Tag: ALERT! Lawful Activity Detected

We’re with the Government, We’re Here to Take Your Stuff

What happens when changing the labor laws to make it nearly impossible for an independent farm to function isn’t enough? If you’re the state you just start doing what you’re good at, stealing their money:

Now, Obama has the Dept. of Justice going after small farmers under the post-911 “Bank Secrecy Act” which makes it a crime to deposit less than $10,000 when you earned more than that.

“The level we deposited was what it was and it was about the same every week,” Randy Sowers told Frederick News. The Sowers own and run South Mountain Creamery in Middletown, Maryland.

Admittedly, when the Sowers earned over $10,000 in February, and learned they’d have to fill out paperwork at the bank for such large deposits, they simply rolled the deposits over to keep them below the none-of-your-fucking-business amount, rather than waste time on bureaucratic red tape aimed at flagging terrorism or other illegal activities.

“Structuring,” explains Overlawyered.com, “is the federal criminal offense of splitting up bank deposits so as to keep them under a threshold such as $10,000 above which banks have to report transactions to the government.”

While being questioned, the Sowers were finally presented with a seizure order and advised that the feds had already emptied their bank account of $70,000. The Dept. of Justice has since sued to keep $63,000 of the Sowers’ money, though they committed no crime other than maintaining their privacy.

This just goes to show that there is a law for everything. If you don’t want to fill out a ton of pointless paperwork when depositing $10,000 or more you’re committing a criminal act by making multiple smaller deposits. At this point it’s probably smarter to build your own valut to store you cash in because it certainly isn’t safe at the bank.

You also have to love the fact that the Department of Justice (DoJ) is suing the farmer to keep most of the ill-gotten money even though the farmers have committed no crime. Guilty until proven, well, guilty is the motto in this country.

Silence Citizen

People often believe we live in a free country where the freedom of speech is respected. It’s not true, the United States censors people all of the time but isn’t as blatant about it as some states. Instead of outright censoring political dissidence the United States uses various laws and procedures claimed to be in place for safety reasons to determine who can and can’t speak as on blogger found out:

The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.

Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.”

Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.

When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.

But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.

Isn’t that a nice little scam to censor speech? First you require anybody practicing dietetics or nutrition to be licensed and then you make the act of providing nutritional “counseling” without said license illegal. Since counseling is a pretty good catch-all term that can be applied to any advocacy you can effectively prevent individuals from speaking about a topic unless they’re approved by the state.

Heicklen Ruled Innocent of Jury Tampering for Advocating Nullification

Reader plblark was good enough to send me this story from Say Uncle about a judge who ruled advocating jury nullification isn’t a crime:

Yeterday a federal judge ruled that distributing pamphlets about jury nullification—even in front of a courthouse—is not jury tampering. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood dismissed a 2010 indictment against Julian P. Heicklen, a retired chemistry professor who was accused of violating Title 18, Section 1504, of the U.S. Code, which authorizes a jail sentence of up to six months for anyone who “attempts to influence the action or decision of any grand or petit juror of any court of the United States upon any issue or matter pending before such juror, or before the jury of which he is a member, or pertaining to his duties, by writing or sending to him any written communication, in relation to such issue or matter.”

I wrote about Julian P. Heicklen’s situation last year. He was passing out pamphlets in front of a courthouse informing potential jurors about their right of nullification.

For those of you unaware jury nullification is a side effect of jury trials. Namely juries aren’t punished for their decision or asked to justify their ruling so they can find a defendant innocent based solely on the ground that the law he’s being tried for is unjust. Unfortunately this right of jurors is no longer covered in school and judges outright lie to jurors by telling them that they must rule based on the letter of the law, not what they think the law should be. Thankfully there are organizations like the Fully Informed Jury Association and individuals like Heicklen working to raise awareness of nullification rights.

Good on you Julian P. Heicklen for being an advocate of liberty and not backing down when the state threatened to throw you in a cage.

Get Them Started Early

The hardest part about implementing a police state is getting the people to fully submit to it. Sure we see mindless submission to the state left and right but if the state inconveniences the populace too much the populace will eventually give the state a jolly old send off. What you really need to do is get people used to the police state while they’re still young, which is what Texas has been doing:

He is looking down on a courtroom full of teenagers and their parents who are facing “Class C” misdemeanour offences for skipping school.

At the truancy courts of Dallas in Texas, absence from class or repeated late arrivals are punishable with fines of up to $500 (£316).

“A Class C misdemeanour is the lowest level of all the criminal offences, it would be the equivalent of a traffic ticket or not abiding by a stop sign on the street,” says Judge Sholden, who can also hand out sanctions like essays and book reports in his sentence.

