by RT

The Fourth Amendment no longer means what you once thought it did: A new report reveals that the government has shrugged off concerns over the alleged constitutional infringements of its own citizens near international crossings.

An internal review of the US Department of Homeland Security’s procedures regarding the suspicionless search-and-seizure of phones and laptops near the nation’s border has reaffirmed the agency’s ability to bypass Fourth Amendment-protected rights http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/crcl-border-search-impact-assessment_01-29-13_1.pdf.

In a two page executive summary published http://www.dhs.gov/civil-rights-civil-liberties-impact-assessments last month to the official DHS website, the agency explains that a civil rights and civil liberties impact assessment of the office’s little-known power to collect personal electronics near international crossings has passed an auditor’s interpretation of what does and doesn’t violate the US Constitution.

Since 2009, the DHS has been legally permitted to seize and review the contents of personal electronic devices, including mobile phones, portable computers and data discs, even without being able to cite any reasonable suspicion that those articles were involved in a crime.

When the initiative was introduced in August 2009 by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, she defended the policy change. “Keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States,” the secretary said, adding, “The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”

In that Aug. 09 announcement, Sec. Napolitano ensured the American public that they had nothing to worry about and that an impact assessment would be conducted within 120 days to eliminate any fears. More than two years later, however, the DHS-led study has only now been released in part, and its findings do little to alleviate the concerns of civil liberty advocates who have held their breath since the early days of the Obama administration, waiting anxiously to hear about the legality of a directive that applies to both Customs and Border Protection agents and officers with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement working under the DHS.

“We conclude that CBP’s and ICE’s current border search policies comply with the Fourth Amendment,” reads the assessment, written by Tamara Kessler of the department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. “We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” she adds.

Elsewhere in her report, Kessler dismisses concerns that legalized searches that require Americans to submit their electronic devices without reason would scare citizens from exercising their ability to speak and act freely.
“Some critics argue that a heightened level of suspicion should be required before officers search laptop computers in order to avoid chilling First Amendment rights.

However, we conclude that the laptop border searches allowed under the ICE and CBP Directives do not violate travelers’ First Amendment rights,” Tessler insists.

David Kravets, a reporter for Wired’s Danger Room, writes of the review, “The memo highlights the friction between today’s reality that electronic devices have become virtual extensions of ourselves housing everything from e-mail to instant-message chats to photos and our papers and effects — juxtaposed against the government’s stated quest for national security.”

Commenting on Wired’s report, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Catherine Crump voices concern over how DHS agents can essentially bypass the protections of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search-and-seizure. With few exceptions, the government is not permitted to search the belongings of a person without a reasonable suspicion of a crime. Near the nation’s borders, though, that requirement is removed entirely.

“There should be a reasonable, articulate reason why the search of our electronic devices could lead to evidence of a crime,” Crump tells Wired. “That’s a low threshold.”

Katie Haas of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program adds in a blog post this week, “the reality is that allowing government agents to search through all of a traveler’s data without reasonable suspicion is completely incompatible with our fundamental rights. Those rights, she says, are “implicated when the government can rummage through our computers and cell phones for no reason other than that we happen to have traveled abroad.”

“Suspicionless searches also open the door to profiling based on perceived or actual race, ethnicity, or religion,” Haas adds, “And our First Amendment rights to free speech and free association are inhibited when agents at the border can target us for searches based on our exercise of those rights.”

In response to the stripped-down executive summary posted by DHS, the ACLU’s main office has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the government in hopes of obtaining more information on when and why Americans might lose their Fourth Amendment-protected rights. The ACLU seeks the assessment in its entirety and all data, analyses and records gathered during the course of preparing the report.

Where exactly the government can seize personal items without reason is something that has already been determined, though. Last March, the US Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling that legally permitted the use of suspicionless roadblocks not necessarily close to the country’s borders.

Back in 2006, the ACLU determined that roughly two-thirds of the entire US population lives within 100 miles of the country’s border, making approximately 200 million Americans in places like Buffalo, Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle subject to warrantless and suspicionless searches.

“It is a classic example of law enforcement powers expanding far beyond their proper boundaries – in this case, literally,” ACLU’s Caroline Fredrickson told Wired for an earlier report.

