Collateral Fourth Amendment damage

The consistent excuse from Congress to continue the NSA’s mass data collection is to say they never target anyone other than terrorists. Turns out that’s not exactly the case. In fact, some 90% of the individuals targeted weren’t real targets, as Buck Sexton referred to them on radio today they are more aptly described as collateral Fourth Amendment damage.

WATCH:

Below is a rough transcript of this segment:

BUCK: First, what really caught my eye, because I was doing my read, preparing for what I call as my session in the freedom hunt, there have been new revelations about the N.S.A., Edward Snowden, the contractor turned, oh, people call him a whistle-blower. I think we're going to have to start thinking of other terms. Whistle-blower is a much abused term now. In fact, when you look at the Obama Administration's record on whistle-blowers, a lot of the time the people whose names are bandied about by members of the press are with no normal understanding of the term to be called whistle-blowers.

Someone want to explain to me what Bradley, aka Chelsey, Manning, what whistle was being blown exactly, that a war is being fought, that diplomacy is a dirty business, that there are countries all over the world that are very corrupt. We still try to work with them. I'm not really sure how that is blowing a whistle. That would be perhaps blowing state secrets, but not a whistle per se.

There are other instances as well when are people get lumped in, whistle-blower. To be a whistle-blower you have to be identifying wrongdoing and that does not apply to some of the things that we're talking about here with the N.S.A.

However, in this particular instance, because there there have been many instances, because if you believe what we're told publicly by the intelligence community at this point in time, what Snowden took with him was massive, a trove of data. And the latest according to "The Washington Post" as we see here is ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in a communication sept intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by "The Washington Post."

You see, the Post now has all of these documents in its possession and it takes it upon itself to sift through them. And they're blocking out some things I see here, doing their own version, not of declassification per se, but, oh, of a journalistic scrub perhaps. I'm not really sure exactly what they would call it, because they're not really qualified to do the things that they're doing when it comes to removing sensitive information. But ordinary Internet users are being swept up into this.

Now, I have many people who know me and know what I used to do in a -- what feels like a prior life now, say, did you see the latest revelation? Do you see what they're doing? This is Orwellian. This is big brother. This is absurd. And I say, yes, yes, it is. Why are you surprised? That's where I am now on this. And I don't mean to be glib or smug. Sometimes I do. In this case I don't. In this instance, as we find more and more of these data dumps coming out, I have to say to people, well, yes, of course, don't you see everything on the Internet essentially now for all intents and purposes is collected, it is under surveillance, it is being kept. That the government now, because it's protecting you from the terrorists, from the terrorizers, the government has decided that it needs all of the information it can get on all of us at all times, even though it doesn't seem it's ever able to stop many of these threats from actually becoming a reality.

So we see once again in the dragnet that the N.S.A. is running, allegedly according to "The Washington Post," according to the snowing document that is -- snowing documents that they have in their possession, some of which have been published in the post at least in piecemeal, much of the information that's being collected from this N.S.A. dragnet that's suppose to protect us from terrorist organizations, it's just the stuff that you're sending to your families and friends. In fact, 160,000 intercepted conversations is what the "Post" is claiming, including emails, instant messages, photographs, social network posts and other document.

The trove included messages exchanged from 2009 to 2012 and some were hundreds of pages long, with 90% of the individuals not targets, but rather I guess you could call them collateral Fourth Amendment damage. Maybe that's how we should start referring to this. The Fourth Amendment seems rather clear, and yet when it comes to national security, when all of a sudden the intelligence community is in a place where the national security apparatus more broadly, we have to include the White House and the Pentagon. When they have a moment, they can tell us that we're under such dire threat. They do as they did over the weekend, by the way. I didn't even care much to delve into the specifics. I just know there was a threat, Fourth of July weekend. DHS looking for something. They're going to take even more time now, squirt out even more milk bottles and look through even more laptop cases and all the rest of that, because that's really going to stop the terrorists. So much of it is needless theater, but it's theater to a broader purpose.

And now you have to understand it's theater that has a couple of things that make it very tricky to walk back. We're always told we're under threat and that if we don't do these sort of things, if we don't allow the government to trample on the Fourth Amendment, to decide that it's able to ignore the Constitution when it's convenient, we don't do those things and the terrorists will win. Or at least the terrorists will strike at us. They will harm us. They will do bad things to this country. And so now so many Americans in fact have been brought up in this sort of statist culture. When they talk about these things, you'll hear them say, I have nothing to hide. And they don't seem to understand that the founders didn't say I'm against a general warrant because I'm illegally importing goods, although some of them were. They didn't say I'm against the concept of my home and my business being rummaged through by Redcoats, because I'm doing so much illegal stuff. They just said that that's not what the state should be able to do.

