The Guardian: Cosmetics chain Lush resumes undercover police poster campaign

The Week: The NSA knew about cell phone surveillance around the White House 6 years ago

Mashable: Apple’s officially making it harder for cops to bust into your iPhone

Reuters: Big Brother facial recognition by police challenged in Britain

The New American: Surveillance State grows with help from state and local accomplices Ed: A few days old, but so important.

Gizmodo: China to make RFID chips mandatory in cars so the government can track citizens on the road

Foreign Policy: In China’s far west, companies cash in on surveillance program that targets Muslims

Techdirt: South Carolina drug war cops routinely serve regular warrants as if they’re no-knock warrants

The Free Thought Project: Video of massive crowd chasing down British police at protest over man arrest for reporting on pedophiles Ed: It is apparently illegal to report on certain court trials of Muslim immigrant pedophile rings in Britain, probably due to the fear of the government not living up to PC standards.

Reason: Domino’s Pizza is fixing the roads of towns across the US, because local governments won’t

The American Conservative: The Saudi-UAE alliance is the most dangerous force in the Middle East today

Telegraph: Only 100 nuclear bombs needed to cause catastrophe around the world Ed: 15,000 currently exist.

The Guardian: ‘Surveillance society’: Has technology at the US-Mexico border gone too far?

New York Times: The US spends billions in defense aid. Is it working?

The Intercept: Law claiming to fight sex trafficking is doing the opposite: making sex work more dangerous

Boing Boing: The EU’s terrible copyright proposal will ‘carpet bomb’ the whole world’s internet with censorship and surveillance

Techdirt: Legislators reintroduce pro-encryption bills after FBI destroys it’s own ‘going dark’ narrative

The Intercept: Trump’s “zero tolerance” crackdown won’t stop border crossings but it could break the courts

McClatchyDC: A freed Guantanamo prisoner and his ex-guard meet again in remarkable Ramadan reunion

WhoWhatWhy: Google’s deep involvement with the Pentagon

NationalDefenseMag: Army to acquire new nano drones

Reason: You’ll soon be able to manufacture anything you want and governments will be powerless to stop it

Futurism: The guy who created Oculus has now made surveillance tech that acts as a virtual border wall

Gizmodo: Psychedelic drugs may help the brain repair itself, study finds

From Chapter 3 of The Constitution of Liberty: 

“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful means that human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from trying to do better. Every organization is based on given knowledge; organization means commitment to a particular aim and to particular methods, but even organization designed to increase knowledge will be effective only insofar as the knowledge and beliefs on which its design rests are true. And if any facts contradict the beliefs on which the structure of the organization is based, this will become evident only in its failure and supersession by a different type of organization. Organization is therefore likely to be beneficial and effective so long as it is voluntary and is embedded in a free sphere and will either have to adjust itself to circumstances not taken into account in its conception or fail. To turn the whole of society into a single organization built and directed according to a single plan would be to extinguish the very forces that shaped the individual human minds that planned it.”

It’s strange to realize that every societal problem we face today is due to a lack of liberty, which itself is due to a pervasive distrust of the consequences of liberty, which, although they are unpredictable, are always beneficial.  This state in particular is suffering from string of catastrophes which include the shameful fact that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.  This is a consequence of a fear of liberty, a fear that the ruling class has an interest in perpetuating and inflaming.  All that is required to solve these unending crises is to remove the restrictions, regulations, and prohibitions, and let what Albert Jay Nock termed ‘social power’ solve the problems that government created.  Fear leads us to support politicians and measures that promise more control, but this control only creates greater and more uncontrollable problems down the road.  It also has the even more negative effect of creating the perfect environment for greater corruption, in a cycle that spirals into a situation we have today.  Only by unleashing Hayek’s “uncontrolled spontaneous forces” will our problems be solved.  But it would be so easy, and it would cost nothing.

CBS News: Israel uses data, algorithms to predict, prevent, 200 Palestinian attacks Ed: And here is the true way that governments will use facial recognition and data tech: the suppression of undesirable groups of people.  In Israel’s case, it’s the inhabitants of the biggest concentration camp in the world, consisting of over one million Palestinian Arabs. And now the state of Israel is carrying out some strange historical/ethnic revenge against the Arab world with the use of sophisticated surveillance-data-tech aimed at Palestinians.  When they aren’t murdering protesters and medics, of course. Should we care? Yes, due to the fact that $3 billion and handed out to Israel every year.  Not to mention the blind eye the US turns to Israeli atrocities, which is probably worth quite a bit more.

Techdirt: Australian cops say their unreliable drug dogs will decide who gets to attend music festivals Ed: Drug dogs, with a 74% failure rate at detecting drugs, are nothing more than “probable cause on four legs”.

