Security devours freedom

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

A flock of sheep is in the enclosure and the mother ewe asks: “Children, do you know why we are surrounded by barbed wire?” “I know, Mom!”, says one of the lambs. “That is there to keep the terrorists out, so that we can enjoy our freedom in peace.”

The terrorists hate us for our freedoms we are being told and in order to fight them and to keep us safe we have to give up our freedoms piece by piece to the powers-that-be.

The powers-that-be press the people to clamor for more and more security and protection by creating more and more threats and claiming that in order for them to be able to protect us they need to have access to all our telephone data, our Internet data, and more and more surveillance of all our lives, of everything that we do. We must, we are told, to give up more and more freedoms for which the terrorists hate us here so much.

Well, the way things are going there will soon be nothing left anymore for them to hate us any longer. We will have given away all those freedoms, more or less voluntarily, to be safe from terrorists (and criminals).

All those CCTV cameras neither deter crime, nor do they help to solve crime, and they definitely do not stop terrorism. Neither will broad telephone intercepts, especially on cell phone networks, and data collection and retention. But it will make “1984” look like a children's story.

Incrementally our freedoms, that we are being told the terrorists hate us so badly for, are being eroded and removed and the people, in general, by clamoring for more and more safety and security, having been first scared by the powers-that-be into believing all those threats and dangers, are playing right into the hands of the elite whose aim is to remove our freedoms from us.

More and more surveillance, data retention, monitoring of everyone's Internet activity and (mobile) telephone calls, and whatever else they are going to come up with next is not there to keep us, the public, safe but to monitor everything that we do just in case that we get ideas above and beyond our station.

It is all about people control and has absolutely nothing to do with making and keeping us safe from terrorist attacks or such like. How can any of those measures prevent a suicide attacker carrying out his “mission”? It cannot and will not. In the same way that police and soldiers on the streets, even in armored carries, won't. If you shoot a suicide bomber the bomb goes off, if you challenge him he will detonate it. Off it goes in any case and there will be victims.

None of those measures are designed to keep us safe. They are designed to keep us controlled and to keep us in a perpetual state of fear.

© 2017

The right to self-defense

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Under British law it was once totally acceptable to defend oneself and others from attacks and harm but nowadays this has become the sole reserve of the law enfarcement services, basically, especially outside of one's own home.

Everyone in Victorian England and before, especially the men, carried a club, that is to say a cudgel, of some sort or, if he was a person of standing a sword or sword cane and it was accepted by the law that people had the right to defend themselves from attack by whatever means.

Today the criminal has more rights in England than any law-abiding subject of Her Britannic Majesty and the mere thought, almost, of carrying a stick (or something else) for the purpose of self-defense is considered against the law.

Any stick, for instance, especially if perceived as a cudgel, will be immediately considered and offensive weapon in the eyes of the police and the courts of law.

In fact, in Victorian times it was considered a right to be able to defend oneself and even by use of a firearm and many people had and carried such.

Over time, however, the people have permitted the lawmakers to whittle away all those rights by increments and the people also gave those rights away, basically, in return for promised protection by the law and the police.

The response time of the police has never been a great one and the truth is that they really only can come in after the event when a person has been attacked and injured or even killed by an attacker.

Nowadays we have arrived at such a state when the attacker is being treated more favorable than the victim should the latter have had a weapon of any sorts on his or her person with which to defend him- or herself. And even the person who just beats an attacker “to pulp” with his or her hands could find him- or herself charged with a felony.

Has the world gone mad? I would surely say so...

Time the people took back the streets and the right to proper self-defense as it once was the case.

© 2013

Homeland Security monitors domestic and foreign journalists

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Russia Today has reported that the US Homeland Security monitors journalists, and not just, it would appear and of that we can be certain also, American journalists.

Freedom of speech is one of the fundamental right of the US Constitution and it might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what.

Under the National Operations Center (NOC)’s Media Monitoring Initiative that came out of DHS headquarters in November 2011, Washington has now the written permission to retain data on users of social media and online networking platforms.

Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s own definition of personal identifiable information, or PII, such data could consist of any intellect “that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information which is linked or linkable to that individual.”

Previously established guidelines within the administration say that data could only be collected under authorization set forth by written code, but the new provisions in the NOC’s write-up means that any reporter, whether someone along the lines of Walter Cronkite or a budding Blogger, can now be victimized by the agency, without any cause.

Also included in the roster of those subjected to the spying are government officials, domestic or not, who make public statements, private sector employees that do the same and “persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest,” which to itself opens up the possibilities even wider.

