RAND PAUL: Bring our troops home and then, yes, throw a parade

Techdirt: ICE wants to be yet another federal agency with access to unminimized surveillance

ScienceMag: China’s massive investment in artificial intelligence has an insidious downside

The Intercept: US secretly negotiated with Russians to buy stolen NSA documents…and the Russians offered Trump-related material, too

NYT: Facial recognition is accurate…if you’re white

Cato: The “trial penalty” explained

FEE: Bright kids shouldn’t be dulled down with drugs

Aeon: Few things are as dangerous as economists with physics envy

Washington Post: Biometric hand scans and reinforced concrete: The history of the FISA court

The Baffler: Surveillance Valley: Why are companies like Google in bed with cops and spies?

Reason: Rand Paul single-handedly tries to stop massive spending plan

New Jersey Herald: America has become a Surveillance State

Alphr: Gagging orders: The internet surveillance nobody can talk about

TomDispatch: Drug wars, missing money, and a phantom $500 million

The Atlas: The world’s top 15 “defense” spenders Ed: Of course it’s the United States, which spends far more than every other nation combined.  Do check out the graph.

Al Jazeera: US airstrikes kill over 100 Syrian soldiers in retaliation for ‘attack’ that left no US causalties

StatNews: Commonly-used PTSD drug fails rigorous trial.  No better than a placebo, according to the study.

BBC: The Bermuda Triangle of space

Compelling alternative view of the consequences of the “Nunes Memo” Techdirt: The Nunes Memos has effectively destroyed intelligence oversight

Cato: ICE doesn’t belong in the intelligence community

The Nation: The Pentagon sent $500 million abroad for international drug wars.  What happened next is a mystery.

Reason: Mass surveillance is one Chinese export we should ban

McClatchyDC: As court weighs Microsoft case, the rest of the world feels big stake in privacy ruling

KCTV: Sweeping up more than just dirt: Is your Roomba spying on you?

Activist Post: Boston police waste money illegally spying on citizens for years

The Guardian: The Guardian view on internet privacy: It’s the psychology, stupid

Tonic: The future of healthcare could be a privacy nightmare

FEE: For preventing abuse, public schools are not a good model for homeschooling

The Hill: Will the FISA memo turn into Obama’s Watergate?

The American Conservative: Trump’s illegal war in Syria is getting more dangerous

Antiwar.com: JUSTIN RAIMONDO: In search of enemies

High Times: Seattle could dismiss 1,000 marijuana convictions

Aeon: Is the universe a conscious mind? Ed: Mind-bending article

The Hill: California judge rules in favor of baker who refused to make cake for same-sex couple Ed: On the grounds that it is “artistic expression”, although the correct defense would be that doing so would be involuntary labor, or, slavery.  Also, why would this couple want a cake from a shop that had been forced to make it?  I can’t imagine there are no gay-friendly bakers in California.

Oklahoma in the news again: Activist Post: Mother of seven receives court-ordered sterilization in exchange for shorter sentence Ed: Technically, the procedure was voluntary, but really, given a choice, plenty of people would give up a lot more than that to avoid prison time.

National Review: FISA-gate is scarier than Watergate

The Intercept: Trump’s military parade is ridiculous, but he isn’t the first US politician to use Humvees and F-16s as props

MassLive: Pentagon misconduct complaints on the rise, but fewer officers are being found guilty

Techdirt: Judge tells CIA it can’t hand classified info to journalists and pretend the info hasn’t been made public

Mises: The new German gov’t is bad news

Gizmodo: The house that spied on me

High Times: People are celebrating Valentine’s Day with weed-infused chocolate

Reuters: Bat genetic trait holds secret of longevity

Forbes: The biggest myth in quantum physics

And now for the most informative video you’ll watch today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

It clashes with our indoctrinated view that cops are “our friends”.  No, they aren’t.  Friends are people we know and trust.  Cops are the armed enforcers of the Political Class, but they will pretend to be your friend to gain your trust, in order to milk you for information, or incriminate yourself.

The other greatest libertarian writer of my generation, the late Will Grigg, wrote a wonderful column a year ago on the topic:

Teaching Kids to Trust the Police is Child Abuse.

That indignation you feel at reading that title is the indoctrination resurfacing again.  It’s okay to feel it, but it’s important to recognize it for what it is: conditioning over a period of decades to trust anyone with a badge on.  The ubiquity and effectiveness of that particular mind-laundry is the reason the TSA, a few years ago, began giving their agents uniforms that resembled law enforcement, complete with badge.  Because Americans submit to those with badges.  The flip side of that coin is that the TSA agents began acting more like cops, despite having no law enforcement power.

