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Gate Rape: Your Government’s TSA Molestation Program

by Carla Gericke
written by Carla Gericke

This is my post-TSA gate rape face.

Why? For about a decade, I opted out of the scanner, but a few years ago, I had such a shocking experience–the female agent literally stuck her finger into my lady parts–that I started to “obey.”

My last defiance is doing a double bird–FU fingers in the air–in the scanner.

This has resulted in interesting verbal exchanges.
TSA agent: “I saw what you did in there.”
Me, leaning in: “Good.”

Today? They claimed my nether regions–ensconced in leggings–“alerted”.

Total bullshit.

Probably retaliatory.

I’ll keep zapping the bird, but if I get another “random alert” resulting in another traumatic gate rape experience, I **will** sue.

Rights not asserted are lost.

I have the Constitutionally protected right to flip off Big Bro. And they don’t get to stick their dirty statist fingers up my cooch in retaliation. (As I’m writing this, I recognize that there is deep-rooted trauma this experience has exposed. I will try to write a more comprehensive essay later.)

Then you see stuff like this, and it makes you go, Hmm.

This post generated a lot of social media interest.

I decided to make some GROK art… let’s call it a new category: TSA MOLESTATION ART. I didn’t have time to tweak these to perfection, but you get the gist.

UPDATE 12/26/24: I have come to the conclusion I carry trauma from an experience in South Africa after returning from Brazil, traveling without a diplomatic passport for the first time in my life, and my dress was too short and my bobby socks too long, and that meant I was supposed to grin-and-bare-it while getting molested in a room with 3 “Paspoort Beheer” men.

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The Panopticon is Coming to Manchester, Unless We Stop It DOA

by Carla Gericke
written by Carla Gericke

The MPD are at it again with a super, super creepy program to turn every neighbor into a government spy. Listen to this word salad from the FUSUS site (literally, Fuse Us, like the Panopticon): “Fusus is an open and unified intelligence ecosystem that integrates and enhances all public safety and investigations assets for law enforcement, first responders, and private security personnel.” <— please note the “stakeholders” are NOT THE PUBLIC AT ALL.

Here’s the UL article. We need to kill this DOA.

“Manchester homeowners, businesses and just about anyone with a security camera would be able to feed their video to Manchester police under an information system under consideration by the department.

Police said video feeds would be integrated and used in real time to assist officers who are responding to a crime. It also could save time for detectives, who now have to approach people and ask for their security camera video while investigating a crime.

Department leaders gave an overview of the Fusus system to the Manchester Police Commission and a police community advisory board on Wednesday.

“The owner of the camera decides what the police can see and cannot see,” said Lt. Matthew Barter, the chief of staff to Police Chief Allen Aldenberg. For example, Manchester schools are considering limiting their feed to high-priority calls.

The system has been implemented successfully in Atlanta and Minneapolis, he said. No other New Hampshire municipality uses the system, but New Hampshire State Police use it in a limited fashion, he said.

The first step would be to channel the feed of 285 city security cameras into the system. The cameras capture the interior and exterior of city-owned buildings such as libraries, City Hall and fire stations. The Manchester school board would have to approve school feeds into the system.

Barter said police are unveiling the system to community groups and are formulating a policy for its use. This summer, police expect to bring it to Manchester aldermen for approval.

He did not know the cost but said it would likely have to be funded by a grant or city-authorized debt.

Privacy questions

The public-private nature of Fusus concerns Carla Gericke, a Manchester resident and liberty activist.

“It’s a backdooring of the surveillance state,” said Gericke, the board chairman of the Free State Project.

While police are coming up with more ways to surveil people, they are taking steps to keep information secret, Gericke said, citing scrambled police radio transmissions and interviews with body cameras, which are exempt from Right-to-Know disclosure.

Gericke sued Manchester police in 2019 over the installation of a surveillance camera in downtown Manchester, a suit that she lost.

Barter said he realizes that questions will arise regarding surveillance and civil liberties. He said a balance has to be made.

“We know we have challenges in this state. We’re not like other states that put cameras up everywhere,” he said.

Officials said no one will be sitting at a desk monitoring video feeds without reason. When a crime takes place, a dispatcher will be able to access feeds from neighborhood cameras.

The camera owner will have to pay $250 for the hardware that allows a four-camera feed, Barter said.

Those who don’t want to pay for the feed can opt to register their security camera with the police. When a crime takes place in their neighborhood, police will send them an email asking for video from a certain time frame.

That saves time for detectives, who otherwise would have to knock on doors and ask for a feed, said Sgt. Emmett Macken.

“I don’t think I’ve ever knocked on the door, and they said, ‘We’re not giving it to you,’” Macken said.

Alderman-at-Large June Trisciani, a member of the advisory panel, said the system has prompted a response when mentioned at recent neighborhood meetings.

“People want to help, and this is a way to help,” she said. But she said police will have to warn homeowners where they can’t point their cameras — for example, at a neighbor’s back yard.

Some aspects of the system:

• FususAI can search feeds and find descriptions entered by police such as “backpack” or “red truck.” Barter said that does not involve facial recognition, and descriptors cannot be employed that involve race or ethnicity.