Sec. Napolitano and the DHS have been sued at least once over allegations that the seizure of personal electronic belonging to a US citizen near an international border violated the Constitution of the country. David House, a founding member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, says his laptop and other devices were confiscated without reason while returning to the US from Mexico in November 2010. According to legal filings, House was grilled about his association with Manning, an accused Army whistleblower arrested six months earlier, and WikiLeaks, the website Manning is alleged to have supplied with hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables.

by the El Reportero’s wire services

Felipe Calderón

As poverty increases, some 203,000 investors share 40 percent of Mexico’’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to the newspaper La Jornada, which quoted the latest report from the National Banking and Assets Commission (CNBV).

The newspaper noted that 0.18 percent of the population has assets worth 80.1 million dollars (6.3 billion Mexican pesos), whose capital grew six times more than the economy as a whole, with a sustained increase of 13.8 percent.

La Jornada added that 12.2 percent of Mexicans have become poor over the past six years, while few investors in the local stock market increased their assets to the equivalent of 40 percent of Mexico’s GDP.

That percentage accounts for the value of all goods and services produced in the country in one year at a market price.

The newspaper reported in mid 2012 that the socalled patrimonial poverty had increased from 45.5 million to 57.7 million during the six-year term of then President Felipe Calderon.

FARC-EP:Peace talks going well

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’’s Army (FARC-EP) reiterated on Sunday that the peace talks with the government are going well, and urged to support the process.

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Shortly before resuming a new round of talks, which will end the current cycle of negociations, guerrilla member Ricardo Tellez stated that the parties will continue discussing the first item on the agenda, which refers to rural development.

For both the FARC-EP and the government of President Juan Manuel Santos, the land issue is a essential to find a solution to a decades-long armed conflict.

Rural development is the first point on a six-item agenda created as a basis for the talks, which include other topics such as guarantees for citizens’ participation, the end to the armed conflict and the solution to the problem of illegal drugs.

From Havana’s Conference Center, the permanent venue for the talks, the in surgency representative also called to “isolate the warmongers, to the open and hidden snipers of peace.”

The matter of the talks, the possibility to end the conflict, is on the table, and here the FARC are putting muscle, nerve, and people, he said.

According to Tellez, the guerrillas are still waiting for Simon Trinidad, who is a member the delegation to the talks, although he is doing a 60-year prison sentence in the United States, to where he was extradited in 2004. Trinidad “is needed at the table” and “we are waiting for the government’s response to the serious prison situation our comrades are facing,” he added.

Regarding the soldiers captured by the FARC-EP in Colombia on January 25, Tellez said the release of the prisoners is going well.

From Latin News: Oviedo’s death shakes up Paraguay’s electoral race

One of the most influential figures in Paraguayan politics over the last two decades died in a helicopter accident on 2 February. Retired General Lino César Oviedo Silva was on the campaign trail ahead of presidential elections on 21 April. His death could have a decisive impact on the outcome of these closely contested elections, which are being billed in the wider region as essential to put Paraguay back on a democratic footing after the contentious impeachment of President Fernando Lugo last June.

by Mike Adams

Modern children are being poisoned like never before in the history of human civilization. No wonder the rate of autism in America has skyrocketed to 1 in 88 children over the last few decades, putting autism squarely in the “epidemic” category.

But don’t expect any CDC action on this epidemic. The CDC knows full well why autism rates are exploding across America, but instead of admitting the truth, the CDC is running a cover story to protect the corporate interests of the real culprits: the medical corporations poisoning children for profit.

However, they’re also being poisoned in other insidious ways that suppress free thinking, assault good health and crush children’s souls.

Here’s my list of the ten worst ways in which our children are being poisoned right now.

1) Multiple vaccinations that inject mercury, aluminum, MSG and formaldehyde into children

It is an admitted fact that today’s vaccines given to children are intentionally formulated with mercury, aluminum, MSG and formaldehyde, all of which is insanely injected into the body of infants and children. This is openly admitted by the CDC itself, which has emerged as a criminal front group for the vaccine industry.

Rather than trying to determine why vaccines are causing so much autism, the CDC tries to hide the evidence to protect the criminally-operated vaccine industry where nearly every single vaccine manufacturer operating today has been found guilty of multiple felony crimes.

2) Mercury fillings Astonishingly, dentists in the USA continue to fill children’s mouths with the most toxic heavy metal known to man: Mercury

They don’t call it mercury because that would raise too many questions. Instead, they call them “silver amalgam fillings.” But the No. 1 ingredient in these fillings is the heavy metal mercury.

