Police State

Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they're private corporations and therefore immune to open records laws.

Here's a guide about what to do if a police officer tries to search your phone without a warrant.

"Despite the strong privacy protections established in the court's Riley decision, police still have the right to search your phone without a warrant in a few certain scenarios known as “exigent circumstances.” This includes, for example, the abduction of a child, when police suspect a person is in imminent harm, or “some imminent threat of evidence destruction,” says Fakhoury. “So its not like a carte blanche rule.” In those instances, there's simply not much you can do.
Fortunately for us all, says Stanley, “those kinds of circumstances should be very rare.”"

They won't be rare, and warrants will be quick and easy for them to obtain.

You cell phone is still not safe from police.

"But the high court’s decision doesn’t prohibit warrantless cellphone tracking by police. The ACLU conducted a study in 2012 in which it filed more than 380 public record requests to local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. Of the roughly 250 agencies that responded, 92 reported engaging in cellphone tracking, and only 10 reported that they did not track cellphones. (The remainder provided a vague statement or no statement at all about phone tracking.) Only six of the agencies that tracked cellphones said warrants were required by local or state law."

They'll get your data without touching your phone, and in upside-down world, that's considered legal.

Somebody is copying my line:

"When it comes to spying, surveillance, and privacy, a simple rule applies to our world: however bad you think it is, it’s worse. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we’ve learned an enormous amount about the global surveillance regime that one of America’s 17 intelligence outfits has created to suck into its maw (and its storage facilities) all communications on the planet, no matter their form. We certainly know a lot more than we did a year ago about what the government is capable of knowing about us. We’ve also recently learned a good deal about “big data” and what corporations can now know about us, as well as how much more they may know once your house is filled with “smart” technology."

OK, it's not an exact copy, but it's close. There's nothing smart about smart technology.

Think you're protected from the government dragnet?

"The United States federal government issued more than 19,000 National Security Letters – perhaps its most powerful tool for domestic intelligence collection – in 2013, and those NSLs contained more than 38,000 individual requests for information. The new data was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday as part of its effort to comply with a directive from President Obama to declassify and release as much information as possible about a variety of tools that the government uses to collect intelligence."

While Obama ordered the release, he only did so because of Snowden.

Why hasn't the NSA shot down this blimp and bombed the EFF into submission? This must violate tyrannical airspace restrictions.