Totalitarianism Through Technology, Episode 4

Another Homeland Security Overreach: DHS Starts Seizing Websites

The always interesting Business Insider has this report:

The Department of Homeland Security’s ICE has launched a major crackdown on websites enabling copyright infringement or selling counterfeits of trademarked goods. In just the past few days ICE has seized at least 12 domains, TorrentFreak reports.

Knowingly violating someone’s copyright is rightfully against the law.
[...]
Still, this part of the article bothers me:

The owner of an affected site told TorrentFreak that his domain was taken over without any prior complaints or notification from the court.

Here are the two critical points:

So, the sites were seized before the site’s owner heard any charges or had the chance to submit any counter evidence in court. The owners of the sites had their property seized without being allowed to defend themselves.
[...]
But, the article begs an even bigger question: What the hell do fake Guccis have to do with homeland security?

Property seizure without due process is flat out against the law, and one of the reasons explicit in the Declaration of Independence for our secession from Britain. How could copyright infringement be a threat to national security?

The questions we should all be asking:

In the aftermath of 9-11, when the creation of DHS was being debated, would your opinion have been swayed if you knew that, within just a few years, the proposed agency would be seizing websites peddling fake purses? Did you imagine that the proposed agency would soon demand to take naked photographs of randomly-selected U.S. citizens? Or, insist on its authority to physically grope children?
Now, ask yourself this: What will the Agency be doing 10 years from now? Or, 20? In a little more than half a decade, DHS has morphed from protecting us from terrorists to protecting us from fake merchandise. Who is going to protect us from DHS?

Manchurian Candidate Must Be Impeached

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Even More Corruption at Obama's Department of Justice

H/T Pat Dollard

Lawlessness at the DOJ: Voting Section Told Not To Enforce Purging the Dead or Ineligible from Voting Rolls

In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.

The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.

Jaws dropped around the room.

It is one thing to silently adopt a lawless policy of refusing to enforce a provision of federal law designed to bring integrity to elections. It is quite another to announce the lawlessness to a room full of people who have sworn an oath to fairly enforce the law.

Arizona Law Already Upheld in High Courts!

National Review Online: United States v. Arizona — How 'Bout United States v. Rhode Island? - Andy McCarthy

Well whaddya know? It turns out that Rhode Island has long been carrying out the procedures at issue in the Arizona immigration statute: As a matter of routine, RI state police check immigration status at traffic stops whenever there is reasonable suspicion to do so, and they report all illegals to the feds for deportation. Besides the usual profiling blather, critics have trotted out the now familiar saw that such procedures hamstring police because they make immigrants afraid to cooperate. But it turns out that it’s the Rhode Island police who insist on enforcing the law. As Cornell law prof William Jacobson details at Legal Insurrection, Colonel Brendan P. Doherty, the state police commander, “refuses to hide from the issue,” explaining, ”I would feel that I’m derelict in my duties to look the other way.”

If, as President Obama and Attorney General Holder claim, there is a federal preemption issue, why hasn’t the administration sued Rhode Island already? After all, Rhode Island is actually enforcing these procedures, while the Arizona law hasn’t even gone into effect yet.

Could it be because — as we’ve discussed here before — the Supreme Court in Muehler v. Mena has already held that police do not need any reason (not probable cause, not reasonable suspicion) to ask a person about his immigration status?

Could it be that just this past February, in Estrada v. Rhode Island, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the Rhode Island procedures, reasoning that, in Muehler v. Mena, the Supreme Court “held that a police officer does not need independent reasonable suspicion to question an individual about her immigration status…”?

So, we have a Justice Department that drops a case it already won against New Black Panthers who are on tape intimidating voters in blatant violation of federal law, but that sues a sovereign state for enacting a statute in support of immigration enforcement practices that have already been upheld by two of the nation’s highest courts. Perfect.

H/T Brutally Honest

Rhode Island Ahead of the Curve

Bad posture on amnesty

If he’s really upset that the same laws he has taken an oath to enforce might actually get (gulp!) enforced, why isn’t he suing Providence instead of Phoenix? They’ve been doing local immigration enforcement for years now.

As The Boston Globe-Democrat reported yesterday, “From Woonsocket to Westerly, the troopers patrolling the nation’s smallest state are reporting all illegal immigrants they encounter, even on routine stops such as speeding, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Even liberal Providence, where politicians long opposed any local enforcement efforts, changed its policy in 2008 after the infamous Marco Riz case.

Riz was the illegal immigrant arrested by Providence cops twice while under a federal deportation order but released both times. He was then charged with carjacking a woman in Warwick and raping her in Providence.

Rhode Island cops now routinely contact ICE when they suspect they’ve come across an illegal immigrant. Since 2006, the number of contacts they’ve made to ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center in Vermont has nearly doubled, the Globe reported. How is this significantly different than Arizona’s proposed law?

Families who fear running into the next Marco Riz might think Rhode Island is onto something. But not Team Obama.

Obama's DOJ is MIA

The Ugly Truth About The Black President, The Black Gang And The Black Attorney General Denying White People Votes

The New Black Panther case was the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career. Because of the corrupt nature of the dismissal, statements falsely characterizing the case and, most of all, indefensible orders for the career attorneys not to comply with lawful subpoenas investigating the dismissal, this month I resigned my position as a Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney.

Remember Elian Gonzalez?

Kenneth, What Is the Frequency: How CBS and Dan Rather Set Up Elian Gonzalez

So in effect, the man who until recently served as Obama’s Chief White House Counsel, once agreed to function as a fully deputized agent for a Stalinist regime’s KGB-trained secret police, and arranged to have Castro’s child-kidnapping smokescreened by his chums at CBS.

And lest we forget, the Deputy Attorney General who draped the legal veneer over the above was none other than Eric Holder.

Holder? Holder?

It's one thing for the media to be biased, but when the Attorney General shows favoritism in one case and prejudice in another, then we have a clear and severe case of corruption yet again, from yet another Obama appointee.

Ben Stein: Free James O'Keefe

When was the last time you read about federal charges against a liberal reporter for going undercover? The behavior of the feds here is not just worrisome. It is something beyond that. But, Mr. Holder, here is a line from the civil rights struggle I worked in before you were born: We are not afraid. And we're not going away.