Showing posts with label freedom of travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label freedom of travel. Show all posts

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Senate Bill to Force Citizens to Register Cash Not in a Bank, Violators Get 10 Years in Prison

assets


A new bill seeks to track your money and assets incessantly, will enjoin any business with government ties to act as a de facto arm of DHS, and would steal all of your assets — including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — should you fail to report funds when traveling with over $10,000.


Under the guise of combating money laundering, Senate Bill 1241, “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” ramps up regulation of digital currency and other autocratic financial controls in an attempt to ensure none of your assets can escape one of the State’s most nefarious, despised powers: civil asset forfeiture.


All of this under the farcically broad umbrella of fighting terrorism.



Civil forfeiture grants the government robbery writ large: your cash, property, and assets can be stolen completely sans due process, your guilt — frequently pertaining to drug ‘crimes’ — matters not.


A court verdict of not guilty doesn’t even guarantee the return of State-thefted property.


In fact, the government can seize virtually whatever it wants if it so much as suspects some of your assets might have been acquired through or used in the commission of even lesser crimes.


For some time, a war on cash has been brewing behind the closed doors of government, and — although officials prefer to claim counterfeiting, terrorism, and money laundering as the impetus for asset tracking — in actuality, physical currency facilitates black market and untaxed transactions, and, most imperatively to the U.S., cannot be thefted under civil asset forfeiture laws as easily as money exchanged digitally.



Characterized as an effort to “to improve the prohibitions on money laundering, and for other purposes,” the bill severely curtails the right to travel freely, without undue hindrance, as travelers with more than $10,000 in assets — including those held digitally, like Bitcoin — must file a report with the U.S. government.


Noncompliance with the tyrannical law — including failing to fill out the aforementioned form — would incur penalties befitting a fascist dictatorship: an individual could find the entirety of their assets seized, not just those unreported, and could be locked in a prison cage for up to ten years.



READ MORE:  Minnesota Man Arrested, Sentenced to 6-Months in Jail for Having a Windmill On His Property



To be clear, the State wants to write a permission slip to seize all of your assets — bank accounts, including, specifically, “safety deposit boxes,” prepaid cards, gift cards, prepaid phones, prepaid coupons, cryptocurrencies, all of it — even for being remiss in reporting what you’re traveling with.


Considering one’s digital assets veritably follow wherever that travel takes them, a cryptocurrency portfolio would theoretically have to be reported each time that person travels outside the confines of the U.S.


Of course, the legislation in actuality just amends laws pertaining to assets and travel already considered dictatorial — right now, failure to fill out the form carries not just the penalty of seizure, but a sentence of up to five years behind bars.



“And if that weren’t enough, this bill also gives them with new authority to engage in surveillance and wiretapping (including phone, email, etc.) if they have even a hint of suspicion that you might be transporting excess ‘monetary instruments,’” Simon Black of SovereignMan.com reports.


“Usually wiretapping authority is reserved for major crimes like kidnapping, human trafficking, felony fraud, etc.


“Now we can add cash to that list.”


But it wouldn’t just be the government hawkishly surveilling your every transaction, as, essentially, all retailers would be roped into becoming State spies — any business selling gift or prepaid cards would be required to report those, too.


Worse — and in defiance of current structures pertaining to digital currency — the government wishes to somehow require issuers of cryptocurrencies into its abhorrent, ostensive money-laundering police spy ring.


According to the legislation, reports Smaulgold.com, the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection must, within 18 months of the legislation’s passage, devise a “border protection strategy to interdict and detect prepaid access devices, digital currencies, or other similar instruments, at border crossings and other ports of entry for the United States, including an assessment of infrastructure needed [emphasis added] to carry out the strategy […]


“The obligation to declare amounts in any form over $10,000 exists, irrespective of whether custom officials have a way of detecting such holdings. Since digital currencies technically travel with the holder [wherever] the holder goes, one would have to declare one’s entire crypto portfolio each time the holder entered the U.S.”


Travelers possessing assets, precious metals, and accounts in excess of $10,000 held outside the United States, however, would not be required to declare those to the government — perhaps leaving an albeit sketchy option for those wary of unscrupulous authorities.


While the government insists ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear,’ the Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017 proves you might not be able to hide anything from its greedy clutches — and if you try, you could wind up thrown in a cage for a decade, penniless upon release.



