Category Archives: Constitution
The Christian Science Monitor: What will your Obamacare premium be? Numbers are in for 17 states
If you live in California, Ohio, or Connecticut, you can now look up what health insurance will cost on the new Obamacare exchanges.
If you live in Florida, Illinois, or Texas, you don’t know yet, even though President Obama’s Affordable Care Act calls for the exchanges to be up and running in less than a month.
That’s one reason the debate over Obamacare’s impact on health insurance costs is still unsettled. Not all the data are in.
But the Kaiser Family Foundation weighed in Thursday with a report on some 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have unveiled their pricing.
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Click below for the full article.
Reason.com: Watched Cops Are Polite Cops
Who will watch the watchers? What if all watchers were required to wear a video camera that would record their every interaction with citizens? In her ruling in a recent civil suit challenging the New York City police department’s notorious stop-and-frisk rousting of residents, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of the Federal District Court in Manhattan imposed an experiment in which the police in the city’s precincts with the highest reported rates of stop-and-frisk activity would be required to wear video cameras for one year.
This is a really good idea. Earlier this year, a 12-month study by Cambridge University researchers revealed that when the city of Rialto, California, required its cops to wear cameras, the number of complaints filed against officers fell by 88 percent and the use of force by officers dropped by almost 60 percent. Watched cops are polite cops.
Jay Stanley, a policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), calls police-worn video cameras “a win/win for both the public and the police.” Win/win because video recordings help shield officers from false accusations of abuse as well as protecting the public against police misconduct. The small cameras like the AXON Flex from Taser International attach to an officer’s sunglasses, hat, or uniform.
In order to make sure that both the public and police realize the greatest benefits from body-worn video cameras, a number of policies need to be implemented. For example, police officers must be subject to stiff disciplinary sanctions if they fail to turn their cameras on each time they interact with the public. In addition, items obtained during an unrecorded encounter would be deemed a violation of the subject’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure and excluded as evidence, unless there were extenuating circumstances, such as a broken camera. Similarly, failure to record an incident for which a patrolman is accused of misconduct should create a presumption against that officer.
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Click below for the full article.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/30/watched-cops-are-polite-cops
CATO Institute: Another False Arrest for Filming Police
An officer with the Leland Police Department has been suspended without pay for 28 days after a teenager recorded video of an arrest on his cell phone.
According to police reports, 19-year-old Gabriel Self tried approaching Leland Police Sergeant John Keel as he was arresting another man on drug charges. Sgt. Keel told Self to leave the area….
The charge was resisting, obstructing, or delaying a law enforcement officer. Self was interfering with an investigation, according to the arrest report….
Self said Keel was simply standing in the parking lot, so he did not see how he could be interfering with anything.
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Reason.com: Delete the Fed
Who should run the Federal Reserve System when chairman Ben Bernanke’s term expires next year: Vice Chair Janet Yellen or former Obama adviser Lawrence Summers?
Neither.
Who then?
No one.
The fact is, we need the Federal Reserve like we need a hole in the head. Contrary to folklore, the Fed is not needed to stabilize the economy or to prevent unemployment. As the Fed heads into its second century, we ought to realize that its record is terrible. Even if we don’t count the interwar period (which some economists call the new Fed’s practice round), America’s central bank is a flop. Monetary economists George A. Selgin, William D. Lastrapes, and Lawrence H. White wrote in “Has the Fed Been a Failure?”:
Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed’s full history (1914 to present) has been characterized by more rather than fewer symptoms of monetary and macroeconomic instability than the decades leading to the Fed’s establishment. (2) While the Fed’s performance has undoubtedly improved since World War II, even its postwar performance has not clearly surpassed that of its undoubtedly flawed predecessor, the National Banking system, before World War I.
The authors support that generalization with details. On inflation: “Far from achieving long-run price stability, [the Fed] has allowed the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, which was hardly different on the eve of the Fed‘s creation from what it had been at the time of the dollar’s establishment as the official U.S. monetary unit, to fall dramatically” — by 95 percent.
Selgin, Lastrapes, and White also show that the central bank has given us longer recessions and slower recoveries.
But without the Fed, who would set interest rates to guide the economy? The first answer is that government policy and Fed manipulations can create the very recessions that the Fed then tries to reverse. If the politicians and their court economists would get over their hubristic belief that they are stewards of the economy, macroeconomic crises would disappear.
Besides, the Fed cannot set interest rates, not even its narrow federal-funds rate for overnight interbank loans. At most, it targets that rate by buying and selling government securities, but it doesn’t always hit its target. The idea that the Fed can even heavily influence mortgage and other interest rates ignores important facts.
First, the Fed’s operations are small compared to the complex U.S. and world economies. Writes monetary economist Richard Timberlake,
Traditional economics properly teaches that many complex market forces — countless investment and savings decisions not dependent on monetary factors — are essential in determining interest rates. The Fed funds rate that Fed policy can influence through its monopoly over the quantity of money is inconsequential in shaping most short-term and long-term rates in capital markets, unless that moneymaking power subsequently promotes a pervasive price inflation. [Emphasis added.]
Second, the Fed can’t lower rates through monetary inflation beyond the very short run. Why not? Because lenders will respond by raising their rates to avoid being screwed by price inflation –unless the Fed prevents the inflation, as it’s been doing, by effectively borrowing back the new money from the banks at interest.
