Washington Examiner: NSA deletes years of call records, says it exceeded legal limit

Gizmodo: California lawmakers pass bill stopping companies like Facebook from selling user data without consent

Slate: A digital stop and frisk

Ars Technica: Facebook patent would turn your mic on to analyze how you watch ads

National Review: No, really: delete your social media accounts Ed: Very good piece, but not really all that fair that I post it here, as I use social media.

Texas cops ready to get their goosestep on over Oklahoma weed NewsChannel6: North Texas law enforcement agencies react to OK legalizing medical marijuana

Wasn’t going to post any more regarding ‘Russiagate’, but I just really like this headline: Politico: House GOP rips Rosenstein to his face

Reason: Is it legal for cops to shoot unlicensed dogs?

SHELDON RICHMAN: Why Palestine matters

JAMES BOVARD: That time the media cheered for Gestapo immigration tactics

Antiwar.com: Assange is a journalist, and should not be persecuted for publishing the truth

FEE: It’s time to privatize the US postal service

High Times: Is cannabis the cure to rural unemployment? 

WSWS: Tech giants hold censorship meeting with U.S. intelligence agencies

The Hill: DHS declined to let officials testify at hearing on cell surveillance, chairman says

Techcrunch: Study calls out ‘dark patterns’ in Facebook and Google that push users towards less privacy

Zero Hedge: The Police State takes a giant leap towards pre-crime

Curbed SF: NSA spies on internet traffic from non-secret secret San Francisco building

The Intercept: Calls to abolish ICE are becoming more mainstream. Is D.C. ready for the conversation? Ed: Abolish ICE, along with every other agency created during the hysteria that exploded in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Reason: School security guard who didn’t stop the Parkland shooter was previously suspended for sexually harassing students

The American Conservative: The dying children of Yemen

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Honduras is a hellhole: who’s responsible?

National Review: Venezuela’s future…and ours

FEE: Schools have created a generation of Permit Pattys and BBQ Bettys

The New Atlantis: Google.gov

Gizmodo: A new NASA-led project means the search for aliens is heating up

Yesterday, something amazing happened in my home state: medical marijuana was legalized, and the authoritarian incumbent Senator Ervin Yen lost by a large margin to Joe Howell. Needless to say, the prairie Political Class received dual blows by a citizenry sick and tired of the galloping approach of authoritarianism, one that has bankrupted our home state.

In Yen’s case, with such a large margin of defeat of Yen to Joe Howell (20 percentage points!) thanks to a true grassroots ‘Yank Yen’ campaign, intelligently organized and relentlessly executed, the authoritarian EX-Senator must be feeling literal whiplash this morning from what was less of a yank and more of a cannon blast.

But a warning to all those who supported these victories: the Political Class is already gearing up for Round 2, and you know they’ve got plenty of tricks up their sleeves. Namely, they’re working overtime to prepare a completely gutted version of 788, one that will bear little resemblance to what all the activists fought so hard for.

Getting to vote for medical marijuana in a state so hostile to change in the direction of greater liberty was a wonderful experience. Not a vote for a politician who has made oblique paeans to working toward medical marijuana sometime in the distant future, but a direct vote for change now.  For once I didn’t feel helpless in the face of a political system that seems to reward only the politically connected, a system that caters to the powerful, with only a few beans tossed to the voting masses now and then.  With 788, we bypassed the Political Class entirely, and made a desperately needed change ourselves because our government has proven too corrupt and cowardly to do it.

Taking my children along as I voted was a symbolic and literal reference to my small power in that moment to alter their future for the better in this state.  Parents are their children’s shield, standing between them and the State.  We must never relinquish that power, something that Yen insisted was his right to take.  No free society can last long when government comes between parent and child.  And no politician or bureaucrat that attempts to weaken or remove that shield should ever be trusted.

Liberty won yesterday, but the battle isn’t over. 788 must not be allowed to be crippled, mutilated, and transformed into just another crony pay-out.  It should be given the force of law as is.  Anything less would be a betrayal of Oklahoma’s citizens, and the future of this state.

NewsOn6: SQ 788 passes, legalizing medical marijuana in Oklahoma

The Intercept: Google and Facebook are quietly fighting California’s privacy rights initiative, emails reveal

Central Track: Is this old east Dallas high-rise an NSA spying hub?

