THE CHURCH MILITANT
Ephesians 5:11-"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them". This Christian News Blog maintains a one stop resource of current news and reports of its own related to church, moral, spiritual, and related political issues, plus articles, and postings from other online discernment ministries, and media which share the aims to obey the biblical commands to shed light on and refute error, heresy, apostasy, cults, and spiritual abuse.
The President-elect shares an update on the Presidential Transition, an outline of some of his policy plans for the first 100 days, and his day one executive actions.
Is there really "no religious rationale" for terrorism, as Barack Obama has said? Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch shows why that is a false assumption that leads to wrong and repeatedly failed policies.
Last Thursday, the British parliament passed a bill granting the government “perhaps the most extreme spying powers in the developed world,” according to the U.K. Independent. The bill will, among other things, require Internet service providers to retain logs of their customers’ Web usage for up to a year and make them available to government agencies upon request. It will also force technology companies to make electronic devices less secure so that agencies can hack into them.
“The UK has just legalized the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy,” tweeted National Security Agency whistle blower Edward Snowden. “It goes farther than many autocracies.”
The Investigatory Powers Act, aptly dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter” by critics, is the latest version of a bill that the government has been trying to pass for years. A previous version, the Communications Data Bill, was prevented from becoming law in 2013. As usual, however, a government seeking greater power over the people it allegedly serves wouldn’t take no for an answer. Prime Minister Theresa May reintroduced the bill a year ago when she was Home Secretary, and it passed both houses of Parliament with, as the Guardian put it, “only token resistance.”
“In 20 years that I’ve been dealing with surveillance policy in this country I have never seen a more docile parliament,” Gus Hosein, executive director of the nonprofit Privacy International, told the Financial Times.
It’s enough to make one wonder what the intelligence agencies — which, according to the Guardian, just last month were found to have been “unlawfully collecting massive volumes of confidential personal data without proper oversight for 17 years” — have on these lawmakers. They were, after all, concerned enough to add an amendment to the bill protecting themselves from the new intrusions they are foisting on their fellow citizens.
The New Statesman summarized the most horrifying of the bill’s provisions, saying it will:
Force your Internet Service Provider to keep your Internet Connection Record (ICR) — a list of services and websites you use and when — for 12 months.
Oblige communications companies to retain your communications, hand them over when served with a notice, and remove encryption when requested.
Create new rules about who can intercept your communications, i.e. who can read your messages.
Explicitly legalize intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the armed forces interfering with (i.e. hacking) electronic equipment — for example, by covertly downloading the contents of your phone or remotely accessing your computer.
Allow security and intelligence agencies to use these powers in bulk to obtain large numbers of data about a large number of people.
Create warrants for authorities to examine “Bulk Data Sets” — basically, a lot of people’s personal information — such as medical records and tax histories.
Although the government claims the bill is needed to combat terrorism — the last refuge of the 21st-century scoundrel — it’s not hard to see how such powers could be abused. The Financial Times wrote that “dozens of public organizations and departments” — including “the Food Standards Agency and the Gambling Commission” — “will be able to access your communications, in some cases without a warrant.” Intelligence agencies will be free to scrutinize data from “an unlimited number of people who are not suspected of any criminal activity,” the paper added.
“All of us want to be safe, and protected from terrorists and the like — but the evidence that these powers are all needed is thin indeed,” observed Julian Huppert, a former member of Parliament who helped kill the 2013 bill. “However, the cost to all of our privacy is huge.” The bill, he declared, “should terrify all of us.”
Then there’s the danger from forcing tech companies to create “back doors” by which governments can hack into electronic devices. These companies, in fact, were among the few vociferous opponents of the bill, with Apple telling Parliament, “A key left under the doormat would not just be there for the good guys. The bad guys would find it, too.” What’s more, the bill allows U.K. agencies to hack into devices all over the world, not just within their own jurisdiction.
“The passage of the Snoopers’ Charter through Parliament is a sad day for British liberty,” Bella Sankey, policy director for the U.K. civil-liberties group Liberty, said in a statement. “Under the guise of counter-terrorism, the state has achieved totalitarian-style surveillance powers — the most intrusive system of any democracy in human history. It has the ability to indiscriminately hack, intercept, record, and monitor the communications and internet use of the entire population.”
Defenders of the bill claim that numerous safeguards were added to protect individuals’ privacy. Huppert, however, suggested that only “a tiny handful of cosmetic changes were made” to the bill — “most infamously, inserting the word ‘privacy’ into the title of one section, rather than actually doing something to support privacy.” The Independent reported that the bill contains “measures that are still undefined and so could be used by the government to force companies to do almost anything.” And the New Statesman pointed out that while the alleged safeguards sound good, “there are endless problems in practice,” such as “vague” requirements for obtaining a warrant that “could be stretched to rubber-stamp a lot of dubious requests.”
