The American Criminal Justice System is Dead

by Humphrey

A profoundly troubling study published by the University of Texas School of Law concludes that the American criminal justice system is dead in everything but name. The paper, entitled ?Waiving the Criminal Justice System,? describes how the adversarial process through which the state must prove the guilt of a defendant has been supplanted with a system of administrative law in which prosecutors extract plea bargains in exchange for relatively lenient sentences. This is why federal prosecutors win more than ninety percent of their cases through plea bargains, rather than jury trials.

This is a lamentable state of affairs, and to many observers a familiar story. This study, however, breaks new ground by showing that prosecutors at both the state and federal levels require defendants to waive?? due process rights that are vital for post-conviction appeals ? such as the right to effective assistance of counsel, and the right to obtain exculpatory evidence that can be used to overturn a conviction or at least obtain a new trial.

In the American tradition, the purpose of a trial was to establish the truth of an accusation against a defendant who is presumed to be innocent. The purpose of our post-constitutional criminal system is to ratify the defendant's guilt, irrespective of the facts.

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in exchange for relatively lenient sentences.?

They often have little evidence of a minor BS "crime" so they threaten to add "conspiracy" money laundering, terrorism, and other BS and threaten 30 years, unless they plead guilty and serve two years It an extortion business.

Agree they trump up the charges and add two or three extra charges and there you are facing 20 years in jail if the jury goes against you. Out of fear you accept the maximum sentence for the minor charge that they offer you a plea bargain on. You end up with the maximum sentence for a minor crime. The whole system is been on a decline for the last 100 years now it is finally dead. Now we have disorderly police who arrest people for made up offenses like a parent speaking out against a school for giving a child sexually explicit material in a English class.

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There Already Is A Government Health Care System In America And It Is The Medical Version Of Hell

by Michael Snyder

What would happen if the entire health care system in the United States was run by the federal government?? Would such a system be better or worse than what we have today?? To get an answer to these questions, all we have to do is take a look at what is already happening.? The truth is that there already is a government health care system in America and it is the medical version of hell.? You are about to read about the horrifying state of health care being provided by the federal government at VA hospitals and on Indian reservations around the country.? Injured military veterans and those that live on Indian reservations are some of the most vulnerable members of our society, and the government is doing an absolutely nightmarish job of taking care of them.

Theoretically, the government should be able to provide at least a basic level of care for these people, but as you will see this is simply not happening.

Why?

The bottom line is that the federal government is completely and utterly incompetent.? This has been demonstrated once again in recent months by the launch of Obamacare.? What a train wreck that has been.

But we shouldn?t be surprised.? When it comes to health care, the U.S. government can?t seem to get anything right.

Most Americans don?t realize this, but government-run health care for our military veterans is a complete and total joke.? In some instances, it can take critically injured military veterans?more than a year to see a doctor?

CJ Jackson, a Purple Heart recipient and 101st Airborne medic, was severely wounded during a battle in Afghanistan when an enemy rocket-propelled grenade hit a wall a couple of feet from him, sending debris into his arm and leg. He said he waited over a year to see a doctor at the Jackson VA despite being considered critically injured.

And once a vet is finally able to see a doctor and have surgery scheduled, those surgeries are often conducted in facilities that are beyond disgusting.? The following is what one orthopedic surgeon recently told CNBC?

?Occasionally we?d find pieces of bone? on equipment, he told CNBC. ?What it really shows is that no one is really taking the time or care to clean the instruments.?

His story was backed up by Dr. Phyllis Hollenbeck, who still works at the hospital. She testified on Sept. 9 about problems at the Jackson center. ?Essentially everything that happens in primary care at the Jackson VA can be included under the umbrella of being unethical, illegal, heartbreaking, and life threatening for the veterans, and everything in the care of the veterans starts in primary care.?

Of course this is not the first investigation that discovered these kinds of conditions at VA hospitals.? A few years ago, ABC News also conducted an investigation of conditions at VA facilities across the United States.? What ABC News discovered was absolutely staggering.? The following are just a few of the things that they found during the course of their investigation...

*Bathrooms filthy with what appeared to be human excrement

*Dirty linens from some patients mixed in with clean supplies

*Examining tables that had dried blood and medications still on them

*Equipment used to sterilize surgical instruments that had broken down

*Some patients that were begging for food and water

*Vets neglected so badly that they had developed horrific bedsores and dangerous infections

Is this how the federal government should be treating the men and women that have shed blood fighting for our country?

Unfortunately, it appears that the mistreatment of our military veterans has gotten even worse since Barack Obama took power.? For much more on all of this, please see my previous article entitled ?25 Signs That Military Veterans Are Being Treated Like Absolute Trash Under The Obama Administration?.