CNET: Google’s Project Maven work could have been weaponized, ex-Pentagon official admits

Motherboard: ICE modified its ‘risk assessment’ software so it automatically recommends detention

Consortium News: How US policy in Honduras set the stage for today’s mass migration

The American Conservative: Separating children from parents? Our prisons do it all the time

Mises: The Drug War is pushing more migrants to our borders

Activist Post: California considering creating advisory group for fake news with Orwellian bill

The Verge: This Japanese AI security camera shows the future of surveillance will be automated

The Intercept: The NSA’s hidden spy hubs in eight U.S. cities

The Hill: Senate votes to require Pentagon to disclose cellphone spying near military facilities

World Net Daily: New drone surveillance will ‘make Big Brother drool’

New India Express: China steps up surveillance with flock of robotic doves in Muslim-majority Xinjiang

Futurist: By turning down 23andMe, immigration activists are actually being responsible about genetic privacy

EFF: A technical deep dive into STARTTLS everywhere

Gizmodo: Orlando police drop Amazon’s controversial facial recognition tech…for now

Forbes: Facial recognition and future scenarios

The Week: If America wants to stop the migrant crisis, it should decriminalize drugs

DANIEL HARSANYI: The real world is starting to resemble Twitter, and that’s a problem

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Washington D.C., the epicenter of crazy

The American Conservative: Believe it or not, banning flavored E-cigarettes is a terrible idea

Also The American Conservative: The Military-Industrial Complex’s assault on liberty

Reason: 1972: The year that made 2018 seem sane

Activist Post: One card to rule them all

High Times: THC-infused sriracha has arrived

The Guardian: “A crack in the edifice”: Privacy advocates hail Supreme Court cellphone data ruling

And more: LA Times: The Supreme Court protects privacy in the digital age

Heroic: BoingBoing: Googlers’ ethical refusal to build airgap systems curtailed Google’s ability to bid on sensitive military contracts

EFF: Illinois declines to adopt proposed arbitrary drone surveillance of protests

The Intercept: Trump insider wanted to sell social media surveillance tools to abusive governments, leaked documents suggest

WSWS: US Navy planning to build military camps to jail 120,000 immigrants

CNN: Canada becomes second nation in the world to legalize marijuana after Uruguay

True-life tales from Ancapistan, amirite? The Hill: Canada to allow mail-order marijuana sales

FEE: Tariffs are harming the American workers they’re supposed to protect

Techcrunch: In Army of None, a field guide to the coming world of autonomous warfare

The heat is on as the day to cast our vote for medical marijuana in this state draws near, and everyone with a finger in the prohibitionist pot is bringing out the big guns to ensure that their golden goose isn’t pried from their greedy, greasy hands by the citizens of Oklahoma who have had to pony up the taxes, and bear the brunt, of the farcical, tragic, War on Drugs. Sheriffs, district attorneys, prisons both public and private, the entire medical/pharmaceutical complex eager to keep the public addicted to their patented poisons, the peddlers of Surveillance State tech goodies that are deployed against innocent civilians by cops increasingly taught that they’re soldiers at war, and increasingly behaving as if they were, and many, many more.

But it’s a virtual victory come Tuesday (but only if you vote!), and how sweet it is to see every political and corporate parasite make their final, pathetic stand against a measure that would increase liberty and simultaneously decrease their power and income.  And so the lies come out: “SQ 788 will let veterinarians prescribe marijuana”, “…students will be allowed to grow marijuana in their dorms”, “…the filth-covered potheads will come scurrying out of the tunnels and smoking marijuana right next to your babies”, etc. And the biggest lie of all: “this is recreational marijuana disguised as medical”.  No, it clearly is not. The language of 788 requires approval of a board-certified physician before obtaining a license for medical marijuana.

And the elite rag of the Oklahoma Political Class has been unloading clip after clip at supporters of 788, but they’re firing blanks, as the lies are falling on fewer and fewer willing listeners. The people who’ve been forcibly funding the boondoggles of the Political Class, all the grand plans that have run this state into the ground, are becoming immune to the desperate lies designed to keep the party going. For anyone but us, that is.

The Establishment is afraid of 788 because it is true medical marijuana, not a crony half-measure that ensures the right people receive their cut first.

And if you’ll remember Oklahoma’s own Scott Pruitt, the current head of the EPA, and laughingstock of the entirety of DC, attempted to rewrite SQ 788 in a blatant effort to mislead voters into misconstruing the initiative as legalizing recreational marijuana, was rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

In truth, the War on Drugs is nothing more than a war on our liberty.  It has unleashed a black market plague of meth, heroin, and criminals to supply a demand that, due to the ridiculous prohibition of safer alternatives, cannot currently be supplied by legal businesses in an open and free market.

Another truth, and one that becomes plainly evident every time a real threat to the existence of the gravy train of Prohibition emerges, is that the Drug War is nothing more than a jobs program for hundreds of thousands of workers at the federal and state level.

An entire bureaucracy has been built up around prohibition to combat it, and now, as with every other war, foreign and domestic, that our Political Class is busy waging, this bureaucracy realizes that it needs the Drug War to continue to exist. Far-reaching powers of surveillance have been built upon this ridiculous policy of Prohibition, and rooting out and dismantling the power structure built upon it is an Augean stable of a task, but 788 is a mighty first step toward washing away the horse manure of entrenched corruption.

