4Th Amendment and your Freedom.

The surveillance inside the United States. Senator Arlen Specter’s (R-Pa.) bill (S. 2453), which Specter revised to accommodate White House requests for greater authority, would ratify and dramatically expand the President’s authority to wiretap U.S. Citizens and non U.S. Citizens.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. — Fourth Amendment, U.S. Constitution.

“If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.” — William J. Brennan, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice.

The right of an individual to conduct intimate relationships in the intimacy of his or her own home seems to me to be the heart of the Constitution’s protection of privacy.” — Harry A. Blackmun, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice.

Every American deserves to live in freedom, to have his or her privacy respected and a chance to go as far as their ability and effort will take them - regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or economic circumstances.” — Christopher Dodd, U.S. Senator.

Racists a Treat for Obama Administration?

Oooops you better believe it.!!!! There should be a great concern for Obama Administration for Racist groups were racist talk is supposedly protected but harmful acts are not.

Hate crimes experts and law enforcement officials are closely watching white supremacists across the country as Barack Obama becomes our first African American president of the United States.

So far, there is no known organized effort to express opposition to Obama's rise to the presidency other than a call by the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for its members to wear black armbands as well as fly the U.S. flag upside down on Inauguration Day and Obama's first full day in office.

Anger, violence and interest in racist ideology did increase in the hours and days after Obama was elected president in November, hate groups experts said.

While experts said it is difficult to determine how many people belong to hate groups, they do agree with an SPLC estimate that claims there are about 900 operating now, a 40 percent increase from 2000. The vast majority of these groups promote white supremacist beliefs, and range from skinheads living in urban areas to the KKK ,which is based largely in rural settings.

I am glad that SPLC monitoring those groups but some times It is difficult to pinpoint how many people subscribe to white supremacist views, because the Internet allows people to follow the movement under the cloak of anonymity.

Keep reading here: Source

Patriot Act. U.S. Citizen Jailed without evidence.

.

The story of one US Citizen who was wrongfully detained without charges and later sentenced to jail without evidence. It is just one of the many examples of scapegoats produced by the ideological-hatred, indifference and incompetence reflected in both the 'under-the-table' Congressional agendas and the Bush Administration's controversial Patriot Act.

Patriot Act and the War on Civil Liberties.

A brief history of the Patriot Act, showing the many deceptions brought in by the Bush Administration, including: requesting total secrecy form public input and swapping at the last moment, the original Bill that Congress agreed to sign, with one manipulated by the Administration. The Administration's version of the Bill contained unconstitutional provisions that had been rejected earlier by Congress.

Regardless, Congress rushed to pass an, otherwise, unread Bill which sought to greatly expand all federal law enforcement powers -- far beyond their intended means. Hence, America would later discover that the Patriot Act had little, if anything, to do with fighting the actual "war on terror" and much more to do with bypassing the civil protections, granted under the US Constitution

Privacy Invasion? or are you for enforcement and Innovation?

Portland police are testing a high-tech camera system that rivals anything in a science fiction movie.

It can reach back in time and track your movements across the city — and even produce photos of your previous locations.

But — while some are raising Big Brother civil liberties questions about the concept — the police promise they will only use it to solve crimes, like finding stolen cars or locating wanted criminals.

The system features a series of cameras that mount on patrol cars that automatically read and photograph the license plates of all passing vehicles — including those parked along the sides of the streets. Plates of stolen and suspect-linked vehicles trigger an alarm, allowing the officers to immediately locate them.

The camera also is hooked into a computer that records the exact time and location where each plate was photographed, allowing the police to later map its previous locations around town.

“It’s not magic, but it’s pretty cool,” said Portland Police Southeast Precinct officer Terry Colbert, who has been sharing the Dodge Charger patrol car used in the test.

The test car only has been equipped with the system for a few weeks. But Colbert already has recovered seven stolen cars it identified.

Colbert believes the “data-mining” ability of the system has the potential to be even more important to the police, however.

“If a detective identifies a suspect and links him to a car, we can then go back and find out where the car has been,” Colbert said. “Or we can find out what cars were near a location where a crime was committed and where they went after that.”

System trips a trigger

Although the police still are testing the system, Jan Carson, the associate director of the Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, has some concerns about it.

She questions the legality of the police gathering and storing information about the travel patterns of people who are not suspected of committing any crimes — and wonders whether the information could be subpoenaed in civil cases.

“If the collection of the data was specifically tailored to the investigation of a crime, I don’t think we would have any problem with that,” Carson said. “But simply collecting information on where and when people are located, I think that’s a real invasion of privacy.”

Colbert said the police bureau is well aware that many Portlanders might consider the system some kind of computerized Big Brother. He counters that all of the pictures are being taken on public streets, where the expectation of privacy is far less than at home or work. And, Colbert notes, the cameras are angled down so that they only photograph the plates, not the occupants of the vehicles.

