Freedom

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Rose/Icke III: The Livestream | London Real

Screen Shot 2020-05-04 at 6.27.40 AMJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is the third and final interview between Brian Rose and David Icke. After the first and second interviews which he exposed the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity for the Global Power Structure, or cult as he calls it, to impose their decades long New World Order (NWO) agenda to destroy the sovereignty of nations. 

Their ultimate goal is to undermine freedom, destroy independent small businesses, reduce the human race to a starving population fighting each other for survival and impose a an absolute totalitarian control system which includes mandatory vaccines laced with microchips/nanobots. All this is run robotically with the rollout of 5G networks.

Immediately after the second interview, David Icke was banned from Facebook and YouTube for violating “community” standards (and daring to air a controversial perspective the Global Power Structure doesn’t want you to hear about).

You can believe Icke’s perspective or not, but it’s your sovereign right (i.e., human right) to be able to hear his perspective and decide for yourself.  For anyone knowledgable in his field of research, you would know Icke is speaking truth if the technocrats have to go to the extreme measures of squashing/censoring the message to stop his message from getting out to the uninformed.  Friends of Liberty, do listen and decide for yourself, but under no circumstances bury your head in the sand. This is the turning point of human civilization and our individual awareness and collective decisions will determine the fate of all humanity.

By David Rose & David Icke

The Broadcast They Don’t Want You To See… The Ideas They Don’t Want You To Hear…

On May 3, 2020 at 5pm UK time, David Icke is LIVE on the DIGITAL FREEDOM PLATFORM for the largest LIVESTREAM of a conversation in human history. This single broadcast could change the course of humanity.

If we get the information now, we can act on it, we can change course.

If We Are Silenced, It Could Be The End of Humanity As We Know It.

WE NEED YOU!

Based on the popularity of our previous Icke I and II interviews, we expect to have a MILLION PEOPLE ACCESSING THIS LIVE.

As a member of the London Real Army you can make a difference by sharing this link and sharing this video.

Be Brave. Stand Up. Fight For Your Freedom.

What Will You Tell Your Grandchildren You Did During The Removal Of Civil Rights During The Great Pandemic?

Did You Stay At Home And Did What You Were Told? Or Did You Fight For Your Freedom Of Speech?

Join Us And Let’s Change The World.

WE WILL NOT BE CENSORED.
WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED.
WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED.

JOIN THE RESISTANCE.
JOIN LONDON REAL.

Source: London Real

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Opposition to Decoupling From China Misses the Problem of 5G | The Epoch Times

FILE PHOTO: A 3D printed Huawei logo is placed on glass above displayed US flag in this illustrationJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: After reading this expose’ I realized why the race for 5G dominance is also a race for which political system will prevail – capitalism or communism. China has taken the lead in 5G and already dominates the marketplace. Unless the USA steps up along with its telecommunications partners and has the ability to compete in a free market with China, it will lose the battle for freedom as well. This does not imply that I wholeheartedly support 5G especially with regards to the untested health and safety issues. Already we know that millimeter radiation damages human health, but the industry refuses to study or mitigate these. It’s a grand experiment which has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths which were falsely attributed to COVID-19.

By Bonnie Evans

As calls to decouple U.S. industries from dependency on manufacturing in China are growing, President Donald Trump has helped prepare the ground for a shift from China by taking a more skeptical approach to relations with the regime in Beijing than his predecessors.

While globalists are pushing back against the efforts to decouple, the key telecommunications technology of 5G shows the limitations of their approach, according to one expert.

Opposing Views

The argument for protecting the deeply intertwined U.S.–China economic relationship is widely supported in some circles.

Last December, former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who served the George W. Bush administration as U.S. trade representative, asked a gathering of the U.S.–China Business Council, “Are you ready for this?”

“The 20th century painted a shocking picture of industrial age destruction; do not assume that the cyber era of the 21st century is immune to crack-ups or catastrophes of equal or even greater scale,” Zoellick said.

“You need to decide whether you think the United States can still cooperate with China to mutual benefit while managing differences, and if so, how.”

The Financial Times said that Zoellick’s words “captured the fears—particularly within parts of Washington’s economic and foreign policy establishment—that U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war against Beijing has paved the way for an irreversible ‘decoupling’ of the world’s two largest economies.”

