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.

Revolving door between fedgov and the tech giant for the last 8 years. 

Reasserting the Fourth Amendment would be a great start towards that goal. Zero Hedge

His picks for attorney general and director of CIA advocate total surveillance. Bloomberg

Justin Raimondo wonders why America must fight a war for NATO’s latest member, tiny Montenegro.

Come on, we knew this would be his opinion. Politico

Techdirt.  They didn’t think anyone notice, much less the bereaved themselves?

Trump thinks the U.S. military isn’t big enough, and wants to pump taxpayer billions into it until it reaches the size he prefers.  As this article at Motherboard notes, any time the military gets a big cash infusion, it blows it almost immediately on boondoggles of the most ridiculous sort.