The Power to Tax is the Power to Destroy

by Bob Bauman

 

The ghost of Richard Nixon is haunting the halls of power in Washington, D.C.

In 1974, as a 37-year-old member of the U.S. House of Representatives, I counted Dick Nixon as my friend. Then, the Watergate scandal broke. President Nixon was accused of, among other things, trying to get the IRS to harass his political enemies with tax audits. It resulted in a vote for his impeachment.

Now, fast forward nearly four decades to last Friday. A director at the Internal Revenue Service openly revealed that the agency had specifically targeted for special scrutiny 75 conservative groups that had 'Tea Party' or 'Patriots' or other similar terms in their names. They even went so far as to target groups looking to educate citizens on the U.S. Constitution.

I know, it's chilling. It prompts us to ask: If faceless IRS bureaucrats can target Americans for their beliefs at will, are you next?
 

As The Wall Street Journal (May 11, 2013) stated: "Other than the power to prosecute, the taxing authority is the most awesome power the government has. It can ruin people and companies."

And if you offend the IRS, it could ruin you too!

In the face of these appalling attacks on our basic liberties, perhaps the time has come for Americans to protect their fundamental financial and personal privacy rights by considering heading offshore. For decades, The Sovereign Society has been showing members how to implement simple asset protection strategies, take advantage of global investment opportunities and employ safe, cost-effective ways to move assets to safer havens abroad.

As recent events have highlighted, the proverbial government noose around our necks is only getting tighter.


The United Police State of America


Think, for a moment, about the implications of the IRS's actions.

If you dare to advocate a political position that it dislikes, will your taxes be audited? How much will it cost you to defend yourself?

This is not small-time Chicago ward heeler politics. This is serious, criminal official misconduct on a massive scale.

Until now, I think most Americans assumed that the IRS treated us as the law and our Constitution required, although not always courteously or fairly.  In reality, things were much different. High IRS officials knew about and concealed their anti-conservative policy for two years, since at least June 29, 2011.

Equally shocking, one of my least favorite bureaucrats, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, for a year falsely denied that the IRS had done the very thing they just finally admitted doing.
 

A few months ago, I wrote: "As a former professor of constitutional law, I would hope the president knows that the Bill of Rights guarantees every citizen due process of law. But if the president is willing to ignore the U.S. Constitution, what might such a zealot do to implement his vision of social justice and redistribution of wealth?"

Turns out, some people's names (or at least the names of their organizations) really are on Obama's list.

In anticipation of the tyrannical impulses of our current government, I recently created a survival guide for Washington D.C's new tax assault, wrote about a fast-track residence program in Panama and shared the secrets to the easiest way to enjoy the benefits of European Union citizenship.

It pains me to admit it, but I believe that our best chance to protect our liberties and enjoy financial freedom may exist overseas. I urge you to plan for your future accordingly.

I leave you today with the words of Martin Niemiller, a prominent Protestant pastor who was an outspoken foe of Adolf Hitler. He spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps and is best remembered for this quotation in which we all can find a lesson, we must all speak out against oppression:

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.



Read more: http://patrioteponym.webnode.com/news/power-to-tax-power-to-destroy/

OP's Reich adds License Plate Scanner To Tighten Citizen Surveillance

by Jennifer Lynch and Peter Bibring

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using sophisticated cameras, called "automated license plate readers," or ALPRs, to scan and record the license plates of millions of cars across the country. These cameras, mounted on top of patrol cars and on city streets, can scan up to 1,800 license plate per minute, day or night, allowing one squad car to record more than 14,000 plates during the course of a single shift.

Automated License Plate Recording System

Photographing a single license plate one time on a public city street may not seem problematic, but when the data are put into a database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets, and stored forever, it can become very revealing. Information about your location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor, and your associations with others. And according to recent research reported in Nature, it's possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial data points (location plus time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifiers.

To better gauge the real threat to privacy posed by ALPRs, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Southern California asked the LAPD and LA Sheriff's Department for information on their systems, including their policies on retaining and sharing information and all the license plate data each department collected over the course of a single week in 2012.

After both agencies refused to release most of the records we asked for, we sued. We hope to get access to these data, both to show just how many data the agencies are collecting and to show how revealing they can be.