Zoellick was responsible for completing the negotiations that brought China into the World Trade Organization.

Zoellick’s views are echoed by other trade and China specialists.

Harry G. Broadman, an economist who has worked in key U.S. government, international organization, private sector, and academic roles during his 30-plus-year career, wrote in Forbes in September 2019 that decoupling from China potentially presents “worldwide negative spillover impacts.”

Of those consequences, Broadman suggests, “technological bifurcation, which could fundamentally jeopardize harnessing global benefits from advances in science and technology,” is one of the riskiest aspects of taking the United States out of China.

In plain English, Broadman’s argument is that without globalization, which is largely underpinned by the U.S.–China relationship, technologies go their own way, developing standards and specifications for the regions in which they emerge, rather than under a globalized standard common throughout the world.

5G Domination the Danger

“He’s mistaken,” Robert Spalding said, referring to Broadman’s views on technological bifurcation. Spalding is a retired Air Force brigadier general and architect of the U.S. National Security Strategy, which named China as an adversary. He is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, and author of the recent book “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept.”

The real danger, Spalding told The Epoch Times in an extensive interview, is in the ongoing struggle for dominance in fifth-generation—5G—mobile technology and standards that are already beginning to change how data is collected and used around the world.

“The U.S. was the first to develop the smartphone in 4G,” Spalding said. As a result, “we dominate the information market.”

But as the world moves into 5G, the risks are greater if the “concept of open data” and “open data markets” of those 4G networks are maintained. In Europe, the open data concept has already “created concern for privacy protection.”

In China, however, open data markets create a global opportunity.

“In the hands of China,” Spalding said, open data “lets the state take hold of power that Google and Amazon have.”

The “state” in China is led and run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“The ability of these companies to pinpoint your location and the things you’re doing and buying is incredibly powerful and counter to privacy concerns and counter to the principles of our liberal democracies,” Spalding said.

Spalding pointed out that “as Android and Apple become less of dominant players in 5G, now Tencent and Alibaba and DJI and Hikvision can begin to dominate that data space. So we move from a world centered on the U.S. to one centralized on Baidu and Tencent.”

All five companies are Chinese technology companies with ties to the CCP. Alibaba and Tencent generally rank in the top 10 internet companies in the world by market capitalization.

“That’s why he’s mistaken [about the problem of technological bifurcation]. It’s positive if we move to a data system that is focused on privacy and security and sovereignty and deploying secure 5G,” Spalding said.

Referring to Broadman, Spalding said that “what he’s advocating is that China dominate the technological space.”

China Sets Standards

Already, Spalding said, 3GPP, the umbrella body under which the key telecommunications standards organizations in the world operate and coordinate, is heavily dominated by China.

Since American network equipment manufacturers “are not expected to survive,” that leaves only four companies in the world that will make the networking equipment for the 5G future.

Those companies are Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and China’s Huawei—all subject to the standards that are being so heavily influenced by Chinese technical specifications.

Functionally, therefore, Spalding points out that even though Ericsson and Nokia are Swedish and Finnish respectively, and Samsung is South Korean, they end up building the same system as Huawei.

“Essentially,” Spalding said, “everybody is building a Chinese network based on open data, not on a secure network. That’s why he’s incorrect. His theory promotes China,” Spalding said.

This means, Spalding said, that China’s “acquisition of intelligence” and “ability to influence societies” is greatly enhanced both in China and abroad, including in the United States.

Statistics from the Institute of Electronics and Electronic Engineers support Spalding’s claim.

In a March 17 post titled “Strategy Analytics: Huawei 1st among top 5 contributors to 3GPP 5G specs,” Alan Weissberger reports that “even though there are more than 600 member companies participating in 3GPP, their 5G specification process is actually led by only a few leading telecom companies. … New research from Strategy Analytics … finds that 13 companies contributed more than 78% 5G related papers and led 77% of the 5G related Work Items and Study Items.”

Of those 13, the top five are, in order, Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm, and China Mobile.

Free Versus Centrally Resourced Trade

“By allowing China to be in the global trading system, you’re actually undermining the foundational premises” of that system, Spalding said. That global trading system has “a market-based approach to both capital allocation and trade.”

