Adam Dick

Many news reports are heralding that the expiration this week of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act authority has ended the United States government’s mass surveillance program. Meanwhile, in a Fox News interview, Judge Andrew Napolitano throws cold water on such claims.

Napolitano bluntly declares that the expiration of Section 215 authorization in no way prevents the US government from continuing its mass surveillance program. Napolitano explains that the National Security Agency (NSA) can continue to “gather phone calls, transcripts of phone calls, transcripts of emails, in real time” from all or nearly all Americans irrespective of the expiration of Section 215 authorization.

Watch Napolitano’s complete interview here:

In addition to the President George W. Bush executive order Napolitano mentions in the interview, the US government can also turn to the supposedly anti-mass surveillance USA FREEDOM Act, signed into law in June, for support as it continues the mass surveillance program. The US FREEDOM Act, typical of “reform” in the US government, masquerades as doing one thing when in fact it does the opposite.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Beware the United States Census Bureau. While it may seem innocuous, this government agency, which asks Americans questions and publishes demographic statistics, can quickly be turned into an instrument for mass rights abuse.

James Bovard warns in his Monday USA Today column that, should the US government pursue a “mass roundup of unpopular minorities,” the Census Bureau will likely “serve up the names and addresses on a silver platter.” After all, that is just what Bovard explains the bureau did in the 1940s to aid the US military in rounding up Japanese Americans for internment camps.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Osama bin Laden Unit Chief Michael Scheuer, interviewed by CNN’s Michael Smerconish regarding the path to take after the recent Paris Killings, advises that the current “half-way approach” that rejects both non-intervention and all-out war “leads directly to fascism in this country.”

Fourteen years into the US government’s Global War on Terrorism, Scheuer reminds us that the Founders observed that, “the longer a war goes on, the more power accrues to the central government, and you eventually create a despotism.” This trend toward despotism continues. Indeed, Scheuer notes that “the very first thing that happened after these attacks was a demand,” in both Europe and America, “for more surveillance of the entire population.”

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

In July, Ron Paul Institute Executive Director Daniel McAdams warned that “[b]uried inside the US highways funding bill is a provision to revoke or deny issuance of a US passport to anyone who has a large outstanding tax debt to the US Internal Revenue Service.” This provision in the Senate bill, explained McAdams, is “threatening to imprison Americans within (or outside) US borders.”

Today, in the Economic Policy Journal, Robert Wenzel provides an update that a provision much like the one about which McAdams warned appears poised to pass in Congress and then to become enforceable on January 1.

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

It may seem as if nothing can restrain the United States government’s intervention overseas. But, Ron Paul says economic conditions will impose a limit and that that means the days of expansive US military intervention are numbered.

The former presidential candidate and US House of Representatives member drew applause at a Ludwig von Mises Institute event in Phoenix, Arizona on November 7 when he predicted that US troops will come home because the government is “flat-out broke.”

Continue reading at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.