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The SNOWDEN Saga continues...

vta

Active member
Veteran
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." -- The Declaration of Independence
 

Hash Zeppelin

Ski Bum Rodeo Clown
Premium user
ICMag Donor
Veteran
I have lived in both the EU (germany) and the US with travels all over the world. The USA is the closest thing to a Nazi police state since 1939 Nazi controlled Germany.

^It's worse. We are dealing with Fascist Plutocrats now. Nazi's didnt control the world. They had to start a war to get power. They were financed by the plutocrats that are still running the show now. The Nazi's were just pawns to start a war to sell steel, just as the U.S. military are pawns now to make weapons contractors and oil contractors rich. It's all a scam to concentrate the entire planets wealth in to the hands of less than 400 individuals. The U.S. already controls the world and has drones. It is by far worse tan any nazi party ever was, and the U.S. government is responsible for far more deaths than the holocaust. If your white in America it just doesn't seem that bad because we are used to it. Try being a black or brown person of any sorts. try being a foreigner.

other reasons it's worse.
-the drug war
-the prison pop
-the wealth redistribution to the already wealthy
-debtors prisons.
-homeland security
-the patriot act
-Guantanamo bay
-drones
-black water
-daisy cutters
-nukes
-Andrews air force base
-a military 7 times larger than all of our allies combined.
-the anti-protest bill
-the NSA program PRISM
-Justin Beiber (i know he is canadian, but we let him on TV damnit.)
-Kim Kardsian
-Miley Cyrus
-NASCAR
-Dick Cheney has not been beheaded
-Southern Baptism
 

vta

Active member
Veteran
Does your phone provider profit from your data...YES


NSA Pays Hundreds of Millions to Phone Providers for Records

AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint receive hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the National Security Agency (NSA) so the NSA can have access to 81 percent of all international phone calls made into the United States.

A secret inspector general’s report that was leaked and published by the Washington Post, Associated Press and the New York Review of Books asserts “NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies, underscoring that the U/S. has the “home-field advantage as the primary hub for worldwide communications.”

The fees vary depending on which company is involved; AT&T charges $325 for each time an account is activated plus a monitoring fee of $10 a day: Verizon charges $775 for the first month and then $500 every subsequent month; Microsoft, Yahoo and Google refused to divulge their charges.

The Washington Post also reported elsewhere that the telephone companies receive roughly $300 million annually from the NSA for the access the NSA wants, including information on their communications, the location and time of the phone calls, who was using the phone, and the length of the calls.
 

vta

Active member
Veteran
th


Obama Asks SCOTUS for Warrantless Cellphone Searches
by Elizabeth Sheld

Last week, the Obama administration asked the Supreme Court to rule that the Fourth Amendment allows for warrant-less cell phone searches. The administration filed a petition asking the SCOTUS to hear a 2007 case in which information was retrieved from a cell phone that was used to obtain evidence against the defendant.

The defendant was subsequently convicted but upon appeal argued that the information obtained from his phone was a Fourth Amendment violation since it was obtained without a warrant. The First Circuit Court accepted this argument.

The Obama administration countered the Court's decision, maintaining it is in conflict with previous rulings that allow the police broad discretion to search possessions of a suspect. The government argued that a cell phone is no different than other possessions.
 

bombadil.360

Andinismo Hierbatero
Veteran
The notion that the United States is so fantastic to live in seems preposterous at least to me. I've seen too much of the five habitable continents of this world, making extended stays in almost every kind of country. No place outside a war zone is so unsafe crime-wise, as a typical large city in the United States. And in hardly any nation on earth is it so easy to wind up behind bars, and no other nation locks up so many of its citizens. On paper the US may have a reputation for freedom, but in reality other locales are more apt to allow you to mind your own business. The US and its people could let down their pride and learn a great deal from even third-world countries. We are not so fantastic nor as great a gift to this world as many of us believe. There are better, much better places to be in my opinion and I plan to take advantage.


I'm not American, but lived there for a few years.

I've been to many places in South America, heck, I was born and raised in Venezuela, got my first university degree there etc...

Also been to Europe, Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

I live in the Middle East now, guess where?

if you think big cities in the U.S are dangerous, that means you have not traveled outside the U.S or Western Europe, plain and simple.

Caracas, now that is a dangerous city, unlike anywhere you'll find in the U.S or most of the world for that matter.

being a tourist in South America is great, but move there, work there, try to make a living out of minimum wage, then we'll talk.