It's too much power in the hands of the state, that it relies too much on the good graces of those who have been given authority by the citizens of this country or in that case of course by the king. And it was unacceptable. It's not a question of innings or guilt. It's a question of how much power you're giving the government to intrude upon our daily lives and to cowice from citizens into subjects. Social media posts. Apparently your baby photos, apparently anything you write to anyone at any point in time could be or is already collected by the same government that promises you, there's so many safeguards in place, it will protect you.

Let's keep in mind this is the government that has one of its senior most officials from the I.R.S. pleading the fifth amendment. Can't talk about what I did in my professional capacity, can't have that discussion. Why? Oh, I wonder. Seven hard drives crashing. Seven hard drives that are irretrievable. In one instance at least with Lois Lerner, they've been destroyed. That's the government that's saying don't worry. We have total access to all of your stuff but we promise we won't abuse it.

You see, they don't necessarily want to abuse your stuff. They're not necessarily targeting any individual out there right now. But they can target every individual. That has of course a chilling effect on all of us. But more importantly, they can target specific people as they need to this time. And as you will see, a state that begins to run roughshod over the people, doesn't take kindly and this is a historical truth. You can look back to any country that has gone to radical. When people speak out, they have to make examples of people. When people all of a sudden step out of line, when citizens say, this is too much. This government no longer is representative of me, of my values, of what I believe in when they start to have that conversation. Then the government, the one-eyed cyclops that is the government decides to crush dissent. And guess what, with a could be easier crushing dissent when you have access to everything a person has ever said or done. When you have access to secret law, not only secret law, secret warrants.

And when you can avoid the scrutiny of fellow citizens, one of the only checks we have tyranny apart from the Second Amendment, when you can avoid that as a government entity by claiming secrecy, national security privileges. Sorry, you can't know about that. If you were smarter, if you had more to offer, perhaps we would tell you, but you're just a lowly citizen. We are the lords in the intelligence community, in the national security community, and you are the serfs. Deal with it. This is the offer they're making to us now or perhaps it's an offer we can't refuse. And this is what they say to us.

And now they wonder why we come out and say, well, you want us to trust us and yet why should we. You want us to trust you, government, and we see how you act in so many different capacities, and instances. This same government that can't secure the border, that lies to our faces for years about how secure the border is.

We're going to be talking about that extensively in just a little bit today on the show. That same government is saying to you, give us unlimited surveillance authority and power. You won't know about it, so don't worry, it can't hurt you. But it is going to be unlimited. Give us that power and we'll protect you. That's an offer that's been made by many a tyrant to many a peasant centuries and centuries, millennia back, actually. Give us the authority and everything will be fine. We just had Fourth of July. We just had our Independence Day and been with it. Perhaps we should start to think a little bit more seriously about what freedom actually means here at home and what the government is asking us to do on a regular basis, or even more egregiously, just doing and expecting us to not make a peep about it.

What do clay pots have to do with to preserving American history?

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Editor's note: This article was originally published on TheBlaze.com.

Why should we preserve our nation’s history? If you listen to my radio program and podcast, or read my columns and books, you know I’ve dedicated a large part of my life and finances to sourcing and preserving priceless artifacts that tell America’s story. I’ve tried to make these artifacts as available as possible through the American Journey Experience Museum, just across from the studios where I do my daily radio broadcast. Thousands of you have come through the museum and have been able to see and experience these artifacts that are a part of your legacy as an American.

The destruction of American texts has already begun.

But why should people like you and me be concerned about preserving these things from our nation's history? Isn’t that what the “big guys” like the National Archives are for?

I first felt a prompting to preserve our nation's history back in 2008, and it all started with clay pots and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1946, a Bedouin shepherd in what is now the West Bank threw a rock into a cave nestled into the side of a cliff near the Dead Sea. Instead of hearing an echo, he heard the curious sound of a clay pot shattering. He discovered more than 15,000 Masoretic texts from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

These texts weren’t just a priceless historical discovery. They were virtually perfect copies of the same Jewish texts that continue to be translated today. Consider the significance of that discovery. Since the third century B.C. when these texts were first written, the Jewish people have endured a continued onslaught of diasporas, persecutions, pressures to conform to their occupying power, the destruction of their temple, and so much more. They had to fight for their identity as a people for centuries, and finally, a year after the end of the Holocaust and a year before the founding of the nation of Israel, these texts were discovered, confirming the preservation and endurance of their heritage since ancient times — all due to someone putting these clay pots in a desert cave more than 2,000 years ago.

I first felt a prompting to preserve our nation's history back in 2008, and it all started with clay pots and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

So, what do these clay pots have to do with the calling to preserve American history? I didn’t understand that prompting myself until the horrible thought dawned on me that the people we are fighting against may very well take our sacred American scriptures, our Declaration of Independence, and our Bill of Rights. What if they are successful, and 1,000 years from now, we have no texts preserved to confirm our national identity? What kind of new history would be written over the truth?

