End the War on Freedom

"I've often thought that, instead of bunting and flags, the proper decoration for Independance Day is a hangmans noose dangling from every lamp post." -- Enemy of the State

Marc Cooper at LA Weekly - Uncensored Gore - an interview with Gore Vidal. [smith2004]

But Gore, you have lived through a number of inglorious administrations in your lifetime, from Truman's founding of the national-security state, to LBJ's debacle in Vietnam, to Nixon and Watergate, and yet here you are to tell the tale. So when it comes to this Bush administration, are you really talking about despots per se? Or is this really just one more rather corrupt and foolish Republican administration?

No. We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country -- like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans -- most Americans would not think of them as citizens.

Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.

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Is Bush the worst president we've ever had?

Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.

Portland Press Herald Editorial - Without the rule of law, a Biddeford school closes - Dottie Lafortune was apprehended on Wednesday, without incident. This editorial complains that her refusal to follow the letter of the law, coupled with threats from Rick Stanley's militia, was responsible for the closure of the St. James School across the street from her house. Maybe if the city had followed the law, and given her a jury trial before stealing her house, they could have prevented the whole thing. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Chris Churchill at The Biddeford (Maine) Journal Tribune - Lafortune out, school open following raid - the local newspaper's account of the raid. Link will break sometime next Thursday.

A SWAT team stormed through Dorothy Lafortune's barricaded door Wednesday afternoon, arresting the woman considered a trespasser in her home of 30 years and ending a stalemate that had unsettled the Graham Street neighborhood.

Police seized four weapons -- an M-1 carbine, a shotgun, a 9-mm pistol and a .38-caliber revolver -- and approximately 1,500 rounds of ammunition during a 12:40 p.m. raid that surprised Lafortune, who was chatting on the telephone, and frightened neighbors.

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Lafortune, 54, was charged with criminal trespassing and taken to Biddeford District Court, where she pleaded innocent and was released on her own recognizance. A judge barred her from possessing weapons and ordered that she stay away from the property and its owner.

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She refused to go, and said she would forcibly defend her right to stay. She even attempted to enlist the aid of a militia group, which initially promised to arrive in the city but failed to show.

Concerns over the likelihood of violent resistance led the Police Department to wait on the eviction, even in the face of heavy criticism from frustrated St. James School parents and others who believed the stalemate was dragging on for far too long.

"We had an obligation to proceed with caution," said Beaupre, adding that police knew of the weapons stockpile because Lafortune had bragged about it. "They were prepared to carry out a threat."

The 13-member SWAT team -- composed of officers from Biddeford, Saco and Old Orchard Beach -- met at the Saco Armory before proceeding to Graham Street. Officers closed the street to traffic, and used an explosive "bang-pole" to break an apartment window and draw attention away from officers entering the front door.

Rick Stanley - For the Stanley Scoop and the Pact - Mr. Stanley's plans for his mutual defense pact militia when he gets out of prison. [stanleyscoop]

The Pact will continue to recruit to build our numbers. I am recruiting from jail and will be able to mount a new recruiting drive, once back on the streets again, to bring in a tougher mentality, a stronger Pact member, a more decisive Pact member, and more Pact members, willing to accept leadership roles with courage and conviction. We have a small base of roughly 740 members to date after defections.

From this date, the Pact status of being prepared to mobilize for an action to defend each Pact member is suspended, until we have 25,000 members and a command staff of 250 in place. The Pact will recruit in the future until this is achieved. Those who do not agree with my decision, as always, are welcome to resign from the Pact. Those outside the Pact, have no say, and are not worth hearing. You want a voice in the Pact, join us or crawl back in your hole.

My decision to retire from my business is announced. I will be selling my company and assets, my wife and I have decided to retire OUTSIDE of the United States of America.

The organizational efforts will be done from offshore, again through the Liberty website of www.stanley2002.org. The Pact organizing effort must be free of US government influence and interference. I will be the organizer.

In the next year or two, I will wrap up my personal affairs, legal problems, and set up a viable command structure; all ANONYMOUS. The Pact command structure will be given to the Pact members when I decide it is absolutely necessary, and not before. Those command decisions will be made by me. Period. Keeping the Pact anonymous will be PARAMOUNT in all of my decisions. When we mobilize, the defense of America begins.

Those wishing to be involved in the command structure of the Pact can write me a letter proposing what you have to offer to: Rick Stanley 6280 E. 39th Ave, Denver, CO 80207 AFTER January 9, 2004.

