Govt. May Be Violating First Amendment by Blocking People from Social Media

In November 2017, the ACLU of Washington sent a letter to all Washington state lawmakers, warning they could be violating the First Amendment when they block people on their social-media accounts.

The ACLU letter describes those pages as “limited public forums” protected by the First Amendment, and says lawmakers can regulate speech such as vulgar or off-topic posts there.

“But viewpoint discrimination — for example, removing posts or blocking particular users entirely on the basis of the point of view expressed — is never permissible since it violates the First Amendment right to free speech,” the letter says.  (The Olympian, July 28, 2018)
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Allowing a government actor to ban critics from speaking in public forums would silence and chill dissent, warp the public conversation, and skew public perception. And enabling government actors to block critics from petitioning them for services or seeing public information would mean punishing them for speaking out or holding critical views.

As a government agency if you establish a social media account, you should never block anyone from viewing that social media. If you allow comments to be made to your social media page, then you must allow all comments to be posted (except as noted above those which are "vulgar or off-topic").

FBI's Ties to Southern Poverty Law Center

Fox News' Tucker Carlson reported on July 27, 2018 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has collaborated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a controversial left-wing group that often promotes misguided and false accusations of hate against conservatives and right-leaning organizations, for input and advice on various investigations.

“Well as you already know if you’ve been paying any attention at all, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a fraudulent enterprise...It’s a left-wing political group that uses ‘hate crime’ designations to target its ideological enemies and to crush people,” Carlson said.

“The SPLC has repeatedly been allowed to brief the FBI on alleged domestic terrorist threats to this country,” Carlson added. “Disturbingly though, the relationship is ongoing, if you can believe it…

Despite multiple requests from this program, the FBI has refused to describe the extent of its collaboration with the SPLC, we’ve asked repeatedly, or even to explain why it continues to work with a group like that.”

The SPLC regularly labels benign conservative thought as "hate speech."

The SPLC one time added Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson on an “extremist watch list" because of a quote in which he said: "Marriage is between a man and a woman; it’s a well-established pillar of society."
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Set a PIN on Your Smartphone of Ten Digits or More

Having some kind of lock on your smartphone is an essential part of your data security. While any kind of lock is better than none at all, some methods of locking your phone are more secure than others.

Using a long passcode offers you the best security. A 4-digit PIN is easy to quickly enter on your phone, but it is also easier to crack than one just a couple of numbers longer. For example, if you use a 6-digit PIN it adds an additional 990,000 additional combinations that must be tried to be sure of a successful brute force attack. A PIN of 10-digits or more pretty much ensures that you are protected from a brute force attack (at least based on today’s technology).  Android lets you go up to 16 characters (under Screen lock in Security in Settings), while on iOS you get up to 37 characters (tap Touch ID & Passcode or Face ID & Passcode from Settings).

Avoid biometrics (like fingerprint or facial recognition) as these can be spoofed, and you have no real protection if you are compelled to provide your fingerprints or photo (face scan). Swipe patterns are also pretty weak, since they can often be guessed, and if someone sees you enter the swipe pattern or can determine it from smudges on your phone’s screen the pattern can be cracked in just a few guesses.

So, while your thinking about it, upgrade the PIN on your phone to at least 10 characters that you can easily remember.
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Quiet Skies

According to the Boston Globe, July 28, 2018, Federal air marshals have begun following ordinary US citizens not suspected of a crime or on any terrorist watch list and collecting extensive information about their movements and behavior under a new domestic surveillance program that is drawing criticism from within the agency.

The previously undisclosed program, called “Quiet Skies,” specifically targets travelers who “are not under investigation by any agency and are not in the Terrorist Screening Data Base,” according to a Transportation Security Administration bulletin in March.

But some air marshals, in interviews and internal communications shared with the Globe, say the program has them tasked with shadowing travelers who appear to pose no real threat — a businesswoman who happened to have traveled through a Mideast hot spot, in one case; a Southwest Airlines flight attendant, in another; a fellow federal law enforcement officer, in a third.

It is a time-consuming and costly assignment, they say, which saps their ability to do more vital law enforcement work.