“China is not a market-based economy,” Spalding said. China, Spalding has said earlier, is not “a centrally planned economy, but it is centrally resourced.”

“When the state is providing resources and capital to a company, that’s not a market-based solution,” he said.

“Prices are set by China, not by the market.

“If you really want to have a free trading system … then China can’t be a part of it because they don’t believe in it.”

Source: The Epoch Times

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AG Barr Speaks Out on Lockdowns: “We Are Killing the Patient” | Trending Politics

5e9f7445cfcbc47809910352_f4d658e3c0_bBy Collin Rugg

While joining conservative host Hugh Hewitt on his radio show on Tuesday, Attorney General Bill Barr spoke out on the coronavirus lockdowns here in the United States, stating that the stay at home orders are beginning to do more damage than the virus itself.

Barr explained that the lockdown decision was initially a good move to slow the virus however he feels that it is starting to go for too long.

“These are unprecedented burdens on civil liberties right now. You know, the idea that you have to stay in your house is disturbingly close to house arrest,” Barr said. “I’m not saying it wasn’t justified. I’m not saying in some places it might still be justified. But it’s very onerous, as is shutting down your livelihood.”

The Attorney General continued by comparing the coronavirus shutdowns to chemotherapy treatments.

“Your first thing is to drive [the cancer] back to a more manageable state, and that’s what we’re doing and have done,” the attorney general stated. “The question is, you can’t just keep on feeding the patient chemotherapy and say ‘well, we’re killing the cancer,’ because we’re getting to the point where we’re killing the patient.”

Check out what the Daily Wire reported:

Nearly 22 million people have applied for unemployment benefits in the past month, a rough estimate of the number of people that have either lost their jobs or been furloughed since states began implementing strict stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The Department of Labor reported the latest claims numbers on Thursday, and the number of jobs lost has likely continued to climb steeply since.

Protests have broken out across several states such as Michigan, North Carolina, and Ohio of residents demanding that state governors loosen stringent regulations that are forcing many businesses to stay closed.

The pain of many businesses has been compounded since the Paycheck Protection Program, a federal relief fund meant to float businesses through the pandemic, went dry last week. Democrats in Washington have delayed a fresh cash infusion to the program to secure more funding for state and local governments. A bill is expected to pass the Senate on Tuesday.

Nearly 805,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus in the United States, and roughly 44,000 deaths have been attributed to the virus by Tuesday afternoon. New York, the state hardest hit by the pandemic, accounts for nearly half of total U.S. deaths with about 20,000.

A handful of states are preparing to relax emergency restriction in the coming days and will allow many people to begin working, albeit with some social distancing rules for the foreseeable future. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia is expected to be one of the first to begin opening his state, announcing on Monday that he would lift his stay-at-home order by the end of the week.

Source: Trending Politics

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13th (Film) | YouTube

Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is a great documentary on “institutionalized racism” which has been embedded in the American prison system since the “slaves” were freed by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

Combining archival footage with testimony from activists and scholars, director Ava DuVernay’s examination of the U.S. prison system looks at how the country’s history of racial inequality drives the high rate of incarceration in America. This piercing, Oscar-nominated film won Best Documentary at the Emmys, the BAFTAs and the NAACP Image Awards.

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Trump Administration Opposes Bill Gates’ Vaccine Tracking System on ‘Personal Liberty’ Grounds | Big League Politics

pjimage-2020-04-09T230720.714-1200x630By Shane Trejo

The Trump administration has come out against a proposed digital tracking system that could tell authorities about an individual’s vaccination history.

The Orwellian measure has been proposed by technocratic oligarch Bill Gates, who is attempting to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to inch closer toward mandatory vaccinations.

“Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it,” Gates said during an “Ask Me Anything” appearance on Reddit about the coronavirus.

Attorney General Bill Barr is skeptical of Gates’ idea to tag people with these mark-of-the-beast implants. He said he is concerned about “the tracking of people and so forth, generally, especially going forward over a long period of time.” Barr also said that he is “very concerned about the slippery slope in terms of continuing encroachments on personal liberty.”

However, Barr said he did feel like “appropriate, reasonable steps are fine.” This leaves the door open for some sort of government action in order to enforce vaccine compliance.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation bankrolled research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that advocated essentially tattooing vaccine data “directly into the skin” of children.

“Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish,” a Dec. 2019 Scientific American article wrote about Gates’ scheme.

Gates has been aggressively propagandizing on behalf of vaccines throughout the coronavirus pandemic. He has made it clear that he wants countless shots administered to supposedly stop the spread of coronavirus.

“Our foundation works a lot on diagnostics and vaccines,” Gates said during a recent interview with CBS News. He added that vaccine makers are the only entities “that can really get things back on track where we’re not worried about large public gatherings.”

Gates said that “there’s a lot of dialogue between our foundation experts and the government” about how to get the world back to normal using his vaccines.

“Which activities, like schools, have such benefit and can be done in a way that the risk of transmission is very low? And which activities, like mass gatherings, may be – in a certain sense – more optional? And so until you’re widely vaccinated, those may not come back at all,” he said.

This all comes back to Gates’ primary goal with his foundation and its funding: depopulation.

“Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that [the population] by perhaps 10 or 15 percent,” he said in a 2010 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference.

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Liberty: The Last Casualty of the Pandemic | The Epoch Times

electoral-college-founding-documents-webJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Finally, somebody’s writing about the overreaching power of the federal, state and local governments during this COVID-19 crisis. After 911 the USA Patriot Act was passed and never repealed. It was just up for renewal a few weeks ago. Will there ever be a return to this new normal?

By Dustin Bass

In December, the outbreak in the City of Wuhan, located in China’s Hubei province, was officially detected. On Jan. 31, Health and Human Services declared a public health emergency. On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic. On March 13, President Trump declared a national emergency.

In the span of that following week, gatherings of 250 or more were discouraged and then banned by numerous states. That number immediately dropped to 50, and now it has dropped to 10. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, banned all gatherings for the largest state in the Union. It was unprecedented. No matter. Eleven other states quickly followed suit. More are to follow, as 17 other states have banned gatherings of 10 or more.

The rapidly escalated reactions prove that the threat to our national health is very high. The threat to our individual freedoms? Higher. From the Declaration of Independence to the Amendments, recent government action flies directly in the face of the nation’s founding documents.

The Declaration of Independence

The founding document of our nation stated that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The biological threat against the former has ushered in an existential threat to the latter two. One may argue that without the first, the other two cannot exist. True. But without the latter two, what is the point of the first?

Unless Americans merely perceive this moment in our history as “light and transient,” then there should be no need to clamor. Americans have grown accustomed to the subtle threats to our freedoms since John Adams and the Fifth Congress; and as long as citizens are still free to determine the course of the country every two, four, or six years, then these “evils are sufferable.”

This is unless, of course, we perceive those threats to be a “long train of abuses and usurpations.” The federal government has rarely felt a restriction on its massive powers, like the constant wars in far off places, spying on citizens, dislodging citizens without habeas corpus, or creating unelected government agencies armed with the three branches of power.

State governments now have become fearless in exercising their might by forcing people into their homes under the threat of penalty of law. It is for this reason the Founding Fathers created our extended republic so instead of overthrowing a king, voters would be able to “throw off such government” every two, four, or six years. Citizens need not look solely at the federal government, but at their local and state governments as well.

The Constitution of the United States of America

There are 50 States and 50 Constitutions, which all fall under the supreme law of the land: the Constitution of the United States of America. Our national Constitution was ordained and established to provide six services to the People. One of those is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

With state governments seamlessly conducting the aforementioned gathering bans; the shutting down of non-essential businesses in 18 states, along with three other states shutting down non-essential retail; the mandatory quarantines of 13 states; and the forced closure of bars and restaurants, except for take-out and delivery, in nearly every state in the Union, it may prove difficult for the blessings of liberty to reach our posterity.

In a state of national emergency and pandemic, however, there are no solutions—there are only trade-offs. The trade-off for a dramatically decreased risk of contracting the coronavirus and having it spread further is the surrender of several rights listed in the Constitution.

The Amendments

The right that has been most obviously violated is “the right to peacefully assemble.” Of course that ends with “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Some may argue that people are not conducting a redress of grievances against the government; therefore, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. But a redress of grievances is not truly possible without the threat of assembly. Petitions on Change.org are easy ways to obtain signatures, but they don’t assume the power of a physical redress.