I'm not a blind America fan though, I have my fair share of criticism, I could have stayed to live there, but chose not to. even though now Colorado does sound really good hehehe...

peace
 

gaiusmarius

me
Veteran
i do want to be clear, i have great respect and admiration for the original self sufficient no bs American. there is no doubt that the US constitution is one of the all time great founding documents. upon it and the bill of rights hundreds of years of great progress was made on all fronts. America used to be my dream retirement location. historically speaking it was a force for much good, even if mistakes were made even back then.

so i do not equate the NSA with the ideal of America, nor do i even believe the US gov actually represents the people anymore. the gov has morphed into the master of the people in the last 100 years, very slowly, tinny step by tinny step, never pushing more then people would put up with at any one time, till in the last decade or so things are jumping forward towards more police state control over everything and everyone.

the problem in the end is that the gov has declared it's self above the law. it makes laws and gives out exemptions. but worse peoples representatives swear to uphold and defend the constitution, then pass laws violating it the next chance they get. it's a terrible trend we are seeing when they can say oh well it's not convinient to follow the law, so we won't. we see this attitude even when it comes to Syria and the UN. oh well the security counsel is not in agreement, so we will just do as we please. again it's a blatant disregard for international law. if the security counsel can not pass a resolution, it's supposed to mean it is not lawful to act on it. i wonder if other security counsel members should start making the same arguments in other situations, where 1 lone member is vetoing resolutions again and again, against the will of the whole international community, lol.

anyway my point is the law is the law, there should be no exceptions for governments about following the law. we just have to hope that the EU can stay strong on this matter and start closing the information access off in line with countries constitutional and national privacy laws as well as international treaties and charters.
 

bombadil.360

Andinismo Hierbatero
Veteran
gaius, I think the U.S will move forward and sort itself out, providing that honest and intelligent folk take an interest in helping with the problems you mention; if not, then I dunno what will happen.

I doubt in a truly oppressive police state, the victories in the states of Colorado and Washington would have been able to happen. the people took action, organized themselves, spoken and won against all odds.

this proves that many other positive changes are a possibility provided the people take an active role in things.

in other countries such changes are way more difficult, I can only speak from experience, where I remember the many times in Venezuela, the government spoke about how they did not want the dea in their business, with their "imperialism and interventionism" and how the coca leaf is not a drug but from nature etc...

so some friends and I, one who actually has a natural medicine company, tried to get permissions to grow coca leaves in the Andes, as well as Cannabis, for making medicines as well as offering herb to various ill people who could benefit... the response was a serious no, including threats to close my friend's company.

not long after that, another friend got stopped at a military check-point, you have hundreds of those throughout all the road-systems of Venezuela, even traveling within state's lines, you'll have to cross a few and be potentially searched and extorted... so he gets stopped, they found about 20 grams of herb, and off to jail. he was driving his dad's car, his dad had to sell his car to bribe a few people to get his son out of jail, all the while, the government is making big speeches that go on for hours about how people should be free and not oppressed by "imperialist laws"...

that's just one of the reasons why I say why in the U.S many people tend to over-criticize their own country, and don't really know how much good they can actually do if they get involved in things.

peace
 

Hash Zeppelin

Ski Bum Rodeo Clown
Premium user
ICMag Donor
Veteran
Does your phone provider profit from your data...YES


NSA Pays Hundreds of Millions to Phone Providers for Records

AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint receive hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the National Security Agency (NSA) so the NSA can have access to 81 percent of all international phone calls made into the United States.

A secret inspector general’s report that was leaked and published by the Washington Post, Associated Press and the New York Review of Books asserts “NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies, underscoring that the U/S. has the “home-field advantage as the primary hub for worldwide communications.”

The fees vary depending on which company is involved; AT&T charges $325 for each time an account is activated plus a monitoring fee of $10 a day: Verizon charges $775 for the first month and then $500 every subsequent month; Microsoft, Yahoo and Google refused to divulge their charges.

The Washington Post also reported elsewhere that the telephone companies receive roughly $300 million annually from the NSA for the access the NSA wants, including information on their communications, the location and time of the phone calls, who was using the phone, and the length of the calls.

our tax dollars hard at work.
 

vta

Active member
Veteran
NYT: NSA collects data on US citizens' social connections

By James Risen and Laura Poitras, The New York Times
WASHINGTON —

Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.

The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.

An agency spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans’ data, said, “All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”

“All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose,” the spokeswoman added. “Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity.”

The legal underpinning of the policy change, she said, was a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called. Based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans’ “metadata,” which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and e-mails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

N.S.A. officials declined to identify which phone and e-mail databases are used to create the social network diagrams, and the documents provided by Mr. Snowden do not specify them. The agency did say that the large database of Americans’ domestic phone call records, which was revealed by Mr. Snowden in June and caused bipartisan alarm in Washington, was excluded. (N.S.A. officials have previously acknowledged that the agency has done limited analysis in that database, collected under provisions of the Patriot Act, exclusively for people who might be linked to terrorism suspects.)