3) School lunches that use toxic processed food ingredients, including sodium nitrite

School lunches continue to serve our children a toxic cocktail of chemical food additives, partiallyhydrogenated oils, chemical preservatives and even cancer-causing color fixers like sodium nitrite. Sodium nitrite causes pancreatic cancer, colon cancer and brain tumors in children. It is intentionally added to hot dogs, sausage, bacon, pepperoni, lunch meats and nearly all processed meats.

A nation that eats sodium nitrite on a regular basis will have sky-high rates of cancer as a result. School lunches are also filled with GMOs which we now know cause huge cancer tumors in animals.

The USDA, which is already in bed with Monsanto on the regulatory side, also buys masses of genetically engineered food to be used in school lunch programs.

4) Television programming that poisons children’s brains with messages of materialism and inadequacy

Television was invented as a way to educate and uplift the population, but it has become dominated by commercial interests who brainwash children into worshipping materialism and being manipulated into into feelings of inadequacy. The point of this is to push sugary cereals, action figures, toys and junk foods into the minds of children so that they nag parents into buying it for them.

Virtually all Saturday morning television, for example, has devolved into a “nag factor manipulation matrix” designed to brainwash children into begging their parents to purchase consumable items that generate profits for corporate advertisers.

5) Public education that teaches revisionist history and toxic ideas about society

American children are being insidiously poisoned by public schools and all the atrociously damaging ideas those schools teach. Many schools are now teaching what is essentially socialism or even communism. They attack and ridicule students who believe in the founding principles of America: patriotism, the Bill of Rights, individual liberty and the U.S. Constitution.

Students are also now being microchipped and taught that they are slaves of the state. Just recently, in fact, several students were suspended from Kearney High School for painting the American flag on their chests for a lyp-sync music video project sponsored by the school.

6) Toxic personal care products made with cancer-causing poisons: Shampoo, skin care, toothpaste, air fresheners, laundry soap and more

Children everywhere are being bathed in toxic poisons from all their personal care products, including soaps and shampoos, laundry detergents, fabric softeners and even toothpaste. Most personal care products are loaded with cancercausing synthetic chemicals.

Laundry detergents bathe children’s clothing in cancercausing chemicals which are then worn by the children and absorbed into their bodies. When children become teens, the toxic burden is increased even more through deodorants, makeup and cosmetics, perfumes and colognes.

7) Toxic hydrofluosilicic acid dumped into the water supply after being mislabeled “fluoride”

Children are being wildly poisoned by the dumping of hydrofluosilicic acid into the water supply. This is incorrectly called “fluoride” but it’s actually a toxic byproduct of the chemical fertilizer industry or aluminum smelting industry.

As Natural News has proven, fluoride is sold as an insecticide chemical and a metals smelting chemical. It is one of the most toxic substances yet discovered, which is why it kills insects so effectively.

Fluoride is so toxic that dumping it into a river or stream in the United States would be considered an act of ecological terrorism. Yet, somehow, it is legal to dump it into the water supply of human beings who then urinated it back into the rivers and streams where it poisons the environment.

8) Toxic indoor air environments at homes and schools: Formaldehyde, molds, glues and synthetic pollutants

Indoor air pollution is a significant source of toxic chemical exposure for children. Carpets, paints, wood floor and even furniture all give off toxic fumes that can promote cancer and aggravate allergies.
Many homes, schools and commercial buildings are contaminated with toxic molds that are also ingested by infants and children. Even hospitals circulate potentially deadly superbugs that can kill children.

9) Video games

Video games teach boys that violence is normal through the relentless assault of ultra-realistic first-person shooters that put players in the position of violently murdering other human beings.

These games desensitize children to the real world, and they train children to grow up and join the military. Some of the most popular games are actually engineered and published by the military as recruiting systems for teens.

10) Mind-altering psychiatric drugs

One of the greatest crimes against children today is found in the realm of psychiatry. That dark art of anti-medicine pretends to “diagnose” children with “disorders” which are then claimed to be treated by mind-altering psychiatric drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac.

The entire industry of modern psychiatry is a criminal drug ring conducted for the sole purpose of generating profits by treating children as pharmaceutical disposal objects.

The most effective group fighting this today is the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), www.CCHRint.org.

I have also recorded and produced a music video on the psychiatric drugging of children which you can see on YouTube, as I’m also an activist rapper. See more of my songs and music videos at www.Amethios.com.

Here’s the video for S.S.R.Lies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ByIPNNO-Fw&feature=player_embedded.