Automated license plate readers are often touted as an easy way to find stolen cars -- the system checks a scanned plate against a database of stolen or wanted cars and can instantly identify a hit, allowing officers to set up a sting to recover the car and catch the thief. But even when there's no match in the database and no reason to think a car is stolen or involved in a crime, police keep the data.

According to the LA Weekly, the LAPD and LASD together already have collected more than 160 million "data points" (license plates plus time, date, and exact location) in the greater LA area -- that's more than 20 hits for each of the more than 7 million vehicles registered in LA County. That's a ton of data, but it's not all -- law enforcement officers also have access to private databases containing hundreds of millions of plates and their coordinates collected by "repo" men.

Law enforcement agencies claim that ALPR systems are no different from an officer recording license plate, time and location information by hand. They also argue the data don't warrant any privacy protections because we drive our cars around in public. However, as five justices of the Supreme Court recognized last year in U.S. v. Jones, a case involving GPS tracking, the ease of data collection and the low cost of data storage make technological surveillance solutions such as GPS or ALPR very different from techniques used in the past.

Police are open about their desire to record the movements of every car in case it might one day prove valuable. In 2008, LAPD police Chief Charlie Beck (then the agency's chief of detectives) told GovTech magazine that ALPRs have "unlimited potential" as an investigative tool. "It's always going to be great for the black-and-white to be driving down the street and find stolen cars rolling around... But the real value comes from the long-term investigative uses of being able to track vehicles -- where they've been and what they've been doing -- and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur." But amassing data on the movements of law-abiding residents poses a real threat to privacy, while the benefit to public safety is speculative, at best.

In light of privacy concerns, states including Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of ALPRs, and New Hampshire has banned them outright. Even the International Association of Chiefs of Police has issued a report recognizing that "recording driving habits" could raise First Amendment concerns because cameras could record "vehicles parked at addiction-counseling meetings, doctors' offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests."

But even if ALPRs are permitted, there are still common-sense limits that can allow the public safety benefits of ALPRs while preventing the wholesale tracking of every resident's movements. Police can, and should, treat location information from ALPRs like other sensitive information -- they should retain it no longer than necessary to determine if it might be relevant to a crime, and should get a warrant to keep it any longer. They should limit who can access it and who they can share it with. And they should put oversight in place to ensure these limits are followed.

Unfortunately, efforts to impose reasonable limits on ALPR tracking in California have failed so far. Last year, legislation that would have limited private and law enforcement retention of ALPR data to 60 days -- a limit currently in effect for the California Highway Patrol -- and restricted sharing between law enforcement and private companies failed after vigorous opposition from law enforcement. In California, law enforcement agencies remain free to set their own policies on the use and retention of ALPR data, or to have no policy at all.

Some have asked why we would seek public disclosure of the actual license plate data collected by the police -- location-based data that we think is private. But we asked specifically for a narrow slice of data -- just a week's worth -- to demonstrate how invasive the technology is. Having the data will allow us to see how frequently some plates have been scanned; where and when, specifically, the cops are scanning plates; and just how many plates can be collected in a large metropolitan area over the course of a single week. Actual data will reveal whether ALPRs are deployed primarily in particular areas of Los Angeles and whether some communities might, therefore, be much more heavily tracked than others. If these data are too private to give a week's worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used, then isn't it too private to let the police amass years' worth of data without a warrant?

After the Boston Marathon bombings, many have argued that the government should take advantage of surveillance technology to collect more data, rather than less. But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. We should recognize just how revealing ALPR data are and not be afraid to push our police and legislators for sensible limits to protect our basic right to privacy.


{Editor Note: Automated License Plate Recorders are merely the precursor ro CCTV which is already in use in many U.S. cities. However, a recent Australian court decision casts doubt as to their real purpose which doesn't appear to be crime.  "A local resident opposed to the introduction of CCTV cameras succesfully proved that public surveillance carried out by his city council not only broke Australia’s privacy laws, but also did nothing to prevent crime – the supposed reason for its installation."}

Daniel Solove, author of Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, believes these arguments, and many like them, are flawed. They are based on mistaken views about what it means to protect privacy and the costs and benefits of doing so.

Terrorist attacks, while horrific, claim far fewer lives each year than suicide in the U.S. Nearly 30,000 Americans take their own lives each year. According to The Guardian, 3,467 American lives have been lost in terrorist attacks since 1970; 3,003 of those were in 2001.  A version of this article was originally posted here.