The funny thing is that many of the people that run these VA facilities are greatly rewarded for their ?hard work?.? For example,?CNBC discovered that those running the VA facility in Jackson, Mississippi described above are receiving huge bonuses?

The director of the Jackson VA, Joe Battle, received a $6,500 bonus last year on top of his $165,000 salary, and Rica Lewis-Payton, the network director of the South Central Health Care Network, which includes Jackson, got almost $36,000 in bonuses last year, on top of her $180,000 salary.

Are you disgusted yet?

You should be.

And we see the exact same thing happening in government-run health care facilities on Indian reservations.

By treaty, the U.S. government is required to provide health care on Indian reservations.? But the level of health care being provided is of extremely low quality and the programs are very underfunded.

In fact, things are so bad that the following expression is very commonly heard on Indian reservations across America?

?Don't get sick after June?.

Why would they say that?

Well, because in the fall and winter the waits to see a doctor and the rationing of care get particularly bad.? If you get seriously ill, you might end up dying before you ever get the care that you need.

Posted below is a?video news report featuring Judge Andrew Napolitano about the horrific state of government-run health care on Indian reservations?

In light of all of this, should we have more government interference in the health care system or less?

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FBI begins installation of $1 billion face recognition system across America

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by RT

Birthmarks, be damned: the FBI has officially started rolling out a state-of-the-art face recognition project that will assist in their effort to accumulate and archive information about each and every American at a cost of a billion dollars.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reached a milestone in the development of their Next Generation Identification (NGI) program and is now implementing the intelligence database in unidentified locales across the country, New Scientist reports in an article this week. The FBI first outlined the project back in 2005, explaining to the Justice Department in an August 2006 document (.pdf) that their new system will eventually serve as an upgrade to the current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) that keeps track of citizens with criminal records across America .

"The NGI Program is a compilation of initiatives that will either improve or expand existing biometric identification services," its administrator explained to the Department of Justice at the time, adding that? the project, "will accommodate increased information processing and sharing demands in support of anti-terrorism."

"The NGI Program Office mission is to reduce terrorist and criminal activities by improving and expanding biometric identification and criminal history information services through research, evaluation and implementation of advanced technology within the IAFIS environment."

The agency insists, "As a result of the NGI initiatives, the FBI will be able to provide services to enhance interoperability between stakeholders at all levels of government, including local, state, federal, and international partners." In doing as such, though, the government is now going ahead with linking a database of images and personally identifiable information of anyone in their records with departments around the world thanks to technology that makes fingerprint tracking seem like kids' stuff.

According to their 2006 report, the NGI program utilizes "specialized requirements in the Latent Services, Facial Recognition and Multi-modal Biometrics areas" that "will allow the FnewBI to establish a terrorist fingerprint identification system that is compatible with other systems; increase the accessibility and number of the IAFIS terrorist fingerprint records; and provide latent palm print search capabilities."

Is that just all, though? During a 2010 presentation (.pdf) made by the FBI's Biometric Center of Intelligence, the agency identified why facial recognition technology needs to be embraced. Specifically, the FBI said that the technology could be used for "Identifying subjects in public datasets," as well as "conducting automated surveillance at lookout locations" and "tracking subject movements," meaning NGI is more than just a database of mug shots mixed up with fingerprints -- the FBI has admitted that this their intent with the technology surpasses just searching for criminals but includes spectacular surveillance capabilities. Together, it's a system unheard of outside of science fiction.

New Scientist reports that a 2010 study found technology used by NGI to be accurate in picking out suspects from a pool of 1.6 million mug shots 92 percent of the time. The system was tested on a trial basis in the state of Michigan earlier this year, and has already been cleared for pilot runs in Washington, Florida and North Carolina. Now according to this week's New Scientist report, the full rollout of the program has begun and the FBI expects its intelligence infrastructure to be in place across the United States by 2014.

In 2008, the FBI announced that it awarded Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, one of the Defense Department's most favored contractors, with the authorization to design, develop, test and deploy the NGI System. Thomas E. Bush III, the former FBI agent who helped develop the NGI's system requirements, tells NextGov.com, "The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics." With those items being collected without much oversight being admitted, though, putting the personal facts pertaining to millions of Americans into the hands of some playful Pentagon staffers only begins to open up civil liberties issues.

Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, adds to NextGov that investigators pair facial recognition technology with publically available social networks in order to build bigger profiles. Facial recognition "is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots," he says. When these files are then fed to law enforcement agencies on local, federal and international levels, intelligence databases that include everything from close-ups of eyeballs and irises to online interests could be shared among offices.