But the agency has multiple collection programs and databases, the former officials said, adding that the social networking analyses relied on both domestic and international metadata. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the information was classified.

The concerns in the United States since Mr. Snowden’s revelations have largely focused on the scope of the agency’s collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse. But the new documents provide a rare window into what the N.S.A. actually does with the information it gathers.

A series of agency PowerPoint presentations and memos describe how the N.S.A. has been able to develop software and other tools — one document cited a new generation of programs that “revolutionize” data collection and analysis — to unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible.

The spy agency, led by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, an unabashed advocate for more weapons in the hunt for information about the nation’s adversaries, clearly views its collections of metadata as one of its most powerful resources. N.S.A. analysts can exploit that information to develop a portrait of an individual, one that is perhaps more complete and predictive of behavior than could be obtained by listening to phone conversations or reading e-mails, experts say.

Phone and e-mail logs, for example, allow analysts to identify people’s friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time, acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a fellow plotter.

“Metadata can be very revealing,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. “Knowing things like the number someone just dialed or the location of the person’s cellphone is going to allow them to assemble a picture of what someone is up to. It’s the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

The N.S.A. had been pushing for more than a decade to obtain the rule change allowing the analysis of Americans’ phone and e-mail data. Intelligence officials had been frustrated that they had to stop when a contact chain hit a telephone number or e-mail address believed to be used by an American, even though it might yield valuable intelligence primarily concerning a foreigner who was overseas, according to documents previously disclosed by Mr. Snowden. N.S.A. officials also wanted to employ the agency’s advanced computer analysis tools to sift through its huge databases with much greater efficiency.

The agency had asked for the new power as early as 1999, the documents show, but had been initially rebuffed because it was not permitted under rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that were intended to protect the privacy of Americans.

A 2009 draft of an N.S.A. inspector general’s report suggests that contact chaining and analysis may have been done on Americans’ communications data under the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants, which began after the Sept. 11 attacks to detect terrorist activities and skirted the existing laws governing electronic surveillance.

In 2006, months after the wiretapping program was disclosed by The New York Times, the N.S.A.’s acting general counsel wrote a letter to a senior Justice Department official, which was also leaked by Mr. Snowden, formally asking for permission to perform the analysis on American phone and e-mail data. A Justice Department memo to the attorney general noted that the “misuse” of such information “could raise serious concerns,” and said the N.S.A. promised to impose safeguards, including regular audits, on the metadata program. In 2008, the Bush administration gave its approval.

A new policy that year, detailed in “Defense Supplemental Procedures Governing Communications Metadata Analysis,” authorized by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said that since the Supreme Court had ruled that metadata was not constitutionally protected, N.S.A. analysts could use such information “without regard to the nationality or location of the communicants,” according to an internal N.S.A. description of the policy.

After that decision, which was previously reported by The Guardian, the N.S.A. performed the social network graphing in a pilot project for 1 ½ years “to great benefit,” according to the 2011 memo. It was put in place in November 2010 in “Sigint Management Directive 424” (sigint refers to signals intelligence).

In the 2011 memo explaining the shift, N.S.A. analysts were told that they could trace the contacts of Americans as long as they cited a foreign intelligence justification. That could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to spying on conversations of foreign politicians, business figures or activists.

Analysts were warned to follow existing “minimization rules,” which prohibit the N.S.A. from sharing with other agencies names and other details of Americans whose communications are collected, unless they are necessary to understand foreign intelligence reports or there is evidence of a crime. The agency is required to obtain a warrant from the intelligence court to target a “U.S. person” — a citizen or legal resident — for actual eavesdropping.

The N.S.A. documents show that one of the main tools used for chaining phone numbers and e-mail addresses has the code name Mainway. It is a repository into which vast amounts of data flow daily from the agency’s fiber-optic cables, corporate partners and foreign computer networks that have been hacked.

The documents show that significant amounts of information from the United States go into Mainway. An internal N.S.A. bulletin, for example, noted that in 2011 Mainway was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign.

The overall volume of metadata collected by the N.S.A. is reflected in the agency’s secret 2013 budget request to Congress. The budget document, disclosed by Mr. Snowden, shows that the agency is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion “record events” daily and making them available to N.S.A. analysts within 60 minutes.