The use of the court system to correct student behaviour is a popular policy used in schools across Texas.

A recent study put the number of Class C tickets issued to young people at around 300,000 per year.

Using the judicial system to punish students for skipping class? If that doesn’t scream police state what does? But wait, there’s more:

“I ran into a mother recently whose daughter wrote her name on a school desk in highlighter and she was given a felony conviction for that.

Felony. Conviction. Because a girl wrote here name on her desk with a highlighter she is barred the right to own firearms and vote (unless Texas expunges juvenile convictions, including felonies, when a kid becomes and adult but that is becoming rare). Back in my day (now I’m sounding old) we were merely made to clean off the graffiti and sent on our way. Instead of ruining the life of a student for nothing more than easily washed off graffiti we simply had to correct our wrong, which is how it should be.

Of course this kind of school disciplinary system has two benefits to the state; it gets students used to the police state and raises money. If skipping class can net you a fine of $500, how much money do you think is brought in through fines in the Texas school system? I’m guessing it’s quite a bit. After all, fines exist for the sole purpose of raising money for the state.

I’m guessing this method of dealing with transgressions by school kids will spread beyond Texas, it’s just too authoritarian not to.

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Evidence, probably cause, reasonable suspicion, and due process are all things that were thrown out the door when the war on drugs began. The fact police departments are allowed to keep and seized evidence in drug related confiscations has meant there has been a great dead of drug confiscations (shocking, I know). A woman in Moorhead, Minnesota has just learned this lesson the hard way:

For the struggling waitress with five children, the $12,000 left at the table in a to-go box must have seemed too good to be true.

Moorhead police decided it was just that.

Now, the waitress is suing in Clay County District Court, claiming the cash was given to her and police shouldn’t have seized it as drug money.

“The thing that’s sad about it is here’s somebody who truly needs this gift … and now the government is getting in the way of it,” said the woman’s attorney, Craig Richie of Fargo.

Moorhead police Lt. Tory Jacobson said he couldn’t discuss the matter.

“We certainly have an ongoing investigation with it, with suspicion of narcotics or the involvement of narcotics investigators,” he said.

[…]

“Even though I desperately needed the money as my husband and I have 5 children, I feel I did the right thing by calling Moorhead Police,” she states in the lawsuit.

The lesson to take away from this story is never report cash gifts received to the state, they’ll just take it from you. What’s even worse is the fact this behavior is entirely legal thanks to United States Code 881(a)(6):

(a) Subject property

The following shall be subject to forfeiture to the United States and no property right shall exist in them:

[…]

(6) All moneys, negotiable instruments, securities, or other things of value furnished or intended to be furnished by any person in exchange for a controlled substance or listed chemical in violation of this subchapter, all proceeds traceable to such an exchange, and all moneys, negotiable instruments, and securities used or intended to be used to facilitate any violation of this subchapter.

Oh, it gets better. The above law has also been upheld in court:

Bundling and concealment of large amounts of currency, combined with other suspicious circumstances, supports a connection between money and drug trafficking. A plausible, but unlikely explanation by a claimant fails to show that the currency was not substantially connected to a narcotics offense. Judgment of the district court reversed.

Federal law basically gives a police officer sole discretion in deciding whether or not money in your possession is intended to be used to facilitate a violation of drug laws. When a random police officer mades this determination your right of ownership over that money is revoked by the state and they get to take it. The ruling in United States v. $124,000 in U.S. Currency states a plausible explanation on behalf of the police officer’s victim fails to show the money wasn’t substantially connected to a narcotics offense, so you’re truly guilty until proven innocent.

The war on drugs managed to destroy what little property rights remained in this country. One is no longer a self-owner as the state can dicate what you may or may not put into your body and any ownership of property outside of your body is also entirely ignored. While drug manufacturers and dealers made insane amounts of money because of the war on drugs the bigger criminal organization, the state, makes far more.

You Decide, Sting Operation or Giving the State the Finger

I’m not sure what to make of this:

A retailer selling tools to grow cannabis has opened in the US capital, just a few miles from the White House.

WeGrow sells plant food and lighting – but no cannabis or seeds – to help cultivators grow medical marijuana.

The chain, dubbed the “Walmart of weed”, launches its latest outlet just as Washington’s medical marijuana laws come into effect.

Is WeGrow a legitimate business run by people that love to give the state the middle finger or is it run by agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency who are using the chain as a clever type of sting operation?