The destruction of American texts has already begun. The National Archives has labeled some of our critical documents, like our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, as “triggering” or “containing harmful language.” In a public statement, the National Archives said that the labels help prepare readers to view potentially distressing content:

The Catalog and web pages contain some content that may be harmful or difficult to view. NARA’s records span the history of the United States, and it is our charge to preserve and make available these historical records. As a result, some of the materials presented here may reflect outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions. In addition, some of the materials may relate to violent or graphic events and are preserved for their historical significance.

According to this statement, our founding documents are either “outdated, biased, offensive,” “possibly violent,” or a combination of these scathing descriptions. I’m sorry, the Declaration of Independence is not “triggering.” Our Constitution is not “outdated and biased,” and our Bill of Rights certainly is not “offensive and possibly violent.” They are glorious documents. They should be celebrated, not qualified by such derogatory, absurd language. Shame on them.

These are only the beginning stages of rewriting our history. What if they start banning these “triggering” documents from public view because they might offend somebody? Haven’t we torn down “triggering” statues before? What if we are no longer able to see, read, and study the actual words of our nation's founding documents because they are “harmful” or “possibly violent”? A thousand years from now, will there be any remnant to piece together the true spirit behind the nation that our founders envisioned?

The Declaration of Independence is not “triggering.”

That is why in 2008, I was prompted to preserve what I could. Now, the American Journey Experience Museum includes more than 160,000 artifacts, from founding-era documents to the original Roe v. Wade court papers. We need to preserve the totality of our nation’s heritage, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We need to preserve our history in our own clay pots.

I ask you to join with me on this mission. Start buying books that are important to preserve. Buy some acid-free paper and start printing some of the founding documents, the reports that go against the mainstream narrative, the studies that prove what is true as we are continually being fed lies. Start preserving our daily history as well as our history because it is being rewritten and digitized.

Somebody must have a copy of what is happening now and what has happened in the past. I hope things don’t get really bad. But if they do, we need to preserve our heritage. Perhaps, someone 1,000 years from now will discover our clay pots and, Lord willing, be able to have a glimpse of America as it truly was.

Top 10 WORST items in the new $1.2 TRILLION spending bill

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Biden just signed the newest spending bill into law, and Glenn is furious.

Under Speaker Johnson's leadership, the whopping $1.2 TRILLION package will use your taxpayer dollars to fund the government through September. Of course, the bill is loaded with earmarks and pork that diverts money to fund all sorts of absurd side projects.

Here is the list of the ten WORST uses of taxpayer money in the recently passed spending bill:

Funding venues to host drag shows, including ones that target children

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Money for transgender underwear for kids

Funding for proms for 12 to 18 year old kids

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Border security funding... for Jordan and Egypt

Another $300 million for Ukraine

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$3.5 million for Detroit's annual Thanksgiving Day parade

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$2.5 million for a new kayaking facility in Franklin, New Hampshire

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$2.7 million for a bike park in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, a town with a population of less than 2,300 people

$5 million for a new trail at Coastal Carolina University

$4 million the "Alaska King Crab Enhancement Project" (whatever that means)

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There is no doubt about it—we are entering dark times.

The November presidential election is only a few months away, and following the chaos of the 2020 election, the American people are bracing for what is likely to be another tumultuous election year. The left's anti-Trump rhetoric is reaching an all-time high with the most recent "Bloodbath" debacle proving how far the media will go to smear the former president. That's not to mention the Democrats' nearly four-year-long authoritarian attempt to jail President Trump or stop his re-election by any means necessary, even if it flies in the face of the Constitution.

Meanwhile, Biden is doing worse than ever. He reportedly threw a tantrum recently after being informed that his polls have reached an all-time low. After Special Counsel Robert Hur's report expressed concerns over Biden's obviously failing mental agility, it's getting harder for the Democrats to defend him. Yet he is still the Democratic nominee for November, promising another 4 years of catastrophic policies, from the border to heavy-handed taxation, should he be reelected.

The rest of the world isn't doing much better. The war in Ukraine has no clear end in sight, drawing NATO and Russia closer and closer to conflict. The war in Gaza is showing no sign of slowing down, and as Glenn revealed recently, its continuation may be a sign that the end times are near.