Other cities tout benefits

Although Colbert’s car is the only one in Oregon equipped with the system at this time, the technology is not new. Known as automatic license plate recognition, it is manufactured and sold by several companies. The system being tested by the police is manufactured by PIPS Technology, a division of the Federal Signal Corp., which is based in Tennessee.

Although numerous European law enforcement agencies have used the camera systems since the mid-1980s, Amercian police departments only began buying them approximately five years ago.

“Demand in this country is now doubling every year,” said company spokesman Brian Shockley.

Today, he said, about 300 domestic police departments have equipped patrol cars with the company’s system. The Long Beach (Calif.) Police Department claims that since 2005, its nine mobile camera systems have assisted in nearly 200 arrests and the recovery of more than 1,000 stolen vehicles. The Cincinnati Police Department credits the cameras with finding more than 8,000 “vehicles of interest” and assisting with about 300 arrests so far this year, including that of a homicide suspect and a suspected bank robber.

The system even can generate a profit for police by spotting vehicles with overdue parking tickets. Over the past year, Long Beach police identified and towed more than 700 vehicles with nearly $350,000 in outstanding citations.

According to Colbert, the Portland police still are fine-tuning and evaluating the camera and computer system, which can photograph and store hundreds of plate numbers during a single patrol shift.

One idea being discussed is equipping one car in each of the bureau’s five precincts with the system, potentially allowing thousands of license plates to be checked and recorded throughout the city every day.

Averaging about $25,000 per system, the equipment isn’t cheap. But even $125,000 is just a small fraction of the value of all cars stolen in Portland every year.

“There were 5,068 cars stolen in town last year at a value of $23.8 million,” Colbert said. “If we can quickly recover even a fraction of them, that will save car owners and insurance companies a lot of money.”

GPS data also linked

All such license plate camera systems work the same way. They use infrared rays to illuminate the reflectorized fronts of license plates, allowing the contrasting numbers and letters to be identified and photographed. The technology even works at night and in the rain.

Despite its sophistication, the camera is hardly noticeable on the test car. It is essentially a black cylinder, roughly six inches in diameter and four inches in length. Three cameras are mounted on the roof — two facing forward and one looking sideways on the passenger side. This setup allows them to scan the license plates of all vehicles in front of the left and right sides of the car every few seconds, along with cars in parking lots next to it.

A soft ping sounds when each picture is taken. A list of nearly 15,000 stolen plates maintained by the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles has been loaded into the computer. An alarm sounds if one of them is identified.

The cameras also are connected to a PIPS-furnished computer in the trunk of the car. It is loaded with the company’s software that records the time and Global Positioning System location of each photo.

Although Colbert believes this tracking function, potentially, is the system’s biggest benefit, it is what worries Carson the most.

“Who knows how this information will be used in the future?” Carson said. “What policies are going to be in place to protect people from being abused? Once your privacy’s been invaded, there’s little you can do about it.

The Future of the Net. Censorship

In this video, from August 4th 2008, Alex discusses in detail the serious issue of Internet censorship and how it is affecting us. The only winners of this censorship are the governments and corporate oligarchies who want to severely restrict our freedom of speech and our ability to acquire factual information from independent news sites. If you sit by and do nothing about the info you hear in this video, you are effectively kissing goodbye to the Internet as we know it. By 2012, the 'powers-that-be' plan to turn the Internet into nothing more than a glorified cable TV system where access to anything other than mainstream sites will be highly restricted - just like in communist China. We cannot allow this to happen. Only the power of the people can stop this. If we fail to voice our views on this issue NOW, the Internet as we know it will be gone forever and important sites like InfoWars.com and PrisonPlanet.com will not be there for us anymore. I cannot stress enough how important this issue is. Please go to InfoWars.com and check out the links covering Internet censorship and you'll see what I mean. Copy and paste the articles and email them to everyone you know, including the mainstream news sites. Post the articles on MySpace and as many other forums as you can. You can also download this video and upload it to your channel and to other video sites. We need to make a big noise over this, otherwise they'll go full steam ahead with their plans to dismantle the Internet by 2012. Once the Internet is gone, it's gone forever, and there won't be any complaints departments to complain to when you want the old Internet back. The time to take action is NOW.

I tried to squeeze in as much into this video as possible but I had to omit some really important stuff - such as the interview with Paul Watson - who details some of the communist-style Internet censorship that is taking place in the UK right now. I for one will not sit by and allow this to happen. I don't want to get all my news from the likes of CNN, Fox and the BBC. I want to expand my world view, not limit it.

This is a serious call to action folks. We have now reached a huge crisis point in terms of our freedom of speech and our freedom to access information from non-corporate sources. We can either do nothing and just watch the Internet being dismantled before our very eyes, or we can take action now and salvage what's left of the Internet as it stands today.