The spending includes support for the “Enterprise Knowledge System,” which has a $394 million multiyear budget and is designed to “rapidly discover and correlate complex relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive scale,” according to a 2008 document. The data is automatically computed to speed queries and discover new targets for surveillance.

A top-secret document titled “Better Person Centric Analysis” describes how the agency looks for 94 “entity types,” including phone numbers, e-mail addresses and IP addresses. In addition, the N.S.A. correlates 164 “relationship types” to build social networks and what the agency calls “community of interest” profiles, using queries like “travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs.”

A 2009 PowerPoint presentation provided more examples of data sources available in the “enrichment” process, including location-based services like GPS and TomTom, online social networks, billing records and bank codes for transactions in the United States and overseas.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, General Alexander was asked if the agency ever collected or planned to collect bulk records about Americans’ locations based on cellphone tower data. He replied that it was not doing so as part of the call log program authorized by the Patriot Act, but said a fuller response would be classified.

If the N.S.A. does not immediately use the phone and e-mail logging data of an American, it can be stored for later use, at least under certain circumstances, according to several documents.

One 2011 memo, for example, said that after a court ruling narrowed the scope of the agency’s collection, the data in question was “being buffered for possible ingest” later. A year earlier, an internal briefing paper from the N.S.A. Office of Legal Counsel showed that the agency was allowed to collect and retain raw traffic, which includes both metadata and content, about “U.S. persons” for up to five years online and for an additional 10 years offline for “historical searches.”
 

Hydrosun

I love my life
Veteran
our tax dollars hard at work.

Yep...funding our own demise...

Let's get this straight. It is NOT our tax dollars, it is the funding of an immoral system by the top 1%. Less than 50% of adult Mercans pay federal income tax and only the top 5% of that 50% pay any meaningful money.

We the cannabis community are just a lump of shit that needs to be controlled by the 1% hence the very nice NSA budget to keep tabs on all us sheeple.

:joint:
 

dddaver

Active member
Veteran
I read what gas said and the positivity of bombadil. We who grew up here being told one thing and learning reality is FAR different, are VERY discouraged.

In theory, yes, American ideas were great. But our ideals were hijacked. We now serve at the will of a select few. MONEY has become the driving factor over anything at all.

I think the current mess can be traced all the back to the Woodrow Wilson administration, where his wife actually ran the country his second term. A totally non-elected executive branch? One of the 3 most powerful branches in our government? Checks and balances were thrown out the window. Wilson was even quoted as saying he ruined this country. All that was BEFORE WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, etc.,etc.

What I'm trying to say is, yes we know our government has been hijacked. And the hijackers have had over 100 years to find any weaknesses and correct them.

The people are VERY discouraged to the point of apathy. I absolutely hate to think this, but I do think my Grandkids are going to see a violent and bloody over-throw because that will be the only way to take back this once great nation.
 

floralheart

Active member
Veteran
I read what gas said and the positivity of bombadil. We who grew up here being told one thing and learning reality is FAR different, are VERY discouraged.

In theory, yes, American ideas were great. But our ideals were hijacked. We now serve at the will of a select few. MONEY has become the driving factor over anything at all.

I think the current mess can be traced all the back to the Woodrow Wilson administration, where his wife actually ran the country his second term. A totally non-elected executive branch? One of the 3 most powerful branches in our government? Checks and balances were thrown out the window. Wilson was even quoted as saying he ruined this country. All that was BEFORE WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, etc.,etc.

What I'm trying to say is, yes we know our government has been hijacked. And the hijackers have had over 100 years to find any weaknesses and correct them.

The people are VERY discouraged to the point of apathy. I absolutely hate to think this, but I do think my Grandkids are going to see a violent and bloody over-throw because that will be the only way to take back this once great nation.

Yeah, well... that's just like... your opinion man :D

And, I agree.
 

Crusader Rabbit

Active member
Veteran
I have lived in both the EU (germany) and the US with travels all over the world. The USA is the closest thing to a Nazi police state since 1939 Nazi controlled Germany.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany the shooting immediately stopped in western Europe but underground resistance continued for a number of years in eastern Europe. The United States supported this resistance. With the termination of WWII in Europe the United States switched from fighting fascism to fighting communism. The US Army Intelligence Service actually took the surviving members of Germany's intelligence apparatus into its own ranks in order to better fight the Russians. The USAIS eventually became the CIA.
 

gaiusmarius

me
Veteran
Let's get this straight. It is NOT our tax dollars, it is the funding of an immoral system by the top 1%. Less than 50% of adult Mercans pay federal income tax and only the top 5% of that 50% pay any meaningful money.