The store claims to sell people equipment so they can grow marijuana at home:

WeGrow’s founder says he hopes his company will help create a “green rush” by selling the equipment needed to grow cannabis at home.

“The more that businesses start to push the envelope by showing that this is a legitimate industry, the further we’re going to be able to go in changing people’s minds,” Dhar Mann told the Associated Press news agency.

If the chain was targeting the medical marijuana business I would imagine they would setup a system to ensure they only sell to licensed growers, although I could be wrong. While I hope this is an actual business and not a fancy sting operation I’m left wondering. Has anybody heard of this chain before? Is there any news regarding their customers mysteriously being arrested after busying supplies from one of the stores?

You Might be a Terrorist

The New Jersey Department of Motherland Homeland Security has released a document that explains the signs of terrorism [PDF]. After reading this document I’ve come to realize that we all may be terrorists without even realizing it. Why? Because some of the signs of being a terrorist are:

Be alert to the indicators regarding actions, individual behaviors, personal interactions and social dynamics, vehicle characteristics and movements. Use your judgment in determining whether or not they are unusual or suspicious in your community or work environment. Be wary of people who depart quickly when seen or attempt to conceal something. Look for signs of nervousness in the people you come in contact with. Signs will become particularly evident in a person’s eyes, face, neck, and body movements. The following is a list of things to look for:

Eyes

  • Glances: directions, duration, timing
  • Wide open “flashbulb eyes”
  • Cold penetrating stare
  • Trance-like gaze

Face and Neck

  • Exaggerated yawning when engaged in conversation
  • Protruding or beating neck arteries
  • Repetitive touching of face, tugging on or covering ears
  • Increased breathing rate, panting
  • Excessive fidgeting, clock watching, head turning

Body

  • Pacing or jumpy
  • Trembling
  • Unusual perspiration
  • Goose bumps
  • Rigid posture with minimal body movements and arms close to sides

Basically everybody who has ever shown signs of nervousness is a potential terrorist. Another way to detect a terrorist is to look for common equipment used by their kind:

Individuals may be observed:

  • Drawing or taking pictures in areas not normally of interest
  • Taking notes or annotating maps
  • Sitting in a parked vehicle

Some of the tools terrorists might use during surveillance include:

  • Cameras- video, still, or panoramic
  • Laptop computers or PDA’s (Personal Data Assistants)
  • Diagrams or maps
  • Binoculars or other vision-enhancing devices
  • GPS (Global Positioning System) devices

Not only is every person who has ever been nervous a potential terrorist but so is every tourist. Russia Today has a list of potential terrorists that you should be on the lookout for.

Just in case this document gets thrown down the memory hole I’ve uploaded a copy here.

Because Discrimination is Fun

I always find it funny when people scream about discrimination in schools. Why? It’s not because I support discrimination but because of the selective nature of anti-discriminatory policies. While they preach about the need to create a safe environment for all children they also try to prevent many students from feeling welcome. For every rule prohibiting the discrimination of homosexuals, African Americans, women, etc. there is another rule that ban talking about firearms. No rules exist to protect libertarians, atheists, or other groups that are often discriminated against, especially in schools. If you want to see a kid get discriminated against immediately just watch for one to make a comment against public unions, the teachers will descend upon him like vulture on carrion. My main point is that schools don’t oppose discrimination, they promote it by being very selective in the groups they protect. When a school protects one group over another they also make a statement, that those protected groups are better than others and therefore other groups are obviously lesser and, therefore, valid targets of discrimination.

Now that I’ve gotten the gears of discrimination moving let’s talk about adult film stars, or more specifically, two adult file stars. This story starts with an 18 year-old male named Mike Stone, a student at the Tartan High School. Mr. Stone decided to send out invitations to 600 adult film actresses to be his date to prom, and one accepted. The one who accepted, Megan Piper, then invited another, Emy Reyes. Obviously Mr. Stone is now the talk of his class, and for good reason (consider his age, consider what he accomplished, then realize he’s going to be the most popular guy with the guys). Needless to say the school administration saw a student having fun and accomplishing one of his goals in life so they had to shut him down:

A Tartan High School student who used Twitter to find an adult film actress to go to prom with him May 12 won’t be allowed to bring the woman to the dance, according to a statement released by the school. The statement says:

“It has been reported in the national news that a Tartan student has invited a porn star to attend prom and she has accepted his invitation, subject to his paying for her airfare to Minnesota. However, this prom date will not be allowed to attend the Tartan prom as her attendance would be prohibited under Tartan’s standard prom procedures and would be inconsistent with two school district policies, E-077 (Visitors to School District Buildings and Sites) and E-084 (School Sponsored Student Publications and Activities).”

Hold the boat here, what? A student is being prohibited from brining his dates to prom? What kind of discriminatory bullshit is that? Are high schools not the bastions of anti-discrimination? Are we not told that all are excepted, and indeed welcomes, in the hands of public schools? What could possibly be in these school policies that would override their supposed prohibitions against discrimination? Let’s take a look. I went diving through the Oakdale school district’s webpage and found the policies mentioned in the statement above. E-077 [PDF] deals with visitors and exists mainly to give the school the option of banning “undesirables” from school grounds:

3) Visitor Limitations

A. An individual or group may be denied permission to visit a school or school property or
such permission may be revoked if the visitor(s) does not comply with the school district
procedures and regulations or if the visit is not in the best interest of students, employees
or the school district.

If that’s not a catch-all statement I don’t know what is. I’m curious who gets to decide whether or not a visitor is “in the best interests of students, employees, or the school district?” Is there some kind of blacklist containing various “undesirables” such as libertarians, gun owners, and adult film starts or is the decision entirely made willy nilly? My guess is the latter. Next we must take a look at E-084 [PDF], which deals with school publications and events:

1) General Statement of Policy

A. The school district may exercise editorial control over the style and content of student
expression in school-sponsored publications and activities.

B. Expression and representations made by students in school publications is not an
expression of official school district policy. Faculty advisors shall supervise student
writers to ensure compliance with the law and school district policies.

C. Students who believe their right to free expression has been unreasonably restricted in an
official student publication or activity may seek review of the decision by the building
principal. The principal shall issue a decision no later than three (3) school days after
review is requested.

1. Students producing official school publications and activities shall be under the
supervision of a faculty advisor and the school principal. Official publications and
activities shall be subject to the guidelines set forth below.

2. Official school publications may be distributed at reasonable times and locations.

[…]

3) Guidelines

A. Expression in an official school publication or school-sponsored activity is prohibited when
the material:

1. is obscene to minors;

2. is libelous or slanderous;

3. advertises or promotes any product or service not permitted for minors by law;

4. encourages students to commit illegal acts or violate school regulations or
substantially disrupts the orderly operation of school or school activities;

5. expresses or advocates sexual, racial, or religious harassment or violence or
prejudice;

6. is distributed or displayed in violation of time, place, and manner regulations

Honestly I’m not sure how E-084 comes into play here. Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Reyes are not material being written about in a publication, nor are they promoting anything listed in the verboten list. At most E-084 would allow the school to prevent Mr. Stone from publishing material for distribution in the school bragging about what he has done, although that prevention wouldn’t be based on any of the listed items on the verboten list.

Either way the school has seen fit to prohibit Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Reyes from entering the school, a decisions that is technically covered under E-077. This raises a question in my opinion: were the two women banned from entering the school because of their choice in careers? Does the mere fact of being an adult file actress put you on the school’s blacklist? If so, what other careers can put you on the blacklist? We know school officials have a zero tolerance policy towards firearm so we must ask if anybody working in the firearms manufacturing field would be prohibited from entering the school. If Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Reyes violate E-084 then police officers must as well under 3-5, “expresses or advocates sexual, racial, or religious harassment or violence or prejudice;” since police officers do express and advocate violence from time to time.

Let’s take this a step further, what if Mrs. Piper or Mrs. Reyes had a kid in the Oakdale school system? Would they be prohibited from attending student teacher conferences? Could they enter the building to pick up the child for a doctor’s appointment? After all if they’re career is what prohibited it them from entering the school then they must never be allowed to enter, right? If it’s not their choice in careers is is because they’re both women? Is it because Mrs. Reyes happens to be black? We do know for certain that discrimination is afoot.

Whether or not one agrees with the school’s decision isn’t of my concern, the fact that the school claims to be a bastion of anti-discrimination while being discriminators themselves is. The hypocrisy is palpable. School officials never waste an opportunity to come out and talk at length about their hard work in making their school a safe place for everybody. They will go so far as to find scapegoats to sacrifice just so they can’t demonstrate how hard they work to fight discrimination. You can be sure that any fight between kids of differing races will be treated as a hate crime, even if the fight was simply over a non-racial statement said by one student to the other.

The bottom line is schools work hard to prohibit discrimination only if you’re part of a group they like. If you’re not a member of a group they like, say gun owners or libertarians, you’ll not receive their protection and will actually be discriminated against by faculty members. Apparently adult film actresses aren’t one of the protected groups and therefore the school is more than happy to discriminate against them.