The promise of legal marijuana in Oklahoma in reality means the promise of an end to a massive black market and all the societal ills that follow in its wake: the destruction of families, of entire communities, of the most vulnerable among us, an end to our sardine-can prisons, the promise of a way out of addiction for those held in thrall to meth, heroin, and opioids.  Legal marijuana means safe access to a safe product, access to a far safer high than meth, heroin, and even alcohol can provide.  It means thousands of jobs; real jobs with real paychecks. No federal grants, no phony taxpayer-subsidized “jobs”.  It means the elimination of the myriad fake jobs that make their living on the Drug War, paid for by us with our tax dollars and our liberty.  The promise of legal marijuana is the promise of a future with greater liberty, not less.  That’s a future worth working toward.

ACLU: Facial recognition cameras do not belong in schools

The Hill: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

WSWS: ICE agents raid Ohio meatpacking plant, arrest 146 immigrants

CNET: ‘Tell Microsoft to drop ICE as a client or lose us as GitHub users’, say coders

Axios: Why Central Americans flee to the US despite “zero tolerance”

Chicago-Sun Times: Orlando airport is first to scan faces of all passengers on international flights

Techdirt: In a surprising decision, European Court of Human Rights says Sweden’s mass surveillance is fine

Reason: Congress wants to give Jeff Sessions unprecedented new Drug War powers

JOHN WHITEHEAD: We are all prisoners of the Surveillance State

FEE: Foreign tariffs are just domestic taxes

NonDoc: Lawyer lists top 7 misconceptions of State Question 788

Reason: Leaked internal memo reveals the ACLU is wavering on free speech

Reason: Senate can’t even muster the votes to to trim 0.08 percent of federal budget

Gizmodo: Lawsuit: Detained immigrant children forced to take antipsychotic drugs

The Nation: How private contractors enable Trump’s cruelties at the border Ed: Although, this type of detention had been occurring years before Trump

Ars Technica: Microsoft staff call on company to end ICE contract

The Verge: It’s not just Microsoft: lots of tech companies are quietly helping ICE

The Intercept: The US has conducted more than 550 drone strikes in Libya since 2011

New York Times: Why the US should drop all tariffs

FEE: The Drug War started 47 years ago. Here’s some commentary from Milton Friedman on that failed and shameful domestic war

Motherboard: The EU’s terrible, internet-wrecking copyright plan lurches forward

Consortium News: The Pentagon expands its provocative encirclement of China

Big Think: Study: Ecstasy could be far less dangerous than past research suggests

A short post published here yesterday received a surprising amount of attention, so I feel I should delve more deeply into the topic of Oklahoma Senator Ervin Yen’s paternalistic authoritarianism, and why it has no place in Oklahoma.

In truth, Yen himself makes a pretty good case for being removed from elected office. His recently-created Twitter account is nothing more than a string of attacks on various freedoms that he deems offensive.  What’s worse, he appears to believe what he’s saying.  There are few things more terrifying than the authoritarian who truly believes he knows what’s best for us, and is more than willing to use the coercive power of the State to override our ability to choose what’s best for ourselves.

Perhaps the most outrageous action Yen has taken as chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee is when, in April of last year,he refused to even allow a hearing on a bill that would address the severe healthcare provider shortage here in Oklahoma. With 75 out of the 77 counties in this state experiencing a health professional shortage, his action is a scandal of gargantuan proportions.

He also is a firm believer in mandatory vaccination, and has roused the fury of parents across the state, who have organized under banner of the Oklahomans for Vaccine and Health Choice, and rallied to “yank” him out of office, replacing him with Joe Howell on June 26th, the day of the primaries.

Like some strange, autocratic Don Quixote galloping along in a Lynchian nightmare, Yen tilts at the windmills of personal choice, deems them to be evil, and then throws himself headlong at his target, sword swinging wildly. Oklahoma can tolerate this state of affairs not a second longer.

To attack the freedom to make our own choices is to attack the very foundation of the ideals that this country was founded on, to attack the foundation of liberty itself.  Strange how rarely we hear a politician or candidate speak of liberty anymore. How rarely do we hear a politician bent on expanding choice, rather than diminishing it.

Yen places far too much faith in the redemptive power of legislation, which is nothing new to Oklahoma. Our present, dismal state of affairs here is a result of too much faith in government power, too little in the power of liberty.  But only liberty can correct this mess.

The case against Yen is the case against authoritarianism, against the misuse of power.  He has been no steward of the liberty of the people, and must be removed. Removing him, though, should be seen as a small battle in a larger effort to transform the way we view the role of government in our lives.  If government is to exist at all, it should be to protect liberty.  It is not our caretaker from cradle to grave, nor that of our children.  It only has the power that we give it, and it’s time to remove our consent.

Yen’s brand of hyperbolic authoritarianism has run this state into the ground, and he is proof positive that we don’t need to focus our attention on Washington D.C. if we wish to restore liberty.  The tyrants are in our backyard, in our communities, and must be fought (in an ideological, non-violent sense) there.  As Ludwig von Mises said:

“Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards de­struction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. No one can stand aside with unconcern: the interests of everyone hang on the result.”

H/T Liberty Memes.