Welcome to America, where your assets are literally the government’s business, and freedom is anything but free.

Saturday, January 7, 2017

How the FL Shooting Will Be Used to Bolster War, Usurp Freedom, & Create More Terrorism

After September 11, 2001, discarding freedom and personal liberties in the name of security became standard operating procedure following a tragedy, and Friday’s mass shooting at the airport in Fort Lauderdale has not deviated from the new Orwellian norm.


Officials say Esteban Santiago arrived in Florida on a flight from Alaska and proceeded to the baggage claim area, where he pulled a firearm from his checked bag and opened fire — killing five people and wounding eight.


“He eventually retrieved a firearm and began indiscriminately shooting,” Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told the press Friday. “This cowardly, heinous act resulted in the deaths of five people.”


While the incident unfolded, before total casualties and injuries had been counted, corporate media presstitutes championed in live time increased security measures and tighter strictures on gun laws — except for TSA agents, whom, some intoned, should now be required to carry firearms in the performance of their duties.



We have been conditioned for this. Fustian politicians assume an inept undervaluation of rights — and a careless lack of vigilance under color of fear — in the minds of the somnambulant masses will allow the implementation of new rights-crushing legislation.


On cue, the Wall Street Journal nearly immediately published an article citing Jeff Price, an aviation security expert and aviation-management professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver, who — without a hint of irony — asserted,


“I think we can expect to see more of what we’ve seen every time we have one of these incidents at an airport — better-armed, better-trained police and a surge in law-enforcement visibility.”


Because terrorism. Because mass shootings. Most simply, because guns.


Guns, many polls and gun-control enthusiasts will tell you, create calamity — nothing else — and the Second Amendment is an antiquated anomaly to be relegated to the already overflowing dustbin of constitutional rights.


These politicians will further exploit fear of The Next Tragedy to install new checkpoints, more scanners, appended means to verify identity, and additional TSA agents — already proven wholly ineffective, if not derelict — to molest, grope, and harass anyone daring to enter an airport.


Travel, they’ll say, is a dangerous affair — and must be policed accordingly.


No matter Santiago has been deemed mentally disturbed — one person, a lone shooter, who chose a divergent method for enmity — now that someone has undertaken a mass shooting in this manner, terrorists paid attention and gleaned fresh plans, they’ll say.


This snark is in no way reductive to the abhorrent nature of the indiscriminate shooting, nor to the mourning which indeed the country must now collectively experience; but right now is precisely the time for acute attentiveness — not fear-induced myopia as has become epidemic after such incidents.



A more rational response surprisingly came from one legislator, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Greg Steube, who is sponsoring a bill to eliminate gun-free zones in Florida — a necessary measure now that the state has experienced three horrific mass shootings.


“My first thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims,” Steube said Friday, quoted by USA Today. “But this goes back to the fact why I’ve been working against gun-free zones for the past three years.


“Gun-free zones don’t prevent criminals from breaking the law and killing innocent victims. All that law did was prevent law-abiding citizens who have a concealed-carry permit from carrying their firearm in defense of themselves and others.”


While Steube’s thinking seems counterintuitive to those on a crusade to eliminate gun possession for everyone but law enforcement, Chicago — with the strictest gun control laws in the nation and more shooting deaths than New York City and Los Angeles, combined — proves the futility of the notion.


Stricture and prohibition spark black markets — if someone intends to do harm using a firearm, they will find it. That applies equally to all mass shooters — whether mentally unstable, paranoid xenophobe, or religious radical — if guns are the intended tool for an attack, oppressive gun laws only stop law-abiding civilians from killing whatever malicious wingnut next begins shooting random people in a crowd.


Tightening the reins on suffocating security procedures and positioning additional law enforcement officers in airports also won’t stop criminals of any motivation from discerning a creative method to thwart remaining deficiencies. These repeated clamp-downs only restrict our ability to travel freely — they aren’t preventing the next attack or quashing terrorism as politicians claim.


Fear is a potent manipulator — and the government counts on pulling the blindfold of dread over everyone’s eyes in the wake of catastrophe to erase yet another protected freedom from the Bill of Rights.


This time, don’t let it happen — don’t be fooled into obliging lawmakers whose only motive is to use death as a Police State weapon against all of us.