The FBI expects the NGI system to include as many as 14 million photographs by the time the project is in full swing in only two years, but the pace of technology and the new connections constantly created by law enforcement agencies could allow for a database that dwarfs that estimate. As RT reported earlier this week, the city of Los Angeles now considers photography in public space "suspicious," and authorizes LAPD officers to file reports if they have reason to believe a suspect is up to no good. Those reports, which may not necessarily involve any arrests, crimes, charges or even interviews with the suspect, can then be filed, analyzed, stored and shared with federal and local agencies connected across the country to massive data fusion centers. Similarly, live video transmissions from thousands of surveillance cameras across the country are believed to be sent to the same fusion centers as part of TrapWire, a global eye-in-the-sky endeavor that RT first exposed earlier this year.

"Facial recognition creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not," US Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) told the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law earlier this year. "Once someone has your faceprint, they can get your name, they can find your social networking account and they can find and track you in the street, in the stores you visit, the government buildings you enter, and the photos your friends post online."

In his own testimony, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Alessandro Acquisti said to Sen. Franken, "the convergence of face recognition, online social networks and data mining has made it possible to use publicly available data and inexpensive technologies to produce sensitive inferences merely starting from an anonymous face."

"Face recognition, like other information technologies, can be source of both benefits and costs to society and its individual members," Prof. Acquisti added. "However, the combination of face recognition, social networks data and data mining can significant undermine our current notions and expectations of privacy and anonymity."

With the latest report suggesting the NGI program is now a reality in America, though, it might be too late to try and keep the FBI from interfering with seemingly every aspect of life in the US, both private and public. As of July 18, 2012, the FBI reports, "The NGI program ... is on scope, on schedule, on cost, and 60 percent deployed."

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Leaked: Stratfor Emails Reveal Secret, Widespread 'TrapWire' Surveillance System

by RT

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology -- and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It's part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America's intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who's who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program's public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year's hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing.

Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed to be more than five million emails from within the company. WikiLeaks began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year and, of those, several discussing the implementing of TrapWire in public spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks was relentlessly assaulted by a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, crippling the whistleblower site and its mirrors, significantly cutting short the number of people who would otherwise have unfettered access to the emails.

On Wednesday, an administrator for the WikiLeaks Twitter account wrote that the site suspected that the motivation for the attacks could be that particularly sensitive Stratfor emails were about to be exposed. A hacker group called AntiLeaks soon after took credit for the assaults on WikiLeaks and mirrors of their content, equating the offensive as a protest against editor Julian Assange, "the head of a new breed of terrorist." As those Stratfor files on TrapWire make their rounds online, though, talk of terrorism is only just beginning.

Mr. Ferguson and others have mirrored what are believed to be most recently-released Global Intelligence Files on external sites, but the original documents uploaded to WikiLeaks have been at times unavailable this week due to the continuing DDoS attacks. Late Thursday and early Friday this week, the GIF mirrors continues to go offline due to what is presumably more DDoS assaults. Australian activist Asher Wolf wrote on Twitter that the DDoS attacks flooding the servers of WikiLeaks supporter sites were reported to be dropping upwards of 40 gigabits of traffic per second. On Friday, WikiLeaks tweeted that their own site was sustaining attacks of 10 Gb/second, adding, "Whoever is running it controls thousands of machines or is able to simulate them."

According to a press release (pdf) dated June 6, 2012, TrapWire is "designed to provide a simple yet powerful means of collecting and recording suspicious activity reports." A system of interconnected nodes spot anything considered suspect and then input it into the system to be "analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning."

In a 2009 email included in the Anonymous leak, Stratfor Vice President for Intelligence Fred Burton is alleged to write, "TrapWire is a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance." Burton formerly served with the US Diplomatic Security Service, and Abraxas' staff includes other security experts with experience in and out of the Armed Forces.

What is believed to be a partnering agreement included in the Stratfor files from August 13, 2009 indicates that they signed a contract with Abraxas to provide them with analysis and reports of their TrapWire system (pdf).

"Suspicious activity reports from all facilities on the TrapWire network are aggregated in a central database and run through a rules engine that searches for patterns indicative of terrorist surveillance operations and other attack preparations," Crime and Justice International magazine explains in a 2006 article on the program, one of the few publically circulated on the Abraxas product (pdf). "Any patterns detected -- links among individuals, vehicles or activities -- will be reported back to each affected facility. This information can also be shared with law enforcement organizations, enabling them to begin investigations into the suspected surveillance cell."

In a 2005 interview with The Entrepreneur Center, Abraxas founder Richard "Hollis" Helms said his signature product "can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists." He calls it "a proprietary technology designed to protect critical national infrastructure from a terrorist attack by detecting the pre-attack activities of the terrorist and enabling law enforcement to investigate and engage the terrorist long before an attack is executed," and that, "The beauty of it is that we can protect an infinite number of facilities just as efficiently as we can one and we push information out to local law authorities automatically."

An internal email from early 2011 included in the Global Intelligence Files has Stratfor's Burton allegedly saying the program can be used to "[walk] back and track the suspects from the get go w/facial recognition software."