Again, it will take me a year or two, to wrap up my personal and business affairs. Should the Pact acquire 25,000 members, we will prepare to defend other Pact members again at that time, not until. Until then the command structure will be built, day by day, block by block, individual by individual. There will be a 25 person "Headquarters" command team as well as a 225 person command structure for field action, set up by regions. Nothing else about the command structure will be announced until it is in place, and the individuals of each state will be appraised as to their state gathering areas, for mobilization, how this will be done, and how Pact members will be met by their command structure. Progress will be listed on the Stanley website.

Kim du Toit - Real Man - comments on this story about BC resident John Hirsch'es victorious knife fight with a 200 pound black bear. [kimdutoit]

GeekWithA.45 - A Quick Musing - on the grand-daddy of unconstitutional gun laws, the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA). [geekwitha.45]

World Trade Center Site Memorial Compeitition - they've announced the finalists in a contest to create a WTC Memorial. I like Reflecting Absence, though it's an awful waste of high-priced commercial real estate. I think the best memorial would be another huge skyscraper or two, even more monstrous than the WTC. I also liked five towers giving the finger, which travelled around the web shortly after 9/11/01. [geekwitha.45]

Simson Garfinkel at Wired - CodeFellas: A mafia hacker tells his story to Wired - the story of a hacker for the mob. Sounds like an honest buck for an honest day's work to me. [smith2004]

A few years ago, then FBI director Louis Freeh warned Congress that if encryption technology wasn't controlled, drug dealers, organized criminals, terrorists, and child pornographers would soon be using it to protect their records. Freeh was half right. We are using encryption, but we'd be using it even if it was illegal. The fact that it's built into the operating system just makes my job easier.

So what's a nice techie like me doing in a place like this? I gotta be honest. For starters, I don't think there's anything wrong with gambling - it's a private, symmetrical transaction between consenting adults. By another name - lottery, casino, offtrack betting - this sort of operation is completely legal. And it's not like I'm shaking people down for protection money. Besides, I tried the dotcom thing and failed. Plus, here I'm appreciated: Organized crime is smart enough to know that it doesn't know tech.

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The fact remains that I could be pulling in $150,000 as a programmer on the open market. But I make a third of that. So why am I risking a prison sentence or the potential of a lifetime in witness protection for a job that doesn't make me all that rich? Simple: When you start making a lot of money, you get noticed by the biggest bullies on the block - the cops and the IRS - and I don't want that. I like living below the radar. I sublet a friend's apartment and pay his utility bills with money orders that I purchase at the post office or at one of those check-cashing storefronts. Because I get paid entirely in cash, I don't fork over any taxes. When you get right down to it, I'm an idealist. I don't condone the actions of the US government. By refusing to pay taxes, I withhold my financial support. And, truth be told, I like mobsters. They're more willing to accept you at face value. They aren't hung up on college degrees, or where you live, or how many criminal convictions you have.

Yes, I am a hacker for the mob. And damn proud of it.

Clarence Page at The Chicago Tribune - All of a sudden the Patriot Act isn't just about terrorists anymore - While Herr Ashcroft is making noise about how careful his people are being about preserving our Constitutional rights while using their new law-enforcement "tools", his minions are quietly using their new powers for a lot more than just terrorism. Surprised? Of course not. Heil Bushcroft! Sieg Heil! [scopeny]

"We have used these tools to save innocent American lives," Ashcroft told a convention of law officers at the federal courthouse in Las Vegas back in August. "We have used these tools to provide the security that ensures liberty."

He neglected to mention how, even as he spoke, Las Vegas FBI agents were using those "tools" to go after a strip club owner and the politicians he allegedly paid off.

It turns out that Section 314 of the Patriot Act allows federal investigators wider leeway in obtaining financial information from stockbrokers, banks and other financial institutions on people "suspected, based on credible evidence, of engaging in terrorist acts or money laundering."

Pay close attention to that last phrase, "or money laundering." Ah, what legal power that little word "or" contains. Thanks to that teeny but mighty conjunction, the Patriot Act is not limited to money laundering that is linked to suspected terrorist acts but to any suspected money laundering.

"The Patriot Act was not meant to be just for terrorism," Department of Justice spokesman Mark Corallo told a reporter.

Now they tell us. Before the Patriot Act became law, FBI agents needed a subpoena from a grand jury to demand financial records. Under Section 314, agents no longer need trouble themselves with facing a grand jury, which is, after all, made up of only ordinary citizens. Instead, agents need only certify in secret documentation a reasonable suspicion that money laundering is taking place.

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