Reason: Lindsay Graham says only possible outcomes from Trump-Kim talks are ‘peace or war’. He’s wrong. Ed: The presence of nuclear weapons are the only reason North Korea hasn’t been invaded and overthrown. It would be suicidal for Kim to give them up.

DAVID HARSANYI: Free trade already puts America first

Motherboard: Facebook says its competitors are the whole internet, because Facebook itself has replaced the internet for many people

EFF: The ENCRYPT Act protects encryption from U.S. state prying

The American Conservative: Why Trump’s next pardon should be CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou

Buzzfeed: Here are 18 things you might not have realized Facebook tracks about you

Defense One: How sanctions feed authoritarianism

Activist Post: What could go wrong? US army planning to deploy autonomous killer robots on battlefield by 2028

NewsOn6: Oklahoma veteran claims medical marijuana saved his life

Nextgov: Intelligence community wants to use DNA to store extabytes of data

Engadget: Stanford’s new lab could make particle accelerators 1,000 times smaller

Boing Boing: Why these libraries welcome the bat colonies that live among the books

Reason: Abolish ICE: “After 9/11, at the behest of the George W. Bush administration, lawmakers voted to consolidate 22 federal agencies and 170,000 employees under the Department of Homeland Security. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (previously part of the Justice Department) and the U.S. Customs Service (previously part of the Treasury Department) were swept into this newly created behemoth and then re-divided into U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and ICE.

But ensconcing immigration in a department focused on national security resulted in a mentality shift. Immigrants came to be regarded not as friends but as foes—potential terrorists or criminals. (This, even though cities with large immigrant populations have lower crime rates than cities with fewer immigrants.)”

Salon: Trump backs off states that legalize marijuana, so why is Colorado still prohibiting access to some? Ed: Colorado gov. Hickenlooper recently vetoed a measure that would allow children with autism access to medical marijuana.

Amnesty International: EU: States push to relax rules on exporting surveillance technology to human rights abusers

WSWS: The pseudo-Left stabs Julian Assange in the back

Enid News: Oklahoma’s medical marijuana law would bring steep tax

Truthdig: ‘We live in a Golden Age of surveillance’

Activist Post: Country Time stands up to ‘arcane laws’ against kids’ lemonade stands

URI AVNERY: The brainwashing of the Israelis Ed: It’s exactly the same as how the Chinese are brainwashed to view Tibet and Buddhism in such a negative light.

NextGov: Drone cops take flight in Los Angeles Ed: High-tech surveillance is just lazy police work.

FEE: How should we think about public policy proposals? Government-by-unicorn

Here is the report, released Friday, that found Oklahoma to hold the highest incarceration rate in the world. We lock up 1,079 out of every 100,000 people in this state.

The American Conservative: Veterans cheer as VA, DoD take a beating at burn pits hearing

New York Times: In Newark, police cameras and the internet watch you

Jacobin: Tech workers versus the Pentagon

Washington Post: Don’t be Paul Manafort: How to make your online communications more secure

WSWS: Cincinnati, Ohia area fentanyl overdoses increased by one thousand percent over the last five years

Ron Paul Institute: A retirement community for drug-sniffing dogs

Consortium News: The eerie silence surrounding the Assange case

FEE: Immigration unleashes human capital and saves lives

SHELDON RICHMAN: Separation, not association, requires force

Reason: Off-grid survival for you and me

From Chapter 3 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty: 

“From the insight that the benefits of civilization rest on the use of more knowledge than can be used in any deliberately concerted effort, it follows that it is not in our power to build a desirable society by simply putting together the particular elements that by themselves appear desirable. Although probably all beneficial improvement must be piecemeal, if the separate steps are not guided by a body of coherent principles, the outcome is likely to be a suppression of individual freedom.

The reason for this is very simple, although not generally understood. Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known. The direct effects of any interference with the market order will be near and clearly visible in most cases, while the more indirect and remote effects will mostly be unknown and will therefore be disregarded. We shall never be aware of all the costs of achieving particular results by such interference.

And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. Our choice will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial action by unknown persons.

Quartz: This is the week that the drone surveillance state became real

Antiwar.com: US-led strikes kill 100 Syrian civilians

Techdirt: FBI hoovered up two years’ worth of a journalist’s phone and email records to hunt down a leaker

WSWS: Anti-“fake news” bill gives French state unchecked internet censorship powers

FPIF: Why we should be alarmed that Israeli forces and US police are training together

Gizmodo: Apple isn’t your friend

Activist Post: Real-time drone surveillance system is being programmed to detect violence

Aeon: What if E.T. is an A.I.?

Motherboard: Scientists want to talk to people who’ve had life-changing experiences while using psychedelics