Already under Quiet Skies, thousands of unsuspecting Americans have been subjected to targeted airport and inflight surveillance, carried out by small teams of armed, undercover air marshals, government documents show. The teams document whether passengers fidget, use a computer, have a “jump” in their Adam’s apple or a “cold penetrating stare,” among other behaviors, according to the records.

All US citizens who enter the country are automatically screened for inclusion in Quiet Skies — their travel patterns and affiliations are checked and their names run against a terrorist watch list and other databases, according to agency documents.

Since this initiative launched in March, dozens of air marshals have raised concerns about the Quiet Skies program with senior officials and colleagues, sought legal counsel, and expressed misgivings about the surveillance program, according to interviews and documents reviewed by the Globe.

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Life Inside China's Total Surveillance State

China has turned the northwestern region of Xinjiang into a vast experiment in domestic surveillance. This Wall Street Journal video (December 20, 2017) shows what life is like inside a surveillance state.

The BBC (December 25, 2017) published a video China: "The World's Biggest Camera Surveillance Network" that also discusses surveillance of people in China.

The surveillance state continues to grow. The locations, relations, interactions, and associations of people are being collected and filed away in government databases. Some might argue that surveillance makes us safer, but this is not the case.

A February 2, 2018 article in The Atlantic "China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone" discusses how China is perfecting a vast network of digital espionage as a means of social control—with implications for democracies worldwide.

And on July 26, 2018 the German magazine Spiegel wrote about China, A Surveillance State Unlike Any the World Has Ever Seen.

 

WA State Supreme Court Clarifies When Felons Can Regain Gun Rights

OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — People in Washington state who want to have their gun rights restored after a felony conviction must be crime-free for five years, but it doesn’t have to be the five years immediately before they petition.

That’s according to a 6-3 ruling Thursday from the Washington Supreme Court. It came in the case of Edgar Dennis III, who was disqualified from possessing guns after robbery and assault convictions in the 1990s.

Dennis went more than 15 years before he was convicted of another crime, a misdemeanor for negligent driving.

Two years after that, in 2016, he petitioned to have his firearm rights restored. Lower courts rejected his efforts, citing the misdemeanor conviction within the past five years.

The high court overturned those decisions. The majority said that because he had been conviction-free for more than five years after completing his last felony sentence, he was entitled to have his gun rights restored.  (Q13 Fox News, July 26, 2018)
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Taking away a person's Constitutional Rights - the right to possess firearms, the right to vote - because that person has been convicted of a "felony crime" has never seemed right. Of course, while serving time in prison, and while on probation, we might agree that these right may be suspended; but once a sentence has been served should we continue to inflict punishment on a person by denying them their rights.

The WA Court's ruling that once a person has been crime free for five years following a felony conviction he or she can have gun rights restored seems like a step in the right direction.

 

 

King County Sheriff’s Deputy Fired Over Felony Conviction

According to the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber (July 13, 2018) King County sheriff’s deputy Edward Hicks was fired on June 28 after a jury in Michigan found him guilty earlier that week of beating a man back in 2016.

Before getting hired as a King County Sheriff’s deputy in 2017, Hicks worked for the Detroit Police Department, where he was investigated for assaulting a man while on the job. The matter was eventually handed off to the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, who charged him in 2017 with misdemeanor aggravated assault and felony misconduct in office—the two criminal charges that the Michigan jury upheld on June 25.

Hicks waived his right to a formal internal hearing with King County Sheriff Johanknecht on June 27, where he would have been allowed to respond to the jury’s verdict.
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From the article we read that Hicks was charged with misdemeanor aggravated assault (according to the Michigan Penal Code (750.81a), assault without a weapon resulting in an aggravated injury). The felony charge is because he committed the misdemeanor while acting as a police officer. Under Michigan law felony misconduct in office includes malfeasance, which is the doing of a wrongful act, misfeasance, which is the doing of a lawful act in a wrongful manner; and nonfeasance, which is the failure to perform an act required by the duties of the office.

It would seem that any conviction of a public officer in Michigan can result in a felony charge as  well. So, should Deputy Hicks have been fired by Sheriff Johanknecht?