If You Disobey You Will Be Put in a Cage

Periodically I bring up the state’s obsession with using violence to enforce its decrees. Many people seem to believe fines aren’t examples of state violence but they never stop to think about the reason people pay fines. You pay a fine because of the implicit threat: if you don’t pay the fine you will be kidnapped and held in a cage. Many Americans have been held in cages for incredibly stupid reasons. A stupid reason we can add to the list is not siding a house:

A Burnsville man on his way to work was arrested and thrown in jail without bond, and then subjected to electronic home monitoring.

But it wasn’t for drugs or a DWI or some other major crime.

Burnsville city leaders say Mitch Faber’s dealings with the law all stem from his failure to properly put up siding on his house.

Yep, siding.

Faber says he had every intention of completing the stucco and decorative rock project on his home but he ran into money troubles when the economy soured. Burnsville leaders say they had no choice to enforce the law.

Here’s how a simple code violation spiraled into a criminal case:

Mitch and his wife Jean say it all began back in 2007 when they received a letter from the city of Burnsville saying, in part, “you must complete the siding of your home.”

“We were in the process of finishing,” Mitch insists. “This wasn’t something that we were trying to avoid doing.”

But in 2009 there were two more warning letters, and in 2010 yet another–this time requiring Faber to appear in court. Burnsville leaders provided 5 Eyewitness News with these 2010 photos of the Fabers’ home as proof there was a problem.

“I was expecting maybe a $700 fine,” Faber said. Instead he was given an ultimatum — finish the siding or go to jail.

[…]

After two days locked up, a judge agreed Mitch should be released but required him to submit to electronic home monitoring. In Dakota County, that process requires participants — no matter what their crimes — to blow into a drug and alcohol device every time an alarm goes off.

“They could call me at 2 in the morning and they did,” Faber said.

The state didn’t even get to the part where they threaten to kidnap Mitch unless he paid an extortion fee, they just went straight to the kidnapping part. In essence Mitch is being punished for not having enough money. He began stuccoing his home but didn’t have the money to complete the upgrade. Here’s the thing, it’s Mitch’s home so why the fuck should the state be able to tell him what to do with it? Perhaps he wanted a home that had unfinished stucco siding, then what? Too bad? Finish the siding, do with your home what you do not wish to do, or be held in a cage?

My question is this: where is the victim of this supposed crime and what harm do they claim has been done to them? Without a victim claiming harm there is no ground for punishment in my opinion. In this case the state has demonstrated their willingness to bring violence where no violence previously existed. Nobody was harmed by Mitch’s home not being fully stuccoed yet he was kidnapped.

This is yet another example of the police state we live in.

Crashing the So-Called Justice System

We live in a police state where every person is actively breaking numerous laws. Between the constant issuance of speeding tickets, verboten substance possession charges, public intoxication charges, parking citations, and numerous other victimless “crimes” being perpetuated by everyday people you would think our court systems would be flooded with so many cases that none of these things would actually get to trail. The dirty little secret of the state is that they’re only able to fine, incarcerate, and otherwise punish people for these petty crimes is because they rarely go to trail. If we want to crash the punishment system (often incorrectly called a justice system in this country) all we need to do is take everything to court:

AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation one recent evening gave me pause: “What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”

[…]

“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged.

In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial.

[…]

On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?”

The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”

We can grind the police state to a halt by simply exercising the rights that are supposedly guaranteed us by the United States Constitution. In other words we must overcome our fear that the state will toss us in a cage longer unless we surrender our rights. Furthermore we must stop looking at tickets on a purely costs basis. Sure it may cost more to fight a ticket in court than it would to simply pay it off, and the state realizes this, they have engineered the system this way to ensure we simply surrender our money to them.

The current criminalization of everything requires complacency by the people. Were every single citation, ticket, find, and charge taken to trail the court systems would be so flooded with cases that they would be entirely unable to function. In such a scenario they would be forced to make a decision: concentrate on crimes where a victim exists or continue prosecuting victimless crimes and finding it impossible to get through the cases.

Nothing can be changed at the ballot box, but we can change things through other methods. Jury nullification and taking everything to court, in other words exercising your rights, are two great ways to toss monkey wrenches into the state’s works. The state expects us to roll over and pay the money they demand from us because it’s easier than fighting them. In the short run it may be easier to roll over but in the long run it costs us far more as every infraction against our liberty the state wins empowers them, encourages them, and makes them believe they can extract anything they want from us by merely making the cost of fighting seem smaller in the short run. Let us use their own weapon against them, let us gunk up the engine of punishment by exercising our rights.