Buzzfeed. The DEA paid over $200 million to around 10,000 people from 2011 to 2015 in exchange for searching through your mail or luggage to find anything incriminating.

Deadlocked, despite clear video evidence of officer Slager shooting a fleeing Walter Scott to death, and then planting a Taser near the body.  A lone juror is the hold-out, and his letter to the judge makes one wonder if someone’s pulling his strings. Also see the story from Ars Technica

Cato.  I guess we can’t be number 1 in corporate tax rates, police shootings, incarceration rates, and drone strikes and still expect to be the freest country in the world.

CounterPunch.  It is laughable that anyone would take WaPo’s alarmist article over Russian-controlled “fake news” seriously.  I mean, come on people, the writing at Antiwar.com, Counter Punch, or the other list of sites supposedly on Putin’s payroll is so far above anything the Washington Post puts out, that it would be insane to believe that they are part of some Russian-controlled conspiracy.  The Establishment media hates alternative, independent news, dissenting voices, etc.  That’s why they remove their comments sections, the sheer volume of ridicule was too much to bear.

The Intercept.  Trump is going to disappoint everyone.  He’ll turn out to be a run-of-the-mill warmongering neocon, just like Bush, just like Obama.  Hillary would’ve turned out the same way.

92 million U.S. adults used prescription painkillers in 2015, compared to 75.4 million who used tobacco.  So around 40% of Americans use opioids, which generates $10 billion for the pharma companies pumping out these expensive pills. High Times

Beware Police Drones, Huffington Post

These drones are being equipped with real-time facial recognition tech, designed to track civilians as they go about their day-to-day lives.

RealClearDefense writer Trevor Thrall has a new article up entitled, “Obama’s Legacy: Murder.gov”.  It’s an apt title, considering Obama’s 8 years at the helm of a war-making apparatus unheard-of in human history.  He put it to use, unleashing a torrent of drone strikes that ended up killing over 1,100 people, mostly innocent, in a vain effort to kill only 41 suspected terrorists.  Sidestepping Congress, he bombed Libya, where any semblance of social order collapsed utterly, displacing hundreds of thousands of Libyans in the ensuing bloody chaos.

Obama’s legacy will be the expanded power he gifts to Trump.

US judges can now sign hacking warrants outside their jurisdiction: “Legal experts have described the move as the broadest expansion of extraterritorial surveillance power since the FBI’s inception, an agency that has already embarked on international hacking operations. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, has defended the changes, arguing they are crucial for policing crime in an age of anonymization technology such as Tor…

…Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and a group of bipartisan senators have attempted to block the Rule 41 changes by introducing a bill, the Stopping Mass Hacking Act.

“This is a dramatic expansion of the government’s hacking and surveillance authority. Such a substantive change with an enormous impact on Americans’ constitutional rights should be debated by Congress, not maneuvered through an obscure bureaucratic process,” Sen. Wyden said in a statement at the time.”

Julian Assange is a victim of arbitrary detention, says U.N. panel

Maine police have a handy surveillance tool that they use to monitor what you say online.  The rapid progress of law enforcement surveillance tech is far outstripping a free society’s ability to control it.  Law must catch up soon before we’re caught in a total surveillance society with no way to dismantle it.

Why Flag Burning Matters.  Great article on the American Religion of the State and its symbols.  The reaction to the burning of a piece of cloth with a particular color pattern mirrors that of religious fanatics’ reactions to blasphemy.

Victim of civil asset forfeiture gets his $11,000 back, with interest.  Justice is rare in the lawless world of asset forfeiture.