Since its inception, TrapWire has been implemented in most major American cities at selected high value targets (HVTs) and has appeared abroad as well. The iWatch monitoring system adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department (pdf) works in conjunction with TrapWire, as does the District of Columbia and the "See Something, Say Something" program conducted by law enforcement in New York City, which had 500 surveillance cameras linked to the system in 2010. Private properties including Las Vegas, Nevada casinos have subscribed to the system. The State of Texas reportedly spent half a million dollars with an additional annual licensing fee of $150,000 to employ TrapWire, and the Pentagon and other military facilities have allegedly signed on as well.

In one email from 2010 leaked by Anonymous, Stratfor's Fred Burton allegedly writes, "God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major HVT in CONUS, the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients." Files on USASpending.gov reveal that the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense together awarded Abraxas and TrapWire more than one million dollars in only the past eleven months.

News of the widespread and largely secretive installation of TrapWire comes amidst a federal witch-hunt to crack down on leaks escaping Washington and at attempt to prosecute whistleblowers. Thomas Drake, a former agent with the NSA, has recently spoken openly about the government's Trailblazer Project that was used to monitor private communication, and was charged under the Espionage Act for coming forth. Separately, former NSA tech director William Binney and others once with the agency have made claims in recent weeks that the feds have dossiers on every American, an allegation NSA Chief Keith Alexander dismissed during a speech at Def-Con last month in Vegas.

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Restoring Faith in a Free-Market Healthcare System

by Jacob G. Hornberger

The New York Times? account of Cuban cyclist Damian Lopez Alfonso could help Americans regain their faith in a free-market healthcare system.

When he was 13, Lopez was electrocuted while trying to retrieve a kite caught in some power lines. Doctors were able to save his life but not his forearms. His face was also horribly disfigured.

Notwithstanding the loss of both his forearms, Lopez became an avid cyclist. The handlebars on his bicycle have to be turned upwards, which enables him to steer, change gears, and brake with his elbows.

Despite his handicaps, the 34-year-old Lopez has won cycling races at home in Cuba. Next month he?ll compete in a race in Canada, and he hopes to qualify for the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.

What does all this have to do with restoring Americans? faith in a free-market healthcare system?

According to the Times, as Lopez?s situation has become increasingly publicized, ?riders from as far away as California and Germany have sent money, and companies including Fuji, Shimano and a prosthesis maker, Hanger, have provided state-of-the-art products that will help him ride in the standard position so he can compete at an elite level.?

That?s not all.

When Lopez travelled to New York for medical tests and four months of reconstructive surgery and being fitted for prosthetic arms, New Yorker cyclists ?donated their time, money and spare bedrooms to help him in the city?. One rider provided the use of a car service to get Mr. Alfonso around town; another lent him an old iPhone; several have acted as translators on doctor visits; still others have made small cash donations totaling $8,000 to support him during his stay.?

What about Lopez?s medical treatment? Ordinarily it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Guess how much it?s costing him. Nothing! His medical treatment is being provided to him entirely for free.

That is what life is supposed to be all about. That is the spirit of voluntary charity and good will toward others on which America was founded.

Unlike Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, and income taxation, the help provided to Lopez is voluntary. No one goes to jail for refusing to help him. The help that is provided to him is genuine charity given that it comes from the willing hearts of people who want to help.

Sometimes I wonder how many Americans today, especially young people, realize that there was no Medicare and Medicaid ? i.e., coerced, government healthcare ? for more than 150 years after our nation was founded. People were free to keep everything they earned (they didn?t believe in income taxation either), and they had the freedom to manage their own healthcare (and everything else).

Equally important, prior to Medicare and Medicaid, healthcare costs were reasonably priced, given that the federal government wasn?t involved in the process. Moreover, healthcare prices weren?t soaring every decade as they have been ever since Medicare and Medicaid were enacted.

How did the truly poor get healthcare before Medicare and Medicaid? In the same way that Damian Lopez Alfonso got it ? through the voluntary efforts of people who cared, including physicians, hospitals, and donors.

Whenever libertarians bring up the idea of repealing Medicare and Medicaid, what is the all-too-common response of modern-day statists? ?Oh, people will die in the streets without socialized healthcare! Nobody except me will help the poor! Who cares if the nation goes bankrupt as long as we have our free healthcare??

That?s what socialism has done to Americans. It has terribly damaged their faith in themselves, in others, in freedom and free markets, and in God.

But nothing is irreparable, and there is nothing like freedom to restore the deeper spirit of charity that exists within mankind.

When we see the outpouring of help for a man like Damian Lopez Alfonso ? a citizen of another country, a communist country whose regime is antagonistic toward the U.S. government ? it helps to remind us of that there is nothing to fear from the repeal of Medicare and Medicaid and the restoration of a free-market healthcare system to our land.
__
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

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