This violation of the right to assembly causes a direct violation of the free exercise of religion. Churches have been forced to close, and groups have been dispelled throughout the nation due to their size. Congregating is the most common form of Americans’ ability to exercise their religion; it’s the tradition of religious practitioners going back millennia. In fact, as a majority of religious people in the United States practice Christianity, Hebrews 10:25 states to not forsake assembling together.

Some government officials have taken the opportunity to target religious groups. In Indiana, Allen County Health Commissioner Dr. Deborah McMahan issued a recommendation against gatherings of more than 10, but prohibited churches from gathering together, even in non-church venues. The state’s attorney general, Curtis Hill, contested McMahan’s order as “unconstitutional religious discrimination.” The order was rescinded.

In Houston, bars and restaurants are under threat of a $1,000 fine or 180 days in jail for not maintaining social distancing in their place of business. This penalty is on par with a first-time drug offense. Houston’s Harris County, one of the nation’s largest counties, has even gone so far as to create a hotline for people to report businesses not in compliance.

In this economic crisis, business owners have more to worry about than the precise spacing between customers, which has created a possible violation of the Fourth Amendment of being secure in their person.

Comparable to the case in Indiana, businesses are not treated equally, as places such as WalMart, Target, and grocery chains are free of these threats. Considering the dire economic situation the country is in, this could qualify as a violation of the Eighth Amendment, as a $1,000 fine in many cases would be excessive. These two examples definitely do not exemplify equal protection, a violation of the 14th Amendment.

The nation, in this time of crisis, does feel on fire. Alarmingly, our founding documents are being used to put out the flames. When this crisis passes, and it will as all do, the search will inevitably begin for what remains among the ashes.

Dustin Bass is the co-founder of The Sons of History, a YouTube seriesand weekly podcast about all things history. He is a former-journalist-turned-entrepreneur. He is also an author.

Source: The Epoch Times

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Italians Take to the Streets to Protest New Mandatory Vaccination Law | Vaccine Impact

Vaccine-protests-ItalyBrian Shilhavy
Health Impact News Editor

Readers from Italy have been contacting Health Impact News this past week (June, 2017), asking us to cover the massive demonstrations happening throughout Italy to protest a new mandatory vaccine law. This news has been censored from the U.S. corporate media.

Francesca Alesse, who worked with the VAXXED film team to get the film shown in Italy last year, writes:

In an unprecedented way, the decree-law proposed by the Minister of Health has been signed by the sitting Italian president Sergio Mattarella. Only four vaccines were mandatory in Italy, now that number triples to 12.

No other decree-law has moved so fast in the Italian legislative system, the reasons of such hurry are incomprehensible considering that the Istituto Superiore Di Sanità (the local version of the CDC) has declared that contrary to what stated in the decree itself there is no objective urgency. There are no epidemics, the number of cases of measles or meningitis in the current year have been substantially lower than the previous year.

Thousands of parents have protested the new law this past June 3rd,  protests and marches have taken place in 21 Italian cities spread across the nation. A national protest is scheduled for this Sunday June 11th.

The translated full text of the decree-law is found here.

Florence Protest

The new law apparently has severe consequences for parents who fail to comply, including the possibility of having their children taken away from them. In addition to public outcry, there appears to be strong political opposition to the law as well.

Elisabetta Bressan, an Italian commenting on Facebook writes:

Protests are going to increase here, as our Government has announced…  a law to introduce 12 mandatory vaccines. The law…. was announced by our Health Ministry to be as follows: 12 mandatory vaccination needed to have access to pre-school system (age 0-6): no vaccination, no enrollment, no exceptions; for mandatory school (age 0-16) if kids were not vaccinated parents should pay a penalty between 500€ and 7.500€ per year, if you cannot afford it, you’ll be refer to Jouvanile Court, that could suspend your parents rights to get your children vaccinated. A national protest is envisaged in Rome on June 11.

This will start within the next school year (September 2017); it has been calculated that more then 800,000 kids will need to receive a massive vaccination in a very little time.

As you know, Italy had been chosen in 2014 as leading Country for the WHO world vaccination campaign co-financed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, therefore what happen here can affect also other countries.

