The police hadn’t even come for him. When four fully-armed officers of a Swat team burst into Jacob Elliott’s house in Peoria, Illinois in April they were looking for the source of a parody Twitter feed that had upset the town’s mayor by poking fun at him.
It transpired that one of Elliott’s housemates, Jon Daniel, had created the fake Twitter account, @peoriamayor, and so incensed the real-life official, Jim Ardis, with his make-believe account of drug binges and sex orgiesthat the police were dispatched. Elliott was just a bystander in the affair, but that didn’t stop the Swat team searching his bedroom, looking under his pillow and in a closet where they discovered a bag of marijuana and dope-smoking paraphernalia.
Elliott now faces charges of felony marijuana possession. He has also become the subject of one of the more paradoxical – if not parody – questions in American jurisprudence: can a citizen be prosecuted for dope possession when the police were raiding his home looking for a fake Twitter account?
Read story here...
http://bit.ly/1sGrLc8
The swat team was called over a twitter account...a twitter account that made fun of a Mayor. We now have a government that steals your stuff even when you have not been charged with a crime (civil asset forfeiture), spies on citizens through social media, uses government departments to target people who do no believe the "correct" things (IRS, NSA, EPA), uses the military to infiltrate social media and manipulate and and possibly neutralize those believe the government is out of control, ( See my post on what the Air Force is doing in your social network), local governments are looking more like paramilitary forces that you would find in communist or strictly controlled countries,etc ...
There was a book written about about average Germans during the Holocaust. "They Thought They Were Free". If you want to understand how the holocaust could have happened in what we think is such a civilized world, read this book. Average Germans were no different than we are and little by litte, in German society, freedoms were chipped away, all the while people knowing something wasn't right, but lacking the fortitude to go against the grain and break away from the herd." All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing"..very profound words indeed.
This is an excerpt from the book...if you don't get chills reading it...you haven't been paying attention...
But Then It Was Too Late“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the
people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
- See more at: http://disinfo.com/2013/10/excerpt-thought-free-germans-1933-45-milton-mayer/#sthash.Yx1jOy4o.dpuf
It transpired that one of Elliott’s housemates, Jon Daniel, had created the fake Twitter account, @peoriamayor, and so incensed the real-life official, Jim Ardis, with his make-believe account of drug binges and sex orgiesthat the police were dispatched. Elliott was just a bystander in the affair, but that didn’t stop the Swat team searching his bedroom, looking under his pillow and in a closet where they discovered a bag of marijuana and dope-smoking paraphernalia.
Elliott now faces charges of felony marijuana possession. He has also become the subject of one of the more paradoxical – if not parody – questions in American jurisprudence: can a citizen be prosecuted for dope possession when the police were raiding his home looking for a fake Twitter account?
Read story here...
http://bit.ly/1sGrLc8
The swat team was called over a twitter account...a twitter account that made fun of a Mayor. We now have a government that steals your stuff even when you have not been charged with a crime (civil asset forfeiture), spies on citizens through social media, uses government departments to target people who do no believe the "correct" things (IRS, NSA, EPA), uses the military to infiltrate social media and manipulate and and possibly neutralize those believe the government is out of control, ( See my post on what the Air Force is doing in your social network), local governments are looking more like paramilitary forces that you would find in communist or strictly controlled countries,etc ...
There was a book written about about average Germans during the Holocaust. "They Thought They Were Free". If you want to understand how the holocaust could have happened in what we think is such a civilized world, read this book. Average Germans were no different than we are and little by litte, in German society, freedoms were chipped away, all the while people knowing something wasn't right, but lacking the fortitude to go against the grain and break away from the herd." All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing"..very profound words indeed.
This is an excerpt from the book...if you don't get chills reading it...you haven't been paying attention...
But Then It Was Too Late“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the
people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
- See more at: http://disinfo.com/2013/10/excerpt-thought-free-germans-1933-45-milton-mayer/#sthash.Yx1jOy4o.dpuf
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