The department says that they will only scour publicly-made info available while retaining data, but it doesn’t help but raise suspicion as to why the government is going out of their way to spend time, money and resources on watching over those that helped bring news to the masses.

The development out of the DHS comes at the same time that U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady denied pleas from supporters of WikiLeaks who had tried to prevent account information pertaining to their Twitter accounts from being provided to federal prosecutors. Jacob Applebaum and others advocates of Julian Assange’s whistleblower site were fighting to keep the government from subpoenaing information on their personal accounts that were collected from Twitter.

In fact an appeal against this judgment was quashed, yet again, and the government intends to pursue Twitter further for the details of WikiLeaks supporters to be handed over. And those details could be more, apparently, than of those people mentioned in the court judgment.

At the end of 2011 the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk Massachusetts District Attorney subpoenaed Twitter over details pertaining to recent tweets involving the Occupy Boston protests.

The website Fast Company reports that the intelligence collected by the Department of Homeland Security under the NOC Monitoring Initiative has been happening since as early as 2010 and the data is being widely shared with both private sector businesses and international third parties.

Somewhere along the line they do not seem to have read the First Amendment to the Constitution which clearly states that: Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

Which part of “Congress shall make NO LAW” do they not understand?

The biggest problem in all this is that the great majority of Americans, as per usual, only concerned as to whether they can watch TV and go to the Pizza or Burger joint, are totally unaware of the fact that their liberties, for which hundreds of thousands died in many conflicts, at home and abroad, are being eroded one by one.

The land of the free – no longer – and the home of the brave (that also went out of the window, methinks).

WAKE UP, AMERICA!

© 2012

FREEDOM IS NOT FREE!

By Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Freedom, yours and mine, is not free, even though the word free freely forms part of it. Far from it.

Freedom comes at a high cost in effort and sweat and often in blood and hast to be fought for tooth and nail and that time and time again.

At this very moment in Europe we are on the best way of loosing many freedoms that were hard fought for during World War Two against the Nazis and the first country in line trying to – once again – abolish them and demanding that they be demolished all over the EU, is... and you guessed it right, Germany.

All across the European Union freedom is under attack.

Already a year or two ago the German government instigated the “Bundestrojaner” (Federal Trojan) with which they, legally, can infiltrate anyone's computer and not just discover what an individual (or organization) has on the computer. Nay, they can even alter, destroy, remove or substitute files, folders and programs, and all written into the appropriate laws.

Germany would like to have the entire EU adopt such measures in the same way as it is Germany, and one or two other EU member states, who presses for the introduction of “Vorratsdatenspeicherung”, which means the retaining of all Internet data for individuals and companies via their service providers for several years. And this includes every email, every website visited, every contact made via social networks and every post, etc.

France and Italy have enacted laws against (foreign) Gypsies on their soil and rumor has it, via a number of Russian news agencies, that the EU has been or is in discussions with the government of the Russian Federation (and the Ukraine) to take all of Europe's Gypsies. It would appear that the EU would like to ethnically cleanse its member states of the Romani People.

Now, after the attack by a right-wing extremist in Norway the German government once again in the forefront calls for restrictions to the Internet use and for total surveillance of where people go, what they do, etc.

Italy already tried to, basically, outlaw Bloggers some two years or so ago when it dug up the old postwar law that made it illegal for all but government-approved journalists and newspapers to be reporting and writing news and editorial pieces and, according to the government a Blog was, therefore, an unauthorized newspaper and thus illegal. When governments head into that direction we know they are running scared of the people, in the same way when they try to disarm the citizenry.

Freedom is not free and we must always fight to retain our freedoms but too many have decided that they would like to have more security and as soon as that demand is made freedoms go out of the window.

Demands for more security and “peace of mind” to governments always seem to be a license – or so at least they see it – to put in more and more surveillance and more and more restrictions to freedoms until those freedoms, hard fought for, no longer exist. Then it is too late.

We must demand from the governments not more security but the right to defend ourselves against those that may wish us harm and those that wish to steal from us, and those that wish to destroy our freedoms. But, alas, too many people are not prepared to think and do for themselves. They want their governments to think and do for them. After all, they say, that is what they pay taxes for; to have everything done for them.

Do not sacrifice freedoms for peace of mind and an illusion of security. Fight your own fights and demand the right to defend yourself and your own neighbourhoods. The police always is reactive anyway. We must be proactive and also proactive as far as our freedoms go.

© 2011