In short, the nation that gave the world George Orwell is now erecting Big Brother yet paradoxically expecting to remain a free country. But as Liberty policy officer Silkie Carlo asked, “Has any country in history given itself such extensive surveillance powers and remained a rights-respecting democracy?” _____________________________________________________
Among other schemes, UN bureaucrats and establishment voices are calling for an international war on national governments that do not adopt pro-tax and anti-privacy policies demanded by globalists. A UN “expert” even claimed that tax competition among different jurisdictions — a key check on government abuses — was something that needed to be stopped by a newly empowered UN.
The United States, in particular, could be in the UN's cross hairs, along with other liberty-minded nations worldwide labeled by the UN as “tax havens” for not extracting as much wealth from productive citizens as the UN's tax-funded legions demand. Following the largely globalist-manufactured “Panama Papers” pseudo-scandal, the UN is at it again.
The latest demands come after years of globalist scheming to impose UN taxes directly on humanity, too. That would allow the dictators club to raise money independently, bypassing national governments. But as the public mood sours on globalism — as evidenced by Donald Trump's victory, Brexit, and survey results from across European polls showing anti-globalist fervor rising — the globalist agenda may face some serious setbacks in the years ahead.
The most recent globalist demand for greater UN powers over taxation came from UN “human rights expert” Alfred de Zayas (shown above), a Cuban-born “international lawyer,” who demanded “an international Tax Body to fight tax evasion and corruption, phase-out tax havens, stop competition among tax jurisdictions and abolish secrecy.” Translated into plain English, Zayas called for a new globalist UN bureaucracy with draconian law-enforcement powers, a full-blown assault on self-government and democratic principles, a UN effort to harmonize and rig taxation policy worldwide in favor of oppressive Big Government, and a total end to privacy. The policies would undoubtedly produce a collapse in prosperity, in addition to crushing liberty and self-government.
Despite the use of Orwellian double-speak aimed at concealing the totalitarian nature of the demands, Zayas was blunt in his demands, treating the UN as if it already were (in the words of the UN's outgoing secretary-general) the “Parliament of Humanity.” “The United Nations must no longer tolerate the scandal of secrecy jurisdictions that facilitate tax evasion, corruption and money-laundering,” complained the UN “Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order,” appointed by the dictator-dominated UN Human Rights Council, in a presentation to the dictator-dominated UN General Assembly about his report on the subject.
“Concerted action must be taken to counter criminal abuses by individuals, speculators, hedge funds and transnational enterprises who skirt taxes and loot governments,” Zayas claimed. “Corruption, bribery, tax fraud and tax evasion have such grave effects on human welfare that they must be exposed, prosecuted and punished nationally and internationally.”
In other words, bloated and increasingly despotic governments and international organizations need to fleece humanity to get more money from the productive sector. And so, the UN should demonize lawful strategies for reducing tax liabilities as if they were crimes, then grant itself awesome new powers to deal with the non-crimes and the non-criminals who perpetrate them. For any clear-thinking person, the totalitarian implications of the proposed power-grab should be obvious.
The radical globalist bureaucrat repeatedly conflated legal and desirable tax avoidance — which every sensible person and company does, and which is immensely beneficial to humanity by keeping capital in the productive sector — with criminal tax evasion, which is a crime. The self-styled UN “expert” claimed, for example, that “every year governments lose three trillion dollars through various schemes of tax avoidance and evasion, and hitherto most perpetrators have enjoyed impunity.” Impunity for doing something both legal and desirable? Only in UN- and totalitarian-speak do the rantings and ravings even make sense.
Zayas also cited alleged “estimates” that “as much as thirty-two trillion dollars are held offshore in secrecy jurisdictions, escaping just taxation.” “It is high time for the General Assembly to establish an inter-governmental tax body with a mandate to draft standards and ensure enforcement of measures against perpetrators,” he exclaimed, again equating law-abiding citizens with criminals and calling for what amounts to global government. The ultra-far-left bureaucrat also claimed that “the UN provides the most effective way to achieve an equitable global tax system, increase domestic resource mobilization and reduce intra-State and inter-State inequality.”
Echoing the extremist rhetoric of UN Agenda 2030, a road-map to global totalitarianism that stands zero chance of U.S. Senate ratification but is expected to cost more than $170 trillion, Zayas openly called for not just national socialism, but international socialism. In the last hundred years, of course, national and international socialism combined have resulted in the deaths of well over 100 million people, on the extremely conservative end of the spectrum, without including the wars started by national and international socialist regimes.
In short, the “independent” UN bureaucrat, like many other mid- to low-level globalists, is openly promoting deadly, extreme, and violent ideologies that threaten taxpayers and citizens everywhere, all with taxpayer funding on a taxpayer-funded platform. The reason he can get away with promoting violent extremism is simple, when considering that he was appointed to his post by the discredited UN “Human Rights Council.”
Rather than fight back against every new totalitarian scheme dreamed up by the UN and the globalist establishment behind it, Americans should push for a complete U.S. government withdrawal from the UN — an Amexit. The American Sovereignty Restoration Act would do exactly that. With Trump declaring on the campaign trail that the UN was not a friend to the United States or to freedom, and with the UN making more ludicrous and autocratic demands by the day, the time has never been better for Americans to demand a permanent end to U.S. participation in the dictators club.