One thing is clear: we are living in uncertain times. If you and your family haven't prepared for the worst, now is the time. You can start by downloading "Glenn's Ultimate Guide to Getting Prepared." Be sure to print off a copy or two. If the recent cell outage proved anything, it's that technology is unreliable in survival situations. You can check your list of supplies against our "Ultimate Prepper Checklist for Beginners," which you can find below:

Food

  • Canned food/non-perishable foods
  • Food preparation tools
  • Go to the next level: garden/livestock/food production

Water

  • Non-perishable water store
  • Water purification
  • Independent water source

Shelter

  • Fireplace with a wood supply
  • Tent
  • Generator with fuel supply
  • Go to the next level: fallout shelter

Money

  • Emergency cash savings
  • Precious metals

Medicine

  • Extra blankets
  • Basic first aid
  • Extra prescriptions
  • Extra glasses
  • Toiletries store
  • Trauma kit
  • Antibiotics
  • Basic surgery supplies
  • Potassium Iodate tablets

Transportation

  • Bicycle
  • Car
  • Extra fuel

Information

  • Birth certificates
  • Insurance cards
  • Marriage license
  • Immunization records
  • Mortgage paperwork
  • Car title and registration
  • House keys, car keys
  • Passports
  • Family emergency plan
  • Prepping/survival/repair manuals
  • Go to the next level: copy of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and other important books/sources

Skills

  • Cooking
  • Gardening
  • Sewing
  • First Aid
  • Basic maintenance skills
  • Go to the next level: farming/ranching
  • Self-defense training

Communication

  • Family contact information and addresses
  • HAM radio

Miscellaneous

  • Flashlights and batteries
  • Lamps and fuel
  • Hardware (tools, nails, lumber, etc)
  • Extra clothes
  • Extreme weather clothes and gear
  • Gas masks and filters
  • Spare parts for any machinery/equipment

Is Trump's prosecution NORMAL?  This COMPLETE list of ALL Western leaders who served jail time proves otherwise.

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Mainstream media is on a crusade to normalize Donald Trump's indictments as if it's on par with the electoral course. Glenn asked his team to research every instance of a Western leader who was jailed during their political career over the past 200 years—except extreme political turmoil like the French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, Irish Revolution, etc.—and what we discovered was quite the opposite.

Imprisoning a leader or major political opponent is not normal, neither in the U.S. nor in the Western world. Within the last 200 years, there are only a handful of examples of leaders in the West serving jail time, and these men were not imprisoned under normal conditions. All of these men were jailed under extreme circumstances during times of great peril such as the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.

What does this mean for America? Are Trump's indictments evidence that we are re-entering times of great peril? Below is a list of Western leaders who were imprisoned within the last 200 years. Take a look and decide for yourself:

Late 1800s

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Jefferson Davis: The nearest occurrence to a U.S. President to serve jail time was in the case of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. Jefferson was captured in Georgia by Northern Soldiers in 1865 and locked up in Fort Monroe, Virginia for two years. He was offered a presidential pardon but refused out of his loyalty to the confederacy.

Early 1900s

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Eugene V. Debs: Debbs, a Midwestern socialist leader, became the first person to run for president in prison. He was locked up at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta having been convicted under the federal Sedition Act for giving an antiwar speech a few months before Armistice Day, the end of World War I. Many of his supporters believed his imprisonment to be unjust. Debs received 897,704 votes and was a distant third-part candidate behind Warren G. Harding, the Republican winner, and James M. Cox, the second-place Democrat. Harding ordered Debs’s release from prison toward the end of 1921.

Nazi sympathizers and collaborators: After the end of World War II in 1945, several European leaders who had "led" their countries during the Nazi occupation faced trial and imprisonment for treason. This list included Chief of the French State Philippe Pétain, French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, and Minister-President of Norway Vidkun Quisling. The latter two were also executed after their imprisonment. President of Finland Risto Ryti and Prime Minister of Finland Johan Wilhelm Rangell were also tried and jailed for collaborating with the Nazis against the Allied Powers.

Late 1900s

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The end of the Cold War: The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was one of the pivotal moments that brought the Cold War to a close and marked the end of Communist East Germany. With the fall of the wall and the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the former leaders were brought to trial to answer for the crimes committed by the GDR. General Secretary Erich Honecker and General Secretary Egon Krenz were both put on trial for abuse of power and the deaths of those who were shot trying to flee into West Germany. Honecker was charged with jail time but was released from custody due to severe illness and lived out the rest of his life as an exile in Chile. Krenz served 4 years in jail before his release in 2001. He is one of the last surviving leaders of the Eastern Bloc.

Lyndon LaRouche: Larouche was a Trotsky evangelist, public antisemite, and founder of a nationwide Marxist political movement, became the second person in U.S. history to run for President in a prison cell. Granted, he ran in every election from 1976 to 2004 as a long-shot third-party candidate. When he tried to gain the Democratic presidential nomination, he received 5 percent of the total nationwide vote. Even though in 2000 he received enough primary votes to qualify for delegates in a few states, the Democratic National Committee refused to seat his delegates and barred LaRouche from attending the Democratic National Convention.