Moreover, as monetary economist Jeffrey Rogers Hummel points out,
Globalization, with the corresponding relaxation of exchange controls in all major countries, allows [investors] easily to flee to foreign currencies, with the result that changes in central-bank policy are almost immediately priced by exchange rates and interest rates. Add to this the ability to purchase from many governments securities that are indexed to inflation, and it becomes highly unlikely investors will be caught off guard by anything less than sudden, catastrophic hyperinflation (defined as more than 50% per month) — and maybe even not then.
While inflation is not the threat it once was, the Fed is not harmless. “Bernanke has so expanded the Fed’s discretionary actions beyond merely controlling the money stock that it has become a gigantic, financial central planner,” Hummel writes.
No one should have such power.
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Click below for the full article.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/25/delete-the-fed
1787 Network: US Court Orders Tyranny!
Federal Court orders confirm that you are a slave and we live in a totalitarian society. There is a difference between socialism and communism, but the totalitarian control of production and distribution of goods and services is the core of both, the USA is now a Totalitarian Republic. The US Government is saying that a company providing voluntary services to other people, of which there are many other voluntary providers, cannot go out of business. The company in question is Lavabit. It provides secure encrypted email services. Ladar Levison started Lavabit 10 years ago to capitalize on public concerns about the Patriot Act, offering paying customers encrypted email, that make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement agents to decipher. The government gave him a court order to provide the content of ALL email from ALL his customers to the government without letting his customers know. In as much as this totally compromised the reason he created the company rather than comply he shut the company down. In an NBC Article it is reported that “James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison’s lawyer last Thursday – the day Lavabit was shuttered — stating that Levison may have “violated the court order,” a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.” NBC’s byline for the article is an appropriate “from the either-you-help-us-spy-on-people-or-you’re-a-criminal dept”If this happens it means that legally you can be required to work against your will. Isn’t that slavery? If not slavery it is clearly the actions of a totalitarian government that is not limited in any way as to what it can demand of common people. We live in a Constitutional Republic where the government has (had) limited and defined powers. Specifically the clearly stated Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights states that: 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. Modern technology has changed what papers and effect look like, but there is no reasonable way to say the government has the authority to search your every email. Rather than enable the government to violate the 4th, Lavabit choose to cease to provide services designed to protect individuals from government violation of their 4th amendment rights. – See more at: http://1787network.com/2013/08/us-court-orders-tyranny/7363#sthash.ts9dPPBb.dpuf
Reuters: Documents show NSA may have collected tens of thousands of emails of Americans
U.S. intelligence officials released new documents on Wednesday showing that the National Security Agency may have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emailed communications of Americans per year between 2008 and 2011.
The officials revealed the documents as part of an effort to explain how the NSA spotted, and then fixed, technical problems which led to the inadvertent collection of emails of American citizens without warrants.
The move is the Obama administration’s latest response to continuing controversy over alleged electronic eavesdropping excesses by the NSA.
The documents included a formerly “top-secret,” but newly-declassified ruling by the ultra-secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in which the court itself, in an obscure footnote, estimates, based on data supplied by NSA, that between 2008 and 2011, the agency might have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emailed communications of Americans in each of those three years.
U.S. intelligence officials who agreed to answer questions about the documents’ contents told reporters the domestic emails were collected in the execution of a program designed to target the emails of foreign terrorism suspects.
According to the officials and a court document which the administration released, the NSA decided to “purge” the material after discovering it was inadvertently collected.
Details about the secretive surveillance programs have been brought to light in recent months by fugitive U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents to media outlets.
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Click below for the full article, as well as a few updates from Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/21/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSBRE97K14Y20130821
Video: Can the NSA Use Copyright Claims to Crush Free Speech?
The Guardian: NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls
The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.
The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.
The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.
The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.
The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as “incidental collection” in surveillance parlance.
But this is the first evidence that the NSA has permission to search those databases for specific US individuals’ communications.
A secret glossary document provided to operatives in the NSA’s Special Source Operations division – which runs the Prism program and large-scale cable intercepts through corporate partnerships with technology companies – details an update to the “minimization” procedures that govern how the agency must handle the communications of US persons. That group is defined as both American citizens and foreigners located in the US.
“While the FAA 702 minimization procedures approved on 3 October 2011 now allow for use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query terms when reviewing collected FAA 702 data,” the glossary states, “analysts may NOT/NOT [not repeat not] implement any USP [US persons] queries until an effective oversight process has been developed by NSA and agreed to by DOJ/ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence].”
The term “identifiers” is NSA jargon for information relating to an individual, such as telephone number, email address, IP address and username as well as their name.
The document – which is undated, though metadata suggests this version was last updated in June 2012 – does not say whether the oversight process it mentions has been established or whether any searches against US person names have taken place.
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Click below for the full article.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls#
Politico: Al Qaeda’s return complicates civil liberties debate
Al Qaeda’s back, and its timing couldn’t be worse for the Republicans who are taking on the national security wing of their party.
Edward Snowden reignited a debate over privacy and civil liberties that had fizzled in recent years. Just last week, civil libertarians were even picking up momentum on proposals to restrict the NSA’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records thanks to renewed attention in the media.
But that was before the serious new Al Qaeda threats that have forced the shuttering of exploding clothes — because this is exactly the time when they say the public needs to be reminded not to undermine the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans.
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Click below for the full article.