…in case the Empire attempts to embarrass Iran.  (article)

All the belly-aching by law enforcement about unbreakable encryption services has been for naught, as a new report finds that the technology isn’t as malevolent as the Surveillance State would like us to believe.

There is no trade-off between liberty and security.  Indeed, security stems from liberty, not from government.

Sheldon Richman writes on the manner in which James Madison and the Federalists undercut the Anti-Federalists at the Constitutional Convention.

Rather than protecting our liberty, liberty is undercut at every turn by government.  It does this primarily, not by stealing us or our children away in the night, nor by directly taking our every last cent.  Government consolidates its power through the creation of cartels in all sectors of the economy.  Think of money, banking, healthcare, education, the university system, food, etc…The list goes on and on.  These sectors of the economy have been cordoned off via regulation, safe from the effects of free competition.  Banking is completely immune to competition, this activity is controlled completely by those with cartel-creating power.  The method by which government creates a cartel is through regulation.  Regulation builds a wall around the industry in question, protecting the established players, and funneling customers to their services.  When we make use of the healthcare sector, go to the bank, attend a university, etc., we are playing our part as customers of the cartel system.  Through restrictive regulation, our ability to choose with whom to do business is greatly diminished.  Governments cartelize the economy via regulation to restrict our choice of where to spend our money, and where we decide to work.  It’s insidious because we never notice the choices that will never exist due to government regulation.

The choice isn’t between regulation versus deregulation, but what mechanism should regulate the economy?  Should self-interested bureaucracy impose top-down regulation that restricts choice and benefits merely themselves and their comrades in the industry to be regulated?  Or should the market be regulated by the free, individual choices of the millions of people who buy, sell, and speculate in the market on a minute-by-minute basis?  Government fears the outcome of the latter, and will do anything to prevent it.

…is the Drug War bureaucracy.  Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” in 1971, proclaiming that “America’s public enemy number one is drug abuse”.  Since that declaration, police have militarized to an unfathomable extent, deadly synthetic drugs that are easier to produce in an environment of Prohibition have left a a mountain of bodies, criminal gangs have ballooned, with all the violence that goes with it, and US prisons have been bursting at the seams with non-violent drug offenders.  Billions of dollars have been poured into this futile crusade with nothing to show but the predictable, tragic social disintegration that comes along with the creation of a black market.  The chief lesson that the Drug Warriors have failed to learn, because it would threaten their paycheck, is that their creation of the black market is the source of the chaos, not drug use.  The government’s enforcement of Prohibition is the enforcement of the black market, which means that government, either intentionally or unintentionally, is protecting the drug market for the most violent of the drug cartels.

An environment of Prohibition incentivizes the creation of violent, black market criminals.  An environment of Prohibition incentivizes the employment, by law enforcement, of those who are less inclined to restraint themselves in dealing out violence.  The drug cartels rely on the policy of Prohibition just as the US Police State relies on it.  The Drug War is the domestic Warfare State’s Golden Goose, it’s the excuse for the massive network of surveillance, war goodies handed down to local cops, no-knock raids, and trigger-happy cops.  The Drug War is the reason minorities are rightfully afraid of the police.  The Drug War is the outlet for the Bush/Obama power grabs that were sold to protect us from “terrorists”.  From the Patriot Act all the way down the legislative line, these instruments of tyranny and oppression are now aimed at you, the citizen.

America’s public enemy number one is NOT drug abuse, it’s not terrorism or some other trumped-up social affliction.  The number one enemy is the government that professes to protect us from ourselves, the government that constructs a massive bureaucracy upon our politicized fear.

The Drug War is now a jobs program for the hundreds of thousands of federal and state minions who do its bidding.  That bureaucracy has no interest in seeing drug use wiped out; only an escalation of the domestic war will increase their power and their pay.

Steve Horwitz explains the difference, and dissects the false arguments of those who would rule us.

Vigilant Solutions is a private company that is in the business of collecting and storing high resolution pictures of license plates.  It has taken around 2.2 billion of these license plate photos to date, according to this January 27th article from The Atlantic.  When a picture of a license plate is taken, the location of that plate, as well as the time, is also stored.  Vigilant captures around 80 million new images per month, and it is selling this information to the police.  3,000 law enforcement agencies are the happy customers of Vigilant Solutions, according to the Atlantic article.  That’s 30,000 police officers that have access to that database.  Instead of obtaining a warrant from a judge to install a tracking device on your car, they can just access a database that has continually-updated information on your whereabouts via Vigilant’s photos.

Now, according to this Reason article, Vigilant Solutions is installing its cameras on certain Texas police cruisers that syncs with a government warrants database and lets the cop know who has an outstanding warrant.  The cop has a credit card reader conveniently installed in his cruiser so those with outstanding traffic fines can pay immediately.  Oh, and the reader has a 25% service charge, payable to Vigilant Solutions.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has introduced an open-ended Authorization for the Use of Military Force against ISIS, in case Obama wants his Iraq War before he leaves the White House.

Ammon Bundy associate LaVoy Finicum was gunned down after emerging from his car with his hands raised.  From the video it appears to be another case of trigger-happy Federal agents eager to kill.  It’s tragic that it ended in even one death, but when you take up arms against the State, this outcome should be expected.

I don’t want to analyze the details of the Bundy rebellion, I want to make a point, which is this: government loves when it’s critics pick up weapons against it.  The State thrives when its enemies put down logic, reason, and persuasion, and instead pick up a gun.  Violence is not the answer to restoring liberty; passionate persuasion is.  Peaceful, passionate, relentless persuasion on behalf of liberty is what the State fears most of all.  The case against the oppression the political class inflicts on the citizenry is airtight, it does not need violence to back it up.  On the contrary, resorting to a feeble show of force increases the credibility of the State.

The State is always looking for the excuse to extinguish the lives of its critics.  If you pick up a gun and threaten violence against it, you’ve given them exactly what they were looking for: the excuse to murder you.  Just like an out-of-control cop who is looking for any reason to beat you into submission, so the State looks for any reason to destroy your life.  Don’t give them that reason.

The political class fears a peaceful, articulate, organized, unstoppable movement for greater liberty, not a ragtag group of armed men who storm a deserted wildlife refuge.

Chicago police have been sabotaging their own dashcams for years, apparently so as not to capture evidence of official criminality.  Case in point: five police cars were on the scene when Laquan McDonald was gunned down by Officer Jason Van Dyke, but only two had functioning dashcams.  None of the five captured audio, which must be easier to disable.  If it’s that easy to disable these monitoring devices designed to provide accountability, how easily will it be for a cop to “disable” a bodycam during an altercation that the officer would rather leave no damning evidence?  “Body cameras for every cop!” was the declaration from on high after the Ferguson protests, but it now sounds more and more that “police accountability” is going to turn into another cash cow for some lucky contractor.  Just look at the Taser industry.  Oh, Taser International nabbed the lucrative bodycam contract for 22,000 London officers in November of last year.