement arm of the post office, was “not legally authorized” to conduct blanket keyword searches of social media for terms such as “protest,” “attack,” and “destroy,” an inspector general investigation found, because it is only supposed to investigate cases with some connection to the post office or the mail. The USPSIS is the oldest police agency in the country, called the United States Postal Inspection Service, or USPIS. Its job is to police the mail and crimes related to the mail such as mail fraud. USPIS dates back to a time when...

Discusses Russian espionage today, how Putin miscalculated re Ukraine, etc. Now he's US citizen and no longer Russian asset.

When MasterCard and the United Nations have joined forces, you know bad news is on the horizon. Auto manufacturers, companies, and governments increasingly have the power to track our every movement and prevent us from driving our own vehicles. Supposedly democratic governments can lock us down or even freeze our bank accounts on a whim (see also "Canada" and "Trudeau"). In this increasingly dystopian world, large multinational corporations are working hand-in-glove with said governments to reshape society in their preferred image, garden-variety citizens be damned. To that end, MasterCard and the United Nations have joined forces to produce a credit...

Hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government broke into the computer networks of at least six state governments in the United States in the last year, according to a report released Tuesday by a private cybersecurity firm. The report from Mandiant does not identify the compromised states or offer a motive for the intrusions, which began last May. But the Chinese group believed responsible for the breaches, APT41, is known to launch hacking operations both for old-fashioned espionage purposes and for financial gain. The same hacking group, APT41, was implicated in a 2020 Justice Department indictment that accused Chinese...

With America's eyes fixed on Ukraine, the Biden administration just gave Communist China its greatest gift yet. In a little-noticed February 23 university speech, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division announced the department would be terminating its preeminent counter-espionage program, the China Initiative. This comes as the Biden DOJ is ramping up its pursuit of Americans on the basis of purported "domestic terror" threats it has never explicitly defined or substantiated. The initiative was more than justified given China's penetration of America's schools, research centers and businesses. As FBI Director Christopher Wray recognized just...

The U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) no longer recommends universal COVID-19 case investigation and contact tracing, instead saying health departments should direct those efforts to specific high-risk settings. The Feb. 28 update to the CDC guidance comes nearly two years after Robert Redfield, the agency’s previous director, told Congress that America needed as many as 100,000 people working as contact tracers to track the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus that causes COVID-19. According to CDC, a contact tracer is expected to quickly locate and talk with individuals tested positive for the CCP virus, find...

Peter Schweizer, President of the Government Accountability Institute, spent a year-and-a-half with his team researching government corruption as it pertains to China. What they discovered is so loaded with bombshells, it’s no wonder that his book, Red-Handed, has been the NY Times #1 Bestseller for three straight weeks.He joined me on the latest episode of The JD Rucker Political Report on America Out Loud Talk Radio to discuss some of the things he found. It was an amazing hour of blockbuster news that hit both Democrats and Republicans. One particular story in the book that we hadn’t heard much about...

FBI’s Operation to Infiltrate Right-Wing Extremist Groups Lies at Center of Transparency Lawsuit By Ken Silva February 23, 2022 Updated: February 23, 2022 biggersmaller Print An FBI right-wing infiltration operation tangled in allegations of witness tampering, evidence suppression, and connections to the Oklahoma City bombing has been exposed through one man’s unprecedented Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. government. And the case isn’t over yet. Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue’s 2006 FOIA lawsuit against the FBI and CIA for Oklahoma City bombing records is indeed still an open matter, having been sealed and litigated behind closed doors since...

The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday will end a program focused on fighting Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, shifting from what an official called a "myopic" focus to address threats from a broader array of hostile nations.

The Justice Department is ditching the China Initiative, a national security program designed to tackle Chinese economic espionage in the US after a string of cases collapsed amid complaints it was fueling suspicion against Chinese Americans. It was launched by the Trump administration three years ago amid concerns of intellectual property theft at research universities. Matthew Olsen, assistant attorney general for national security, announced a change of strategy Wednesday. He said it followed a months-long review that found it was preventing universities attracting top talent. Instead, he said the work would continue as part of a broader strategy that included...

