TV News LIES

But today, Jackson County, Oregon says it owns YOUR rainwater, and the county has sentenced a man to 30 days in jail and fined him over $1500, for the supposed "crime" of collecting rainwater on his own property.

Much like California, Oregon is increasingly becoming a collectivist state. You didn't build that! The government built that! You don't own that! The government owns that! That rainwater that just fell on your land? That's the government's rainwater, and you're going to jail if you try to steal from the government!

The first systematic look at the New York police department's response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.

In a report that followed an eight-month study (pdf), researchers at the law schools of NYU and Fordham accuse the NYPD of deploying unnecessarily aggressive force, routinely obstructing press freedoms and making arbitrary and baseless arrests.

It's an audiotape the New York Police Department hoped you would never hear.

The caller, Salil Sheth, had stumbled upon one of the NYPD's biggest secrets: a safe house, a place where undercover officers working well outside the department's jurisdiction could lie low and coordinate surveillance. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the NYPD, with training and guidance from the CIA, has monitored the activities of Muslims in New York and far beyond. Detectives infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and kept tabs on Muslim student groups, including at Rutgers.

Most of us don't think much about it, but the truth is that people are being watched, tracked and monitored more today than at any other time in human history.  The explosive growth of technology in recent years has given governments, spy agencies and big corporations monitoring tools that the despots and dictators of the past could only dream of.  Previous generations never had to deal with "pre-crime" surveillance cameras that use body language to spot criminals or unmanned drones watching them from far above.  Previous generations would have never even dreamed that street lights and refrigerators might be spying on them.  Many of the incredibly creepy surveillance technologies that you are about to read about are likely to absolutely astound you.  We are rapidly heading toward a world where there will be no such thing as privacy anymore.  Big Brother is becoming all-pervasive, and thousands of new technologies are currently being developed that will make it even easier to spy on you.  The world is changing at a breathtaking pace, and a lot of the changes are definitely not for the better.

Few Americans would believe that the government has the technological capability and wherewithal to monitor, track, log, and analyze the everyday activities of American citizens. The idea that the National Security Agency, an organization responsible the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligenc, would operate on US soil to turn the surveillance apparatus on the people they are tasked with protecting has up until now been reserved for conspiracy theorists and Hollywood movies.

At a festival called Peacestock in Wisconsin last weekend, I met a woman who lives in Little Falls, Minnesota.  That city had forced her to take down signs in her own yard, signs that said "Occupy Wall Street," "Back the 99 Percent" and "Boycott Monsanto."

But Robin Hensel noticed that the city itself was displaying, in violation of the same ordinance, a banner reading "We Support Our Troops."