Church of God News

Other cities across the USA (as well as in Europe, China, and many other lands) are installing more and more surveillance cameras.

The government wants to monitor more than just your movement, they also want to monitor what you have said. Notice the following:

THE FOURTH AMENDMENT

Now the feds are buying our emails!

Latest NSA scheme ‘has truly reached a new unconstitutional low’

By Andrew Napolitano
Published February 1, 2024 at 7:27pm

“The Framers … conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.” – Justice Louis Brandeis (1856-1941)

While we are all consumed with Joe Biden’s bumblings and Donald Trump’s trials, the federal government’s rapacious appetite for spying on the private behavior of Americans as to whom it has no suspicion of wrongdoing continues unabated. Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., revealed that the National Security Agency has been buying huge caches of Americans’ text messages and emails from Big Tech, and the FBI has been using this data to predict crime. Both of these undertakings are profoundly unconstitutional. …

The purpose of the Fourth Amendment was to prevent the government from utilizing general warrants by requiring instead judicially authorized search warrants issued under narrow circumstances, and to restrict government privacy invasions to prosecuting crimes that had already been committed. James Madison, who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, shared the hatred that the colonists-turned-Americans had for unrestrained government. …

Madison’s language in the Fourth Amendment preserving privacy but permitting the government to invade it only upon a showing, under oath, of probable cause of crime, and then requiring the warrant to specify in writing the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized. General warrants were used to predict crime and revolutionary behavior. The Fourth Amendment outlawed invasions of privacy for such governmental predictions.

After 9/11, in the collective spirit of fear, timidity and subservience to the presidency, and in utter disregard for its members’ oaths to uphold the Constitution, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. It permits one federal agent to authorize another federal agent to search and seize whatever the latter wishes to look at and capture so long as it is in the possession of third-party financial institutions.

Over the years, the definition of “financial institution” has been radically expanded by both legislation and presidential orders so as to include nearly every conceivable entity that has any records about any person in America – from banks to hospitals to lawyers to merchants to credit card issuers to telecoms and computer service providers and even the post office. https://www.wnd.com/2024/02/now-feds-buying-emails/

Innocent until proven guilty or presumed guilty until proven innocent?

Notice something else related to the fourth amendment to the US Constitution:

Amendment Four to the Constitution was ratified on December 15, 1791. It protects the American people from unreasonable searches and seizures. The official text is written as such:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

At the time of its creation, the Fourth Amendment was made in response to increasing infringements on privacy in both the colonies and in England. In England, “general warrants” authorized royal officials to pursue and search the belongings of a person without any cause other than the perceived suspicion that they were political enemies. Meanwhile in the colonies, “writs of assistance” authorized officials to track down and conduct warrantless searches for untaxed items. Both the “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” were challenged in court, but only the former was considered to be a violation of the law. A key element of the Fourth Amendment was that every search or seizure of an individual’s home and property was to be authorized by a judge beforehand, and that the entire operation had to be on the grounds of “probable cause.” https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/constitutional-amendments-amendment-4-right-privacyaccessed 02/02/24

Yes, the USA and others are looking at electronic communications in order to categorize and go after various ones who have political, religious, and other views various ones in government oppose.

We have also seen various steps in Canada (see NewsPunch: Canada Unveils Orwellian “Pre-Crime” Hate Speech Bill – “If You Think It, We’ll Arrest You”) and Europe (see EU, USA, and WEF moving towards making thoughts a crime?).

Long ago, my wife and I saw the 2002 movie ‘Minority Report.’ In it, government agents would arrest people for crimes that the government said they would commit in the future. Here is some information about it:

Minority Report is a 2002 American neo-noir science fiction action film^[5] directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Tom Cruise, and loosely based on the 1956 short story “The Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick. The picture is set primarily in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia in the year 2054, where PreCrime, a specialized police department, apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by psychics called “precogs“. (Wikipedia, retrieved 05/22/21)

We are getting closer to that type of thing in many parts of the world–but instead of ‘precogs” being used, police profiles, internal espionage, electronic surveillance, use of ‘political’ & religious words, and ‘artificial intelligence ‘ are getting involved.

Now consider something else that the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution states:

6th Amendment

These rights are given to all men or women under trial for any sort of wrongdoing. They establish the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra that is present in the United States legal system.

Yet on this point, the USA has been changing. Federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Internal Revenue Service long ago put the burden of proof of innocence on the accused–despite the 6th amendment.

Notice the following from 2021 from John Whitehead:

Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program

May 19, 2021

“There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford …

In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.

Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.

Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, …

The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism. …

In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.

Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.

In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.

It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.

Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state. …

The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates: The Department of Homeland Security has an expansive list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats. While you’ll definitely send up an alert for using phrases such as dirty bomb, Jihad and Agro terror, you’re just as likely to get flagged for surveillance if you reference the terms SWAT, lockdown, police, cloud, food poisoning, pork, flu, Subway, smart, delays, cancelled, la familia, pirates, hurricane, forest fire, storm, flood, help, ice, snow, worm, warning or social media.

Use a cell phone: Simply by using a cell phone, you make yourself an easy target for government agents—… Mention any of the so-called “trigger” words in a conversation or text message, and you’ll get flagged for sure.

Drive a car: Unless you’ve got an old junkyard heap without any of the gadgets and gizmos that are so attractive to today’s car buyers (GPS, satellite radio, electrical everything, smart systems, etc.), driving a car today is like wearing a homing device: you’ll be tracked from the moment you open that car door thanks to black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems …. https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/total_tyranny_well_all_be_targeted_under_the_governments_new_precrime_program

Many governments and various courts have been pushing in that direction.