Last week, we documented Special Counsel John Durham’s motion discussing the potential conflicts of interest of Michael Sussmann’s attorneys. That filing was important for a number of reasons, mainly because Durham stated that Sussmann’s client, Rodney Joffe (a federal contractor with access to “sensitive” data) “exploited” internet traffic data (domain name system, or DNS) pertaining to “the Executive Office of the President of the United States (“EOP”).”We also asked why Joffe and Sussmann continued to push false allegations of Trump’s ties to Russia after the election. One could theorize that they made the Trump/Russia connection in the summer and fall...

After an initial backlash over its facial recognition feature, the Internal Revenue Service said Monday it started a new option that will allow taxpayers to sign up for online accounts without the use of the controversial biometric data. Taxpayers wanting to use its services online will still have to use ID.me to register, but people will have the option of verifying their identity during a “live virtual interview” instead of uploading a video selfie. “This is consistent with the IRS’s commitment earlier this month to transition away from the requirement for taxpayers creating an IRS online account to provide a...

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level. The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority. In a February 14...

Speculation has emerged that the former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign’s tentacles reached into the Trump White House as part of the conspiracy to smear the 45th president.On Friday, special prosecutor John Durham rattled the political world with a court filing that alleged lawyers for the Clinton campaign hired a technology company to infiltrate computer servers and lay a false trail that would implicate the Trump campaign of having contacts with Russia, according to Fox News.Durham, hired to investigate the early stages of the Trump-Russia hoax and root out misconduct, has secured the indictment of Michael Sussman, a lawyer...

Establishment media on Tuesday panned Special Counsel John Durham’s court filings that alleged Hillary Clinton’s campaign associates spied on Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency. After more than 48 hours since Durham’s court filing revelations were reported, the New York Times and Washington Post finally wrote articles on the subject, but they cast doubt on the filings’ significance. The outlets framed their articles around criticizing “right-leaning media” for “carefully” scrutinizing “off track” narratives that are “often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation.” The Times headlined its Monday story, “Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets,...

Vatican spy story takes center stage as fraud trial resumesVATICAN CITY — The Vatican's big fraud and extortion trial resumes Friday after exposing some unseemly realities of how the Holy See operates, with a new spy story taking center stage that is more befitting of a 007 thriller than the inner workings of a papacy.According to written testimony obtained Thursday, one of Pope Francis' top advisers brought in members of the Italian secret service to sweep his office for bugs and commissioned intelligence reports from them, completely bypassing the Vatican's own police force in the process.The reported actions of Archbishop...

One week ago today, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in the government’s criminal case against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. That motion, in requesting the court obtain Sussmann’s waiver of any conflicts of interest held by his lawyers on the record, provided in excruciating detail the factual basis for the purported conflicts. In doing so, it revealed that “enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to...

The U.S. Justice Department has tapped a seasoned computer crimes prosecutor to lead its new national cryptocurrency enforcement team and announced on Thursday that the FBI is launching a unit for blockchain analysis and virtual asset seizure. U.S. regulators under President Joe Biden have been ratcheting up their scrutiny of the crypto industry in the wake of a series of high-profile cyberattacks last year on the largest U.S. fuel pipeline network and the world's largest beef supplier. Ransomware groups often demand their fees in bitcoin.

Big tech companies are doing the bidding of the U.S. government in actions that mirror China’s social credit system, and Americans must recognize what’s happening and take action, according to Kara Frederick, a former Facebook intel analyst and a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Kara Frederick, a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy, in Washington on Feb. 11, 2022 Frederick recently authored a Heritage Foundation report titled, “Combating Big Tech’s Totalitarianism: A Road Map,” which details how Big Tech has wielded its power to censor Americans. The report proposes a range of actions Americans...

Former President Donald Trump told conservative talk show host Glenn Beck Tuesday the moment he knew for sure Democrats were spying on him. “You said from the very beginning, ‘They’re spying on us.’ How did you know that was happening?” Beck asked during a phone interview for his radio show, wondering if it was just a “gut” instinct. “I think it was a combination of things, but I tell you, the world blew up when I did that,” Trump responded. Trump said the moment came during his 2016 contest against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton when he was watching a television...