What an ugly reality, and an unhealthy environment for liberty.

ACLU: Leaked DHS report uses junk science to argue for surveillance of Muslims

EFF: Newly released surveillance orders show that even with individualized court oversight, spying powers are misused

The Federalist: Criminal referral confirms memo’s explosive claims of FISA abuse

Reason: Senate memo on surveillance of Carter Page suggests FBI was misled by Steele

WSWS: Facebook announces latest step in censorship campaign, prioritizing “local news” 

PJmedia: New minimum wage laws will eliminate more than 260,000 jobs in 2018

Reason: Jeff Sessions says opioid addiction starts with marijuana. Here are 6 studies that say otherwise.

Washington Times: Let cryptocurrencies compete with government money

The American Conservative: Trump’s parade and our endless wars

The Week: The sriracha hot sauce creator is an American hero

LA Times: For privacy advocates, Nunes’ criticism of the FBI brings mental whiplash

The Atlantic: The populist Right’s elitist approach to surveillance abuses

ScienceNews: Your phone is like a spy in your pocket

Techdirt: Court shuts down trooper’s attempt to portray new-ish minivans with imperfect drivers as justification for traffic stop

MirrorUK: Chinese police are using high-tech sunglasses that use facial recognition to catch suspects

The Intercept: Blowback: How a CIA-backed coup led to the rise of Iran’s Ayatollahs

Al-Monitor: Military audit confirms US tanks ended up with Iran-backed militias

MintPressNews: UK blocks hacktivist’s extradition over oppressive US prison conditions

Reason: Silk Road’s founder is in jail for life, but the Dark Web only grows

Reason: If a school cop threatens your 13-year old with child porn charges for sexting, get a lawyer Ed: While it’s probably not wise to give kids smartphones, it’s even less wise to place unaccountable, union-shielded, violence-prone bullies in schools.  Better to have trained professionals working with schoolkids rather than someone who couldn’t get a job anywhere else.

FEE: To save rhinos, legalize the horn trade

High Times: California’s history of arresting minorities for marijuana

EFF: Twilio demonstrates why courts should review every National Security Letter

American Thinker: Does James Comey have a perjury problem? 

5NewsOnline: Is Facebook listening in on your conversations?

Business Insider: The NYPD spent decades spying on New Yorkers–now you can see what they collected

Cato: Abuse-deterrent opioids and the law of unintended consequences

High Times: Can cannabis wean addicts off heroin and other opiates?

Reason: It’s not enough to get paid for not working, these L.A. police and firefighters figured out how to double it

Activist Post: Law enforcement can use smart meter parking apps to spy on everyone

WhoWhatWhy: What five ‘domestic terrorism’ cases tell us about FBI tactics

Popular Mechanics: Alaska’s melting permafrost is filled with mercury

SingularityHub: ‘Cosmic GPS’ tech will help us explore the furthest reaches of space

With Ford’s patent filed on autonomous, AI-powered police cruisers, some apparently believe the future looks brighter for bias-free policing.  The logic goes that, since it’s a robot doing the police work, race and class won’t factor into who gets punished.  But it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to see the inevitable future of autonomous cop cars cruising around neighborhoods.  For one, the vehicle would most certainly be equipped with advanced facial recognition tech, and instantaneous access to a biometric database that it would also feed information into.  Second, these drone vehicles wouldn’t replace cops at all, but merely be used as another weapon by them against us.  In essence, each community would be given it’s own personal Surveillance State avatar, an automated, AI-powered snitch snooping around neighborhoods, gulping up images of people, their activities, etc.

Like I’ve said before, not just the protection of our liberty, but our continued existence as a species depends on the preservation of a sphere of privacy from our own government.  The unrelenting push towards total surveillance is a push toward a point when we no longer have that ability.

New York Times: NYT asks court to unseal documents on surveillance of Carter Page

Reason: Trump defenders should support the NYT effort to unseal secret surveillance documents

Alternet: The FBI targeted the Left with devious tactics for years–now they’re finally receiving the same treatment in return

The Federalist: How senior-level corruption can affect entire agencies like the FBI

Also The Federalist: If you love law enforcement, you must criticize FBI corruption

Here comes the perversion of bodycams: SCMP: Chinese police testing panoramic-view body cameras with inbuilt facial recognition

The Intercept: Iranian-American refused to spy for the FBI and wound up with a prison sentence

The Guardian: EU data protection law may end up protecting scammers, experts warn

CNBC: Bitcoin plunges below $6,000

FEE: The solar panel tariff threatens far more American jobs than it protects

Aeon: “Entangled time” is mind-boggling