We the cannabis community are just a lump of shit that needs to be controlled by the 1% hence the very nice NSA budget to keep tabs on all us sheeple.

:joint:

actually, even if you don't pay much income tax, you still pay a lot of tax. every penny you spend is taxed. not 1 penny goes through your hands without the gov taking it's cut. working peoples salaries are robbed before they even see a penny. so yeah, it's misleading to say only 5% are paying taxes to do all the crap they are doing to us. it is indeed all the people paying for their enslavement. people just forget about all the other hidden taxes, but even worse is the stealth tax of inflation through massive injections of dollars into the system, which makes the buying power of the dollars get reduced.

the system has just become very good at hiding the taxes. some would even argue that all the fines being given out for everything under the sun, from too long grass to using rain water or selling your spare tomatoes, are all also a form of taxation. in the end what Hash Zeppelin said was perfectly correct. the people pay to be spied on, as well as all the rest of the gov actions.
 

Crusader Rabbit

Active member
Veteran
Let's get this straight. It is NOT our tax dollars, it is the funding of an immoral system by the top 1%. Less than 50% of adult Mercans pay federal income tax and only the top 5% of that 50% pay any meaningful money.

The rich obtain their income through capitol gains which is taxed at a much lower rate. If you include payroll and sales taxes into the equation then the middle class is paying a much higher effective tax rate. But yes, since the rich have the billions the total sum adds up.
 

imnotcrazy

There is ALWAYS meaning to my madness ®
Veteran
What I wonder is when SHERIFFS are the highest form of law in the country, whay have none of them shown up with arrest warrants for these people who openly violate all of our rights.

Even if it was just a dramatic act which the sheriff didn't fully intend to follow thru on, it could enlighten many to the illegality of it all
 

Hash Zeppelin

Ski Bum Rodeo Clown
Premium user
ICMag Donor
Veteran
actually, even if you don't pay much income tax, you still pay a lot of tax. every penny you spend is taxed. not 1 penny goes through your hands without the gov taking it's cut. working peoples salaries are robbed before they even see a penny. so yeah, it's misleading to say only 5% are paying taxes to do all the crap they are doing to us. it is indeed all the people paying for their enslavement. people just forget about all the other hidden taxes, but even worse is the stealth tax of inflation through massive injections of dollars into the system, which makes the buying power of the dollars get reduced.

the system has just become very good at hiding the taxes. some would even argue that all the fines being given out for everything under the sun, from too long grass to using rain water or selling your spare tomatoes, are all also a form of taxation. in the end what Hash Zeppelin said was perfectly correct. the people pay to be spied on, as well as all the rest of the gov actions.

bureaucratic systems are put in place to tax the poor, and keep them poor. The biggest example of this is the DMV. It is already expensive to own and maintain a vehicle, even if it is just a KIA or Toyota or something. Tires, Gas, and tune ups cost money. People living from pay check to paycheck can barely afford to drive if at all. The the government finds it necessary to tax the purchase, the license plate and drivers license. Then they are forced to pay a property tax on the vehicle every year or so with a "registration fee" to keep the system safe. Bullshit! It is a way to continually tax you for no reason other than to keep you poor. Then you are forced to have insurance too. Well let me tell you about insurance. I have had it for maybe 6 months of my entire life and the one time I needed it the insurance company refused to pay based off some bull shit loop hole. Then on top of that you have to meet some environmental standard with a smog test. Then you have to pay massive fines if any of these are not in perfect compliance. HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU PAY FINES IF YOU CANT AFFORD THE TAXES IN THE FIRST PLACE? THIS IS TAXATION WITH OUT REPRESENTATION. IT IS FEDERAL REGISTRY.

FURTHERMORE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS NOW MADE THUMB PRINTING MANDATORY, SO NOW EVERYONE GETS THERE THUMBPRINT IN AN FBI DATA BASE, IF THEY HAVE BEEN CONVICTED OF A FELONY OR NOT. FUCKING FASCISM

By the time you are done with maintenance, registration taxes, smog, insurance, then you cant afford to drive the fucking thing. Then your stuck using public transportation, which is right where they want you. On an easily controlled path that takes forever to get anywhere, and leaves very few options.

This prevents people from having demanding and higher paying jobs. On every job application these days in Texas they want to know if you have a car because they wont hire people with out one because the bus systems are so bad.

Now in Chicago they are making a registration system for bicycles. You have to do everything for you bike that you would do for a car. So you cant afford a car and have to ride a bike? How bout we tax you on that too?

If there has ever been a time to start beheading and politicians, and bankers its is now. their heads should be on pikes in time square. this should all be handled by Vlad the Impaler.
 
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