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Friday, January 17, 2014

"If anybody asks if they know you from somewhere, look them in the eyes and say, “Do you watch porn?”"

"There’s one line in the middle of a sweeping new study of the most controversial National Security Agency (NSA) program revealed by Edward Snowden that sums up the report’s central conclusion: “surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”"


"Increasingly, and openly, ordinary Americans are committing a legal act that some police nonetheless regard as among the most heinous of all offences: it's called contempt of cop. It's otherwise known as asserting your constitutional rights. Citizens, feeling empowered, are pointing smartphones, rather than just an accusing finger, at abusive authorities. Civil libertarians with hidden cameras are challenging the so-called "suspicion-less" roadblocks that police set up to catch lawbreakers. Motorists and others are fighting back in the courts and online against police shakedown rackets on U.S. highways and elsewhere. Everywhere, it seems, Americans are openly challenging arbitrary behaviour by those in authority. Furthermore, they are winning. Not since the late 1960s have those in authority, from heavy-handed cops to the federal operatives sifting metadata in super-secret intelligence installations, been exposed to so much disinfecting sunlight.

These activists range from hard-conservative gun rights types, who carry copies of the Constitution in their pockets, to left-leaning civil liberties advocates.

..."checkpoint refusals" at roadblocks erected by police looking for drunken drivers, or by federal agents hunting illegal aliens. Courts here have held that police have the right to operate such stops. But the courts have also ruled that citizens are free to remain silent, and can refuse to allow searches and ignore orders to submit to "secondary inspections" unless police detain them — which requires the higher hurdle of reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe an offence has been committed...

In these videos, it's clear that what is really at issue for police is the challenge to their authority. Contempt of cop, as the practice is known in libertarian circles, provokes the same rage at checkpoints that Snowden's media interviews arouse in national security officials. And the reason for it is clearly the same: defiance, to authorities, sets an intolerable precedent. In several of these videos, some of which have made television newscasts, police can barely contain their anger, voices rising as they yell orders at stubborn motorists who exercise their right to remain silent..."














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