Attorney General Bill Barr has done little if anything to bring justice to ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter rioters who have razed cities, caused billions in property damage, and waged war against the Bill of Rights and Constitution in recent months.
However, he is focusing on exploiting the leftist violence to further federalize local law enforcement and coerce them into using facial-recognition software and other Big Brother technology to prey on the rights of Americans.
Yale University Professor Phillip Atiba Goff ran through some of the most problematic recommendations from Barr’s policing commission in a recent New York Times op/ed.
“Since this spring, when Americans watched George Floyd take his last breaths as a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck, we’ve borne witness to the worst that this country’s criminal justice system has to offer: continued extrajudicial killings, failure to hold officers accountable and state-sponsored violence against those standing up for justice. It’s hard to imagine that things could get worse. But draft recommendations from a Trump-appointed policing commission prove that they could,” Goff wrote in the op/ed.
“I say this without exaggeration: the president’s commission was considering recommendations that could transform this nation into a dystopian police state,” Goff added.
In addition to calling for a national database for facial recognition, Barr’s police commission calls for more invasive snooping into cell phones. The feds want tech companies to create backdoor access to encrypted devices, which would not only be a violation of privacy rights for consumers, but would also open up countless avenues for hackers to gain access to sensitive information.
“With the support of a sympathetic judge, law enforcement would face a lowered barrier to searching the contents of your phone, or adding photos of you and your friends to a nationwide facial recognition database. If the officer used excessive force in the process of obtaining that phone and claimed qualified immunity as a defense, the federal government would be obligated to regularly affirm their support for that officer’s defense regardless of the evidence,” Goff explained.
“It’s not a full-fledged surveillance state,” he concluded. “But it’s not far off.”
Liberty Conservative News has reported on how a positive side-effect of the BLM movement has been an increased concern regarding the dangers of facial-recognition software:
“As “Black Lives Matter” protests continue throughout the country after the death of George Floyd have caused widespread outrage, certain privacy and human rights groups are calling out Orwellian facial recognition technology that they claim is discriminatory toward people of color.
“We need to make sure technologies like facial surveillance stay out of our communities,” said Kade Crockford, who works as Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts. The ACLU is leading the charge against widespread facial recognition.
Groups like the ACLU have cited federal studies showing that minorities are 10 to 100 times more likely to be misidentified through the use of facial recognition technology. They believe that the use of this technology leads to more encounters between law enforcement and minorities, which could turn deadly.
“People are marching in record numbers to demand justice for black communities long subject to police violence,” Crockford said to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“In response, government agencies are mounting increasingly aggressive attacks on freedom of speech and association, including by deploying dystopian surveillance technologies,” Crockford added.
The ACLU wants more cities to do what has been done in Oakland and San Francisco, where local authorities have banned the use of facial recognition technology.
“We have a fundamental duty to safeguard the public from potential abuses,” Aaron Peskin, the San Francisco city supervisor who championed the prohibition on facial-recognition technology, said before his board voted to approve the ban.
The ACLU has called out corporations such as Amazon that have paid lip service to social justice protesters while selling facial recognition technology to police that allows them to profile minorities.
“Cool tweet. Will you commit to stop selling face recognition surveillance technology that supercharges police abuse?” the ACLU asked Amazon in a Twitter post.”
The Trump administration is not living up to its promise to drain the swamp, due in large part to AG Barr, who has apparently not changed much from his first term as AG when he oversaw the Waco and Ruby Ridge disasters under globalist President George H.W. Bush.
