Global spy system ECHELON confirmed at last – by leaked Snowden files

I stepped from the warmth of our source's London flat. That February night in 1977, the air was damp and cool; the buzz of traffic muted in this leafy north London suburb, in the shadow of the iconic Alexandra Palace.
A fellow journalist and I had just spent three hours inside, drinking Chianti and talking about secret surveillance with our source, and now we stood on the doorstep discussing how to get back to the south coast town where I lived.
Events were about to take me on a different journey. Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad was running, hard, toward the porch of the house we had left. Suited men surrounded us. A burly middle-aged cop held up his police ID. We had broken "Section 2" of Britain's secrecy law, he claimed.


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Federal Judge Rules Cops Can Take Over Your Home As They See Fit

The Third Amendment was created to protect your home from being quartered by soldiers without your consent. It has very rarely been a matter of debate or litigation, until now.


Federal district court Judge Andrew Gordon recently ruled that the police are exempt from the 3rd Amendment with a case out of Henderson, Nevada after a family had their home broken into and seized by local law enforcement who stated they needed the home to gain a “tactical advantage” against suspected criminals in a neighboring house.


Police actually forced their way into this family’s home, pepperballed the father and his dog and then incarcerated the man for a day.




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Our State of Police

America does not have a police state. Yet. East Germany had a police state. Syria has a police state. In police states, the government is afraid of the people. Our government is not all that afraid of us. Despite the liberal paranoia about militias and assault rifles, the training drills and TV shows where survivalists overrun the country, the people in charge don't wake up every morning worrying about a revolution. If they did, then two people in your neighborhood would be informing on you weekly.

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CSI ObamaCare: Affordable Care Act To Have Own Police

Police State: The administration is building a detective squad that will target consumers and companies that don't follow ObamaCare's rules. The game of "good cop, bad cop" has arrived in American health care.

It was bad enough to know that an Internal Revenue Service that targets the political opponents of the Obama administration between partying on the taxpayer dime would be in charge of monitoring compliance with ObamaCare's individual mandate via our tax returns.

Now, the Daily Mail, which lodged a Freedom of Information Act with Health and Human Services, reports that the agency has hired a bevy of criminal investigators as we continue to learn what is in the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act.

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Annals of the Security State: More Airplane Stories

"My dad fought a war so this can never happen in America. I will not dishonor my father's memory by giving up what he fought for. No, sir. With all due respect, I will not consent to a search without a proper warrant."

Over the weekend I related the story of Gabriel Silverstein, a businessman and pilot who for no apparent reason was subjected to a two-hour detention and invasive search by Homeland Security officials as he traveled across the country in his small plane. The picture above is not from that episode; it's an official DHS photo of its emergency-response agents being trained.

Below and after the jump are two additional stories of the same sort. The first is a long account from Larry Gaines, a small-plane pilot from California who had a similar episode last year. The story is long and detailed, and will be riveting for those in the aviation world. The summary for general readers is this.

• A private pilot set out from an airport in the Sierra foothills of California, headed to Oklahoma; 
• He made the trip "VFR" -- under visual flight rules, choosing his own path and knowing that he did not need to check in with air-traffic controllers as long as he stayed out of certain kinds of airspace (around big airports, in military zones, or subject to other restrictions).
• He eventually landed at a tiny little airport in rural Oklahoma, where a friend met him and took him home for dinner. 
• The pilot realized that he had dropped his eyeglass case at the airport and went back to retrieve it.
• At which point all hell broke loose, as he describes in detail. In short, local, county, and federal enforcement agents were there to inspect him and his plane -- and when he asked why, they said that his "suspicious" profile was "flight west to east, from California."

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