In other comments posted on Facebook, Elisabetta Bressan suggests that the new mandatory vaccine law has strong financial connections to the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, which could benefit from over 1 billion euros invested in Italy over the next four years. She writes:

This is the press conference of Health Minister, Ms. Lorenzin explaining the DL https://www.facebook.com/mauriziolupi.it/videos/10155541295653694/

At the opening of the conference, all guests are presented to the press, including Dr. Ranieri Guerra, presented as Director General of Health Prevention of the Ministry of Health. (Man sitting on Ms. Lorenzin right)

His curriculum vitae is regularly published in the Government’s website:
http://www.salute.gov.it/…/CV…/CV_pubblicazioni_Guerra_n.pdf at page 6 you can see he is a member of Glaxo Smith-Kline Foundation board.

On the Foundation website http://www.fsk.it/la-fondazione/storia-della-fondazione/ you are provided with additional information:

In 1987, it was recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the ‘Center for Collaboration in the Training of Health Personnel’ and in 1997 as a ‘Hospitality Management Collaboration Center’ in Italy.

The Fsk.it website belongs To Smith Kline Foundation which is maintained thanks to the non-binding annual liberal loan of the founding partner GLAXOSMITHKLINE SpA, as well as the incomes of its own projects.

The members of the Board of Directors, as indicated here, are nominated by the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of University and Research, the Ministry of the Economy, ISS, the State State Conference and GlaxoSmithKline SpA and they approve the FSK Activity Plan annually.

The members of the Board of Directors (including Mr. Ranieri Guerra) are appointed, among others, by:
– Ministry of Health, represented in the press conference by Minister Beatrice Lorenzin
– ISS,
– Higher Institute of Health, present in the person of Dr. Walter Ricciardi,
– the same GlaxoSmithKline S.p.A. Vaccines and drugs, Glaxo bets 1 billion on Italy
http://www.sanita24.ilsole24ore.com/…/vaccini-e-farmaci-gla…

Here we talk about an investment of 1 billion euros in Italy for the next 4 years, including 2016 and the years relating to the new National Vaccine Plan 2017/2019 so promoted by the Ministry of Health.

Source: Vaccine Impact

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California’s shutdown orders are totally unconstitutional | WND

FreedomJohnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: Libertarians, as you can see from the Foundation for Economic Education’s annual freedom ranking of the fifty U.S. states, California ranks near the bottom with Hawaii and New York. Perhaps this correlates with the draconian lockdown orders coming from each of these states during the COVID-19 crisis. 

By Jim Breslo

President Donald Trump is rightly talking about when we can reopen the country for business, noting that we cannot allow the cure to become worse than the disease. However, Trump does not have the keys to the shop. It is the country’s governors and mayors. Thus far they have not been expressing the same sentiment. If they do not loosen their shutdown orders within a reasonable time, we may have to turn to the courts. It turns out that many, if not all, of these orders would likely be struck down as unconstitutional.

The federal government thus far has only issued “guidelines,” not enforceable orders. Many states and cities, however, have issued enforceable orders whereby violation subjects one to fines or imprisonment.

Mark Meuser is a constitutional law attorney and former Republican nominee for California secretary of state. He reported this week on my Hidden Truth Show podcastthat the California Constitution does not permit state officials to order every resident, regardless of their individual health condition, to “self-quarantine” or “shelter in place.”

Article I of the California Constitution reads: “All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.” Most state constitutions contain similar language.

Neither the governor nor the mayors have the authority to suspend the state constitution, regardless of the emergency. According to Meuser, state officials may declare a state of emergency, and may quarantine individuals known to have the virus or known to have been in contact with those who had the virus pursuant to the state’s health and safety laws. But a sweeping ban prohibiting people from leaving their homes, according to Meuser, is a clear overreach. It arguably violates numerous parts of Article I, such as Californians’ “inalienable right” to be “free and independent,” enjoy “life” and “liberty,” to “acquire, possess, and protect property,” and pursue “happiness.”

California’s Appellate Court ruled on a case brought soon after the time of the Spanish Flu, stating, “A mere suspicion [that someone is infected], unsupported by facts giving rise to reasonable or probable cause, will not justify depriving a person of his liberty under an order of quarantine.” [Ex parte Arata (App. 2 Dist. 1921) 52 Cal.App. 380, 198 P. 814.]

