Hope you feel safer now

[Winehole23]

Cold.

[boutons_deux]

Michigan Woman Faces 93 Days in Jail for Planting a Vegetable Garden

Her crime? Planting a vegetable garden in the front yard.

This is not some gated community with HOA regulations. This is an ordinary, working class neighborhood in Oakland County, Michigan. Like nearly every other city in my home state right now, Oak Park is facing financial issues. Here at home, people are amazed that a cash-strapped city has the resources to investigate, charge, and prosecute a resident for something as innocuous as planting a vegetable garden.

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151572

[Wild Cobra]

I don't think she will get out of this. I couldn't find the related code, but what I did read about the community, clearly spells out some specific beautification examples. "Suitable" I doubt is specifically defines, but the whole beautification standards of the community seem to come in play.

[ElNono]

How's that relevant to the thread topic (airport security)?

[ElNono]

Not you WC, I was asking boutons

[Wild Cobra]

^^^ Relevance to airport security?

No, but I did get caught up in an interesting diversion.

[boutons_deux]

airport "security" is just another example of the authoritarian police state where everybody is a suspect.

Jailing 60+ year old women for growing vegetables, feel safer now?

Making us safer, the keystone cops at FBI are still chasing, includes busting into homes, anti-war protesters and anybody associated with them. Feel safer now?

[boutons_deux]

The great generational threat

By Glenn Greenwald

In just the past two months alone (all subsequent to the killing of Osama bin Laden), the U.S. Government has taken the following steps in the name of battling the Terrorist menace:

extended the Patriot Act by four years without a single reform;

begun a new CIA drone attack campaign in Yemen;

launched drone attacks in Somalia;

slaughtered more civilians in Pakistan;

attempted to assassinate U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki far from any battlefield and without a whiff of due process;

invoked secrecy doctrines to conceal legal memos setting forth its views of its own domestic warrantless surveillance powers;

announced a "withdrawal"plan for Afghanistan that entails double the number of troops in that country as were there when Obama was inaugurated;

and invoked a very expansive view of its detention powers under the 2001 AUMF by detaining an alleged member of al-Shabab on a floating prison, without charges, Miranda warnings, or access to a lawyer.

That's all independent of a whole slew of drastically expanded surveillance powers seized over the past two years in the name of the same threat.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/gl...ism/index.html

==========

... while admitting there are fewer that 100 al Quaida leaders left.

Feel Safer (and Richer) Now?

[ElNono]

Women Arrested For Refusing TSA Search of Children

"A Tennessee mother was arrested for refusing to allow TSA screening clerks to subject her child to a body scan or patdown. This comes in the wake of a promise by the TSA Administrator to make repeated attempts at non-physical screening of children, after which another video of a child patdown surfaced. This event may signify a tipping point in the public's willingness to tolerate invasive and inappropriate security procedures at airports."

[Agloco]

‘Body-bombs:’ Is the Threat Commensurate with the Hype?
July 12, 2011


By: Kerry Patton



The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) recently issued an alert regarding unconfirmed intelligence indicating terrorists continue to contemplate using so-called “body-bombs” – explosive devices that are surgically implanted into the bodies of terrorists in the hope that they will not be detected and detonated onboard passenger planes. And just as with previous alerts about possible body-bomb threats, the latest bulletins just as quickly captured the media’s attention.

http://www.hstoday.us/blogs/guest-co...3697cb15f.html

Just waiting for the justfication to do body cavity searches and full-body CTs now.

[Wild Cobra]

http://www.hstoday.us/blogs/guest-co...3697cb15f.html

Just waiting for the justfication to do body cavity searches and full-body CTs now.

Be careful what you wish for...

[boutons_deux]

Senators Ask Spy Chief: Are You Tracking Us Through Our iPhones?

“Do government agencies have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes?”

Geolocation is a particular interest of Wyden’s. Technically, there are few obstacles to clandestine geodata collection, since most mobile phones feature built-in GPS. So along with a House Republican, Jason Chaffetz, Wyden introduced a bill that would require warrants for law enforcement to collect geodata. As our sister blog Threat Level has reported, a patchwork of inconsistent recent court rulings has yet to resolve whether geolocation data is protected by the Fourth Amendment.


But intelligence collection is a horse of a different color. The 2008 FISA Amendments Act that blessed the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance programs allowed intelligence agencies greater leeway to collect metadata on Americans’ communications abroad. It’s unclear to the senators if that or any other law prompted the spy community to move into geolocation collection.

That’s why Wyden and Udall want “unclassified answers” from Clapper. If Clapper thinks his spies can go after U.S. citizens’ geodata, they want the “specific statutory basis” for that collection, along with a description of any “judicial review or approval by particular officials” that might accompany it. They also want to know if Clapper thinks there’s any affirmative legal “prohibition” to geodata collection by spies, if the spy chief doesn’t think it’s legal.


http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011...tories+2%29%29

[boutons_deux]

Georgia Police Bust Girls' Lemonade Stand In Midway

Police in Georgia have shut down a lemonade stand run by three girls trying to save up for a trip to a water park, saying they didn't have a business license or the required permits.

Midway Police Chief Kelly Morningstar says police also didn't know how the lemonade was made, who made it or what was in it.

The girls had been operating for one day when Morningstar and another officer cruised by.

The girls needed a business license, peddler's permit and food permit to operate, even on residential property. The permits cost $50 a day or $180 per year.

One girl, 14-year-old Casity Dixon, says the three had to listen to police and shut down.

The girls are now doing chores and yard work to make money.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_900230.html

[boutons_deux]

Obama's Secret Wars: How Our Shady Counter-Terrorism Policies Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism

This remarkable do ent states that the U.S. government intends to "disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat al-Qa'ida and its affiliates and adherents," in the following "areas of focus": "The Homeland, South Asia, Arabian Peninsula, East Africa,Europe, Iraq, Maghreb and Sahel, Southeast Asia (and) Central Asia."

This assassination strategy is already operational in six Muslim countries with a combined population of 280 million: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, which has become a laboratory experiment for urban drone assassinations. The London Sunday Times reported a year ago that "President Obama has secretly sanctioned a huge increase in the number of US special forces ... with American troops now operating in 75 countries." There are presently 60,000 Special Operations forces worldwide, with 7,000 U.S. assassins unleashed upon Afghanistan and 3,000 in Iraq. Lt.-Col. John Nagle (ret.), an enthusiastic assassination supporter, has correctly called these operations "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/151596