Home

Rutherford Institute Launches Inquiry Into Government Use of Drivers’ License Photos to Build Facial Recognition Database, Track Citizens

September 5, 2019

ppjg Constitution, Government, Police State, The PPJ Gazette , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

For Immediate Release: September 5, 2019

The Rutherford Institute

CHICAGO, Ill. — Pushing back against the expansion of secret government surveillance programs at the expense of individual privacy, The Rutherford Institute is asking the State of Illinois to disclose information about its participation in the federal government’s scheme to establish a massive facial recognition database by collecting the drivers’ license photographs of millions of Americans.

In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made on behalf of Illinois resident Dmitry Feofanov, The Rutherford Institute is seeking details about the federal government’s facial recognition program, which allows government agents to track citizens whenever they are in public. The request comes after it was disclosed in July 2019 that the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have mined information kept by state DMVs to create a massive database of biometric photos and personal information without the consent of citizens.

“Surveillance, DNA and biometric technologies have become convenient tools in the hands of government agencies to render null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “For a long time, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s biometrics and use it against them. That is no longer the case. While the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent government officials from tracking a person’s movements or searching an individual’s person or property without a warrant and probable cause—evidence that some kind of criminal activity was afoot—the founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy on a biometric level.”
MAKE THE GOVERNMENT PLAY BY THE RULES OF THE CONSTITUTION: SUPPORT THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
Facial recognition programs, which can be used to identify people in photos, video, or in real-time, employ sophisticated technology to identify individuals using their faces. Advanced cameras scan a person’s features and then compare the “biometric” data obtained with a database of biometric photographs to determine the person’s identity. Law enforcement currently use mobile devices to identify people during police stops.

The FBI’s Next Generation Identification system has dramatically expanded the government’s surveillance capacity by using a variety of photos and other biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation’s growing network of surveillance cameras, to not only track people but create a permanent “recognition” file on them within the government’s databases. However, the government’s capacity to track citizens is dependent on its database of biometric photographs of identified individuals.

In an effort to expand the government’s database, federal law enforcement agencies, and the FBI and ICE in particular, have been obtaining the photographs and associated identities of persons from state agencies that obtain biometric photographs in connection with issuing drivers’ licenses. According to the Government Accounting Office, since 2011, the FBI has conducted over 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state drivers’ license databases. Federal investigators have also established ongoing working relationships with state licensing officials. In its FOIA request to the Illinois Secretary of State, which is responsible for issuing drivers’ licenses in the state, The Rutherford Institute is seeking to know the extent to which the state has disclosed residents’ drivers’ license photographs to any federal or other government agencies.

The Rutherford Institute’s FOIA request is available here.

This press release is also available at www.rutherford.org.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been violated and educates the public about threats to their freedoms.

Source: https://bit.ly/2kwOwIv

Psychiatry in charge of gun control: utter disaster

September 5, 2019

ppjg dangers of psychiatry, families, HEALTH, Mental Health, mental health, The PPJ Gazette , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

by Jon Rappoport

September 5, 2019

(To join our email list, click here.)

During the reign of Barack Obama, mass shootings prompted a White House declaration that community mental health centers would be created across America, in order to spot and treat persons before they committed violent acts. Now, under Trump, we are seeing a similar reaction, with a twist.

The Daily Caller, Aug 22, 2019: “Trump Admin Is Considering Using Amazon Echo And Apple Watch To Determine If Citizens Should Own A Gun”

“The Trump administration is considering a proposal that would use Google, Amazon and Apple to collect data on users who exhibit characteristics of mental illness that could lead to violent behavior, The Washington Post reported Thursday.”

“The proposal is part of an initiative to create a Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA), which would be located inside the Health and Human Services Department, the report notes, citing sources inside the administration. The new agency would have a separate budget and the president would be responsible for appointing its director.” More

Establishment Right and Left Call for COINTELPRO 2.O

September 5, 2019

ppjg 1st Amendment, Constitution, Government, Police State , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

by Kurt Nimmo

Both heads of the two-headed establishment political hydra want to resurrect COINTELPRO, the FBI’s illegal subversion program, in response to speech they oppose and want outlawed.

In August, The Verge (owned by liberal Vox Media and founded by former CIA asset Markos Moulitsas) and the National Review, the failing neocon journal edited by Rich Lowry, posted articles on how to best undermine the First Amendment right of millions of Americans.

The Verge cites a recent paper by N. F. Johnson and a collection of academics. Johnson and his fellows compare online “hate and extremist narratives” to a chemistry project.

“We observe the current hate network rapidly rewiring and self-repairing at the micro level when attacked, in a way that mimics the formation of covalent bonds in chemistry,” they write.

Because of this dynamic, the authors suggest fighting “hate” (unacceptable political speech) by inserting a “population in a pre-engineered format” within a targeted “hate-cluster” and destroying it from within.

This is a tactic taken right out of the COINTELPRO handbook.

Branko Marcetic writes:

As the Church Committee, a congressional committee set up in 1975 to analyze the excesses of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies over the preceding decades, put it, what followed was a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order…

The bread and butter of COINTELPRO operations was the use of wiretaps, anonymous letters, informants, and other means of subterfuge to, in the Bureau’s own words, foster factionalism and create suspicion within groups, bring individuals into disrepute before the American public, and create disruption and discord among such groups and movements in order to destroy the Left, or at least render it useless.

More

%d bloggers like this: