Federal Court Approves Use of Hidden Surveillance Cameras on Private Property Without Warrants

A solar-powered wireless surveillance camera (Image credit: MicroPower Technologies, Inc.)

Yet again, a federal judge undermined the Constitution in a wholly disturbing fashion, this time by allowing police to install hidden surveillance cameras on private property without obtaining a search warrant.

This is especially troubling since the federal government has conducted more warrantless surveillance over the past two years than the entire previous decade. This court decision can only be expected to increase that already troubling number.

Let us not forget that the Obama administration has fought vigorously to hold on to their ability to conduct warrantless wiretapping while also claiming that cell phone location data is not protected by the Constitution and the Supreme Court recently refused to review a lawsuit challenging the warrantless surveillance program of the National Security Agency (NSA).

According to CNET, U.S. District Judge William Griesbach ruled “that it was reasonable for Drug Enforcement Administration agents to enter rural property without permission — and without a warrant — to install multiple “covert digital surveillance cameras” in hopes of uncovering evidence that 30 to 40 marijuana [plants] were being grown.”

Griesbach’s decision was actually based on a recommendation issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge William Callahan on October 9.

Callahan’s recommendation claimed that the DEA actually did not violate the Fourth Amendment by conducting warrantless surveillance.

“The Supreme Court has upheld the use of technology as a substitute for ordinary police surveillance,” wrote Callahan in his recommendation.

The case surrounds Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana of Green Bay, Wis. Both Mendoza and Magana have been charged with federal drug crimes that carry potential fines of up to $10 million along with life in prison.

Steven Curran, a DEA agent, claimed he discovered over 1,000 marijuana plants on a 22-acre heavily wooded property owned by Magana. The defendants called on Callahan to throw out the video evidence collected by the DEA based on the fact that there were “No Trespassing” signs posted throughout the property along with a locked gate, thus making the evidence collected a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Around four days after the DEA installed the surveillance cameras on Magana’s property without a warrant, a magistrate judge granted a warrant for surveillance. Mendoza and Magana’s attorneys rightfully pointed out that the surveillance took place long before the warrant was actually granted.

Callahan made his recommendation based on Oliver v. United States, a 1984 Supreme Court case in which the majority of justices ruled that “open fields” could indeed be searched without obtaining a warrant. They based this decision on their claim that open fields are not actually covered by the Fourth Amendment.

If the land is immediately surrounding a residence, on the other hand, it has greater privacy protections based on a legal concept known as curtilage.

“Placing a video camera in a location that allows law enforcement to record activities outside of a home and beyond protected curtilage does not violate the Fourth Amendment,” Department of Justice prosecutors James Santelle and William Lipscomb told Callahan.

“That one’s actions could be recorded on their own property, even if the property is not within the curtilage, is contrary to society’s concept of privacy,” argued Magana’s attorney Brett Reetz in a legal filing.

“The owner and his guest… had reason to believe that their activities on the property were not subject to video surveillance as it would constitute a violation of privacy,” Reetz added in last month’s legal filing.

Writing for CNET, Declan McCullagh paints a quite disturbing picture of where this precedent could lead.

“As digital sensors become cheaper and wireless connections become more powerful, the Justice Department’s argument would allow police to install cameras on private property without court oversight — subject only to budgetary limits and political pressure,” McCullagh writes.

The ugly reality is that legal precedents such as these serve to reinforce the constant erosion of our most essential rights. So long as judges continue to support the consistent undermining of our Constitutional rights, this disturbing trend will undoubtedly continue and will likely get significantly worse.

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Hurricane Sandy - Before and After

NY Skyline Before and After

New Jersey Before and After

A Parking Garage in NY's Financial District Before (above) After (below)

The Plaza Shops Before (above) After (below)

Ocean City MD Fishing Pier Before (above) After (below)

Carey Tunnel NY Before (above) After (below)

Tony's Pier Restaurant City Island NY Before (above) After (below)

New York City’s Westside Highway, near the USS Intrepid Before (above) After (below)

The HMS Bounty, a replica of the historic ship.
As it appeared in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”: Before (above) and As it sank off North Carolina’s Outer Banks: After (below)

Diet Soda with Aspartame, Made with Fluoridated Water is NOT Good.

This is an hilarious take on the dangers of Aspartame, as well as the Fluoride in your water, and all the other harmfuls we are subjected to.  Well done, and just in time; we needed a chuckling wake up call.

Ignorant, Abusive Cop Tases Diabetic Teen Suffering a Medical Emergency - Caught on Video

(NaturalNews) When they were first being introduced for public acceptance, as many readers will recall, tasers were billed as a law enforcement alternative to actually having to shoot threatening individuals with real firearms. Today; however, tasers are being abusively used by cops in all sorts of non-threatening situations, including recently against a diabetic teenager from Texas who crashed his vehicle during an unexpected hypoglycemic episode.

When 19-year-old Ricky Jones of Cleburne, Texas, collided with another vehicle while driving his car back on April 9, his blood sugar had been running exceptionally low, which put him into a state of extreme disorientation and confusion. Consequently, when a cop rolled up to question Jones following the accident, he was unable to give proper responses to the officer, who quickly became irritated at the young man.

As reported by CBS 11 News in Dallas, the ignorant cop proceeded to threaten the boy that if he did not get out of the car and produce a driver's license and registration forms, the officer would tase him, even though the boy was in no way threatening the officer. As caught on video, the cop immediately proceeded to tase the boy after threatening him, and dragged the boy out of his vehicle to tase him again.

Not long after, emergency crews arrived on the scene -- as a note, the cop should have known to call emergency crews himself from the very beginning -- and it was determined that the boy was diabetic, and had been suffering a serious medical emergency. After discovering the real reason for the boy's strange behavior, the cop can be heard callously saying, "I didn't know he was freakin' diabetic!"


Cops increasingly tasing non-threatening individuals who simply irritate them
Sadly, this recent incident in Texas is hardly an isolated one, as we have reported on numerous cases involving cops tasing non-threatening individuals over the past several years. These include the needless tasing of an eight-month pregnant woman back in June, as well as the tasing of another diabetic man who suffered a seizure back in 2008.

These and many other cases of abusive tasing are becoming the norm, as cops increasingly take the unauthorized liberty to tase individuals that they deem annoying, irritating, or simply non-compliant with their sometimes ridiculous and unlawful demands. In many cases, the individuals being tased are not a physical threat to the cops in any way, which is supposed to be the only legitimate reason why a cop should ever even use a taser in the first place.

UN has already declared tasers 'a form of torture that can kill'
To make matters worse, tasers are not merely innocuous stun devices that temporarily debilitate individuals -- in many cases, they can cause serious injury and even death. The United Nations (UN) Committee Against Torture actually declared back in 2007 that tasers are "a form of torture that can kill," a statement that is evidenced as true by the hundreds of people nationwide who have died in recent years as a result of being tased.

"Tasers are being normalized into everyday policing," wrote Paul Benedek for Green Left Weekly back in March. "They are not used in self defense, but to enforce compliance and even to torture police captives."

Cyclone Brings Heavy Rain, Displaces 150,000 in Southern India; 6 Dead in India, Sri Lanka

CHENNAI, India — A tropical storm weakened Thursday after slamming into southern India, bringing heavy rain and a storm surge and displacing 150,000 people. Six deaths have been reported in India and Sri Lanka.

Just before the storm made landfall Wednesday, an oil tanker with 37 crew ran aground off Chennai. One of its lifeboats capsized in the choppy waters, and one crewmember drowned, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

On Thursday, two helicopters searched in the Bay of Bengal for the four missing crewmembers, said coast guard officer Gurdip Singh, adding that 32 crewmembers were rescued from the tanker.

Andhra Pradesh state said two people died there when their homes collapsed due to heavy rain Wednesday night in Nellore and Chittoor districts, and PTI reported another death in Tamil Nadu state, a 46-year old man who slipped into the rough sea from a pier and drowned. Sri Lanka reported two deaths earlier from the cyclone.

The cyclone had maximum winds of 75 kph (45 mph) after landfall but had weakened to a tropical depression. A storm surge of up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) was forecast to flood low-lying coastal areas, the India Meteorological Department said.

Power supply was disrupted to parts of Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state, PTI said.

Heavy to very heavy rain expected, and fishermen were asked to stay at shore.

State authorities turned 282 schools into relief centers in Chennai and the city’s port halted cargo operations. Twenty-three ships were moved to safer areas.

About 150,000 people were moved to shelters in Nellore, district official B. Sridhar said.

In Sri Lanka, 4,627 people were displaced by flooding and 56 fled because of a landslide threat in the island’s central region. One woman died Tuesday after a tree branch fell on her while another person was killed in flooding, the nation’s Disaster Management Center said. Floods also damaged about 1,000 houses, it said.

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Without Subway, New York is Desperate for a Ride

Passengers crowd onto a bus on First Avenue.

NEW YORK — At 8:07 a.m. Wednesday, Adam Spatz, 42, was standing in a crowd at 94th Street and Broadway on Manhattan’s West Side when a southbound M104 bus appeared on the horizon, a sight that made him and everyone around him step forward, his chin lifting with anticipation.

A few yards away, plastic police tape blocked the stairwell leading to New York’s subway system — dark, flooded and silent since Hurricane Sandy ravaged the city.

 But here came that M104 bus, inching south on Broadway through traffic, crossing 96th Street, and the people at the bus stop moved forward as it approached, until they saw that every available inch of window was occupied by faces, shoulders, hands and arms.

And there went that bus.

“Ain’t even gonna stop,” Spatz said. He shook his head and walked back to his apartment.

If the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center and the Brooklyn Bridge are part of what defines New York’s majesty, the city’s 108-year-old subway system is part of what makes it function, more than 600 miles of tracks connecting Brooklyn to the Bronx and everything in between.

Anyone who wants to get anywhere — whether it’s Coney Island or Wall Street, Yankee Stadium or the Brooklyn House of Detention, grandma’s house or yoga class — rides the subway. Just last year, the system delivered 1.6 billion rides, an average of 5.3 million a day during the week, 3 million on Saturdays and 2.4 million on Sundays.

Waterlogged system

Hurricane Sandy halted all that, flooding the tubes between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Water rose to the ceiling at the South Ferry station at the southern end of Manhattan, across from the Statue of Liberty. And water poured into the station at 86th and Lexington. Even the stations that seemed dry, like the one at 96th and Broadway, were closed.

Limited subway service was to resume in a few pockets of the city Thursday, but on Wednesday, millions of New Yorkers had to find another way to get around.

And one of those ways was the M104 bus, which, like buses on dozens of other routes in the city, promised free rides to anyone who could climb aboard.

The crowd waiting at 94th Street and Broadway included John DeMeo, 53, an assets manager who struggled to remember the last time he took a bus, a ride that is considered inferior to walking by many an overly caffeinated New Yorker.

“Too slow,” he said. But today he needed to get to Midtown, about 50 blocks to the south, and another M104 approached.

He let that one go by because he didn’t want to push his way on. Another passed, also overstuffed.

The crowd around him thinned, then thickened with new arrivals, creating yet another ungainly formation.

Perhaps if there were a line, DeMeo thought. Maybe then he’d have a chance.

A line? Here in New York?

A Coach USA charter bus stopped. Through the window, dozens of vacant seats were visible. The door swung open.

DeMeo and the others around him stepped forward.

“Goldman Sachs! Goldman Sachs!” the driver shouted, apparently looking for investment bankers. A moment later, the door shut, and the driver took off.

At 9:13 a.m., more than an hour after arriving at the bus stop, DeMeo returned to his apartment.

Kate Rubin, 28, kept waiting, hands stuffed in the pockets of her blue coat.

Fourteen minutes later, she hadn’t moved.

An urban parade

A man in a sombrero walked by.

A man on a scooter rolled by.

Then a boy in a dinosaur costume.

“Oh, yeah,” Rubin said. “Halloween.”

A black car stopped. A woman leaned her head in, then turned and shouted, “I’m not paying $70 to get to Brooklyn!”

Rubin’s phone rang. “My e-mail isn’t even working,” she told the caller.

Taxi after taxi rolled by. Then one stopped. A seat was available. She slid in.

It was 9:56 a.m.

Six minutes later, here came another M104.

Sally Tondteaond, 65, tall and thin, had been waiting for one hour and 16 minutes.

She pushed her way on, her left hand gripping the metal rail on the left, shoes clinging to the bottom step, her face pressed into a woman’s corduroy coat.

The doors closed behind her, nudging her in the back.

“Ninety-second Street!” the driver announced.

“Guess I’ll be walking home,” said Janet Saines, 44, on her way to the office, standing on the second step, her nose almost touching the windshield, envisioning her return trip at the end of the day.

The woman standing next to her said: “I thought it would be easier if I got up early. But I didn’t get up.”

At 90th Street, a woman who had boarded two stops earlier squeezed through to get off. Her departing words: “Too hot!”

Eight New Yorkers were waiting to take her place.

At 86th Street, Irwin Gilbert, 55, offered his seat to Sally Tondteaond.

“The mayor made a big mistake when he allowed cars into the city,” Gilbert announced to no one in particular. “But I can’t say what they should do. I’m a nobody.”

To his right, a woman turned to another and said the bank for which she works had just announced thousands of layoffs.

Another woman said, “I’m leaving at 3 p.m. today, and I’m not doing this again.”

At 76th Street, a shaggy-haired man with a guitar on his lap talked into his phone.

“JFK International Airport,” he said.

“Phoenix, Arizona,” he said.

“5:35 p.m.,” he said.

“Oh my God,” he said.

Flight canceled, he had been told.

“Dear God.”

A stranger next to him, an older woman who said she was a psychoanalyst, offered consoling words. New York, she said, is as good a place as any to wait out a crisis.

“There’s so much to do,” she said.

Behind the wheel, the driver announced that the bus was arriving at 72nd Street, on the corner of which, Bob Bachner, 62, a housewares wholesaler, waited for a different line to take him to the East Side.

“Can you believe this?” he asked, a porkpie hat on his head, his eyes behind a pair of shades. New York was upside down, and here he was, waiting for the M5. He was sure one would arrive any time now.

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EU’s Jobless Rate Hits New High of 11.6%

LONDON — Unemployment in the 17-country eurozone hit a record high of 11.6 per cent in September, official figures showed Wednesday, a sign the economy is deteriorating as governments struggle to get a grip on their three-year debt crisis.

The rate reported by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, was up from an upwardly revised 11.5 per cent in August. In total, 18.49 million people were out of work in the eurozone in September, up 146,000 from the previous month, the biggest increase in three months.

While the eurozone’s unemployment rate has been rising steadily for the past year as the economy struggled with a financial crisis and government spending cuts, the United States has seen its equivalent rate fall to 7.8 per cent. The latest U.S. figures are due this Friday.

With the eurozone economy fading, most economists think unemployment will keep increasing over the coming months and that the deteriorating economic picture will soon spook investors again after a brief hiatus.

“Financial markets have calmed somewhat, but we expect that the deteriorating economy will soon enough lead to more crisis headlines,” said Tim Ohlenburg, senior economist at the Centre for Economics and Business Research in London.

Five countries in the eurozone are already in recession — Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus — and others are expected to join them soon.

The region as a whole is expected to be confirmed to be in recession when the first estimate of eurozone economic activity in the third quarter is published mid-November — a recession is officially confirmed after two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

“With surveys suggesting that firms are becoming more reluctant to hire, the eurozone unemployment rate looks set to rise further, placing more pressure on struggling households,” said Ben May, European economist at Capital Economics in London.

Recession and unemployment make it more difficult for the eurozone to deal with its debt problem — governments need to pay more benefits to the jobless and receive less tax revenue. That could push countries to take even more austerity measures, which in turn weighs on economic activity.

Once again, Spain held the ignominious position of having the highest unemployment rate in the eurozone, at 25.8 per cent. Greece may yet surpass that — its unemployment rate mushroomed to 25.1 per cent in July, the latest available figure, and is due to increase in the face of what many economists are calling an economic depression. The country is forecast to enter its sixth year of recession next year.

Both countries, which are at the heart of Europe’s three-year debt crisis, have youth unemployment above 50 per cent. That risks creating a lost generation of workers and is straining the countries’ social fabric. Extremist political groups in Greece and regional separatist parties in Spain have grown in popularity as the economy worsened.

Concern over the social impact of unemployment has also weakened governments and hobbled political decision-making.

In Greece, the three parties in the coalition government have tried for months to agree on an austerity package that is necessary for the release of bailout loans to prevent the country’s bankruptcy.

The lowest unemployment rate in the eurozone was Austria’s 4.4per cent. Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has a jobless rate of only 5.4 per cent.

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33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True

Most people can’t resist getting the details on the latest conspiracy theories, no matter how far-fetched they may seem. At the same time, many people quickly denounce any conspiracy theory as untrue … and sometimes as unpatriotic or just plain ridiculous. Lets not forget all of the thousands of conspiracies out of Wall Street like Bernie Madoff and many others to commit fraud and extortion, among many crimes of conspiracy. 

Conspiracy theory is a term that originally was a neutral descriptor for any claim of civil, criminal or political conspiracy. However, it has come almost exclusively to refer to any fringe theory which explains a historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning.

To conspire means “to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or to use such means to accomplish a lawful end.” The term “conspiracy theory” is frequently used by scholars and in popular culture to identify secret military, banking, or political actions aimed at stealing power, money, or freedom, from “the people”.

To many, conspiracy theories are just human nature. Not all people in this world are honest, hard working and forthcoming about their intentions. Certainly we can all agree on this. So how did the term “conspiracy theory” get grouped in with fiction, fantasy and folklore? Maybe that’s a conspiracy, just kidding. Or am I?

Skeptics are important in achieving an objective view of reality, however, skepticism is not the same as reinforcing the official storyline. In fact, a conspiracy theory can be argued as an alternative to the official or “mainstream” story of events. Therefore, when skeptics attempt to ridicule a conspiracy theory by using the official story as a means of proving the conspiracy wrong, in effect, they are just reinforcing the original “mainstream” view of history, and actually not being skeptical.

This is not skepticism, it is just a convenient way for the establishment view of things to be seen as the correct version, all the time, every time. In fact, it is common for “hit pieces” or “debunking articles” to pick extremely fringe and not very populated conspiracy theories. This in turn makes all conspiracies on a subject matter look crazy. Skeptics magazine and Popular Mechanics, among many others, did this with 9/11.

They referred to less than 10% of the many different conspiracy theories about 9/11 and picked the less popular ones, in fact, they picked the fringe, highly improbable points that only a few people make. This was used as the “final investigation” for looking into the conspiracy theories. Convenient, huh?

In fact, if one were to look into conspiracy theories, they will largely find that thinking about a conspiracy is associated with lunacy and paranoia. Some websites suggest it as an illness. It is also not surprising to see so many people on the internet writing about conspiracy theories in a condescending tone, usually with the words “kool-aid,” “crack pot,” or “nut job” in their articulation. This must be obvious to anyone that emotionally writing about such serious matter insults the reader more than the conspiracy theorist because there is no need to resort to this kind of behavior. It is employed often with an “expert” who will say something along the lines of, “for these conspiracies to be true, you would need hundreds if not thousands of people to be involved. It’s just not conceivable.”

I find it extremely odd that the assumption is on thousands of participants in a conspiracy. I, for one, find it hard to believe any conspiracy involving more than a handful of people but the fact remains that there have been conspiracies in our world, proven and not made up, that involved many hundreds of people. It’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of fact.

One more thing to consider, have you noticed that if the conspiracy is involving powerful interests with the ability to bribe, threaten or manipulate major institutions (like the mafia, big corporations or government) then don’t you find it odd when people use one of those as the “credible” counter-argument? What I mean is, if you are discussing a conspiracy about the mafia, and someone hands you a debunking article that was written by the mafia, it doesn’t seem like it would take rocket science to look at that with serious criticism and credibility. This is the case with many conspiracies. In fact, I am handed debunking pieces all the time written in many cases by the conspirators in question. Doesn’t this seem odd to anybody else but me?

While intelligent cynicism certainly can be healthy, though, some of the greatest discoveries of all time were initially received (often with great vitriol) as blasphemous conspiracy theories — think of the revelation that the earth was not the center of the universe, or that the world was not flat but actually round.

What follows are some of these most shocking modern conspiracy theories that turned out true after thorough investigation by our society. Some through congressional hearings, others through investigative journalism. Many of these, however, were just admitted to by those involved.  
These are just 33 of them, and I still had a long list of others to add. There are a total of 33 in this article. Many of these are listed with original and credible news clips on the matter, as well as documentaries.

Continue HERE:  All 33 "Conspiracy Theories" with Videos