Granted, the case involved imposing a quarantine on a single individual, not on the entire populace. But, think of it this way: If state or local officials required that just you stay home, even though you do not have the flu and have not been in contact with someone known to have the flu, your reaction would likely be, “You can’t do that!” Well, the directive is no more constitutional if it applies to everyone like you. It may seem more “fair,” and not violate the equal protection clause, but it would still equally violate individual liberty. A government violation of individual constitutional rights does not become less violative simply by applying it to more people.

Meuser argues in the interview that the orders are also a clear violation of the constitutional right to “protect property” since Californians are being prevented from tending to their property unless it happens to be deemed “essential.” If a Californian cannot visit, let alone operate, one’s business, it cannot be protected.

Mayor Eric Garcetti’s order requires “all residents of the City of Los Angeles to stay inside their residences.” The order expressly prohibits, “Travel to or from a vacation home outside the City.” In other words, Angelenos are prohibited from going to their own garage, getting in their own car and driving it to their own vacation home. Such conduct, according to the order, is punishable by “fine or imprisonment.”

The orders may also violate the United States Constitution. The First Amendment prohibits both state and federal government from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion or “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” Clearly, the orders prevent people from engaging in religious gatherings or joining in any group activity. Since the bans are not narrowly tailored to those with the virus or known to have been subjected to it, they likely violate the First Amendment. Further, the orders violate at least the intent of the Fifth Amendment, which provides, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Shutting down businesses for the public good arguably requires the state to provide compensation to those businesses.

It is certainly up for debate whether shutdown orders in California, New York and other states is the smart thing to do. It seems that about half of people support them, and half do not. They are wreaking economic havoc on businesses and employees, while at the same time no doubt slowing the spread of the virus. Only with time will we be able to know whether the trade-off was worth it. We make similar trade-offs between freedom and health all the time. The most obvious example being the choice to allow people to drive automobiles despite the fact that they cause about 40,000 deaths every year in the U.S. Importantly, the coronavirus has killed far less than that worldwide, yet we are restricting people to their homes, a far more restrictive measure than prohibiting people from driving.

But whether the trade-off is smart or not, it is irrelevant to the question of whether it is constitutional. The orders clearly are not. State and federal constitutions provide a vital backstop to protect the people against government overreach, which often comes at times of crisis. We saw this happen after 9/11. It is human nature to panic and to overreact out of fear. The Constitution, which we all swear an oath to by nature of being citizens, stands on guard to protect us against such overreach in times like this. This is not the time to abandon it.

Source: WND

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Edward Snowden says COVID-19 could give governments invasive new data-collection powers that could last long after the pandemic | Business Insider

5e7de83b487c224a1c2a56b7Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the breadth of spying at the US’s National Security Agency, has warned that an uptick in surveillance amid the coronavirus crisis could lead to long-lasting effects on civil liberties.

During a video-conference interview for the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival, Snowden said that, theoretically, new powers introduced by states to combat the coronavirus outbreak could remain in place after the crisis has subsided.

Fear of the virus and its spread could mean governments “send an order to every fitness tracker that can get something like pulse or heart rate” and demand access to that data, Snowden said.

“Five years later the coronavirus is gone, this data’s still available to them — they start looking for new things,” Snowden said. “They already know what you’re looking at on the internet, they already know where your phone is moving, now they know what your heart rate is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to them?”

While no reports appear to have surfaced so far of states demanding access to health data from wearables like the Apple Watch, many countries are fast introducing new methods of surveillance to better understand and curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Numerous European countries, including Italy, the UK, and Germany, have struck deals with telecoms companies to use anonymous aggregated data to create virtual heat maps of people’s movements.

Israel granted its spy services emergency powers to hack citizens’ phones without a warrant. South Korea has been sending text alertsto warn people when they may have been in contact with a coronavirus patient, including personal details like age and gender. Singapore is using a smartphone app to monitor the spread of the coronavirus by tracking people who may have been exposed.

In Poland, citizens under quarantine have to download a government app that mandates they respond to periodic requests for selfies. Taiwan has introduced an “electronic fence” system that alerts the police if quarantined patients move outside their homes.

Source: Business Insider