• FususAlert amounts to a panic button and would allow people with an app to start sending a feed into the police station. For example, a teacher could trigger that app.

• FususTips would allow someone to text a photo or video from a social media feed or other source.

• FususVault would store video needed as evidence in a trial.

Barter said a Manchester policy would require that a case number or call number be associated with every saved video, and every click into the system would be logged.

The Manchester Police Commission, a citizen advisory board, would review the activity logs on a regular basis.”

https://www.unionleader.com/…/article_515f5dd1-4c4e…
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Who Owns You? A Question to Grapple with in Times of COVID-Overreach

by Carla Gericke
written by Carla Gericke

Have you ever stopped to wonder… Who owns you? If you’re glib, you’ll, of course, say, “No one,” or, perhaps, “Me! I own me.”

Okay, but if you are not “allowed” to do what you want, when you want, based on your own perception and understanding and knowledge of a particular situation, or, even, no knowledge at all, and are forced, BY ORDER of another human being, to NOT DO WHAT YOU WANT to provide for yourself, your family and friends, then… WHO OWNS YOU?

Why do I believe in Liberty above all else? Beside the moral aspect of only *I, myself* am able to decide *for me about my life,* I believe you always get the best outcomes in the shortest amount of time when human freedom flourishes. When you allow people to pick and choose what works best for them, you allow experimentation, which in turn gives us information, which gives us better, faster results.

Free people = better lives.

When you eliminate Liberty, bad things follow. When you subjugate yourself to unelected “experts” and allow their opinions to form the basis of “government orders” against the people of your own state, forcing them into one single approach, **regardless of our differences,** you not only reduce and/or eliminate that experimentation and nimbleness afforded by free people freely deciding how to live their lives, you actually become a slave to someone else’s decision matrixes, you become a slave… To a state government that now claims to have the “authority” to pick who does what when WITH PRIVATE BUSINESSES, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and supposedly FREE HUMAN BEINGS…

Again… who owns you?

Know how you get people to stay inside during a pandemic? THERE’S A PANDEMIC. The governor failed New Hampshire by choosing tyranny over Liberty.

I realize Sununu had difficult choices to make, but he chose wrong out of the gate by not choosing to respect us, me, YOU, his fellow citizens and by ignoring the founding principles of this nation and state. He chose wrong by choosing to DICTATE instead of LEAD.

As is typical for a politician, there was a lot of nudge-nudge wink-winking that happened at the start. Subtle, “don’t worry,” we’re just going to designate everyone as “essential,” and this “order’s enforcement” won’t have “teeth.”

Well, let me tell you a little something about how Liberty vs. tyranny works… When you issue “orders,” you are empowering law enforcement to… enFORCE ORDERS, which is kind of what they like to do… Which means…

It has taken less than a month for the police to start harassing parents on playgrounds. It has taken less than a month for law enforcement to threaten NH surfers. It has taken less than a month for police departments to start issuing policy statements explaining how they will go about arresting people who are outside (e.g. see Weare PD).

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, and the Attorney General of the United States of America agrees with me, telling you to leave the public IS NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL lawful ORDER and if you are arrested in New Hampshire re this, PLEASE contact me.

(They’ll initially charge you with the catch-all “disobeying an officer” and then drop the charges later, and you’ll have to sue in federal court for violation of your civil rights, but I’m pretty sure–although, of course, no guarantees about anything, you’re reading an opinion on the internet–qualified immunity isn’t going to work for them, and law enforcement may be held *personally liable* too.)

I will be at the rally at Noon today 5/2 at the State House in Concord. I hope you will join me. No matter what your government tells you, WE ARE ALL ESSENTIAL.

Yes, even–nay, ESPECIALLY–us, the hard working, healthy, responsible taxpaying portion of the state… And it might behoove the “order-makers” to remember that!

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Press Coverage of ReOpen NH

by Carla Gericke
written by Carla Gericke

NH Journal:

It is possible to be concerned about the virus, and the economic downturn, and the destruction of our civil liberties. I am, which is why I attended the rally on Saturday. I don’t underestimate the virus, but I also don’t underestimate the cost of the shutdown or the dangers of trading liberty for a false sense of security.

Life is about tradeoffs, and when you use faulty data to implement faulty “solutions” — restricting peoples’ natural rights, instituting a lockdown to “flatten the curve,” and dividing Granite Staters into “essential” and “nonessential” groups — bad outcomes must follow.

Carla Gericke (see full article)

Granite Grok:

Our caution (and lack of widespread testing of antibodies) has carried a huge economic toll. For every person in the US who has died with the virus, 1000 people have lost their jobs. We don’t know how bad it might have been if we had done nothing. At this point, we should ask if we are willing to put another 30 million people out of work in the US when we could justifiably focus on reducing death due to heart disease or other infectious diseases. Also, consider that this virus is not going away – ever. As long as there is life on earth so will be this virus. It would be nonsense to think we can socially isolate our way to zero infections. Instead of forcing society to hide from it, we need to learn to live with it within reason.

Our national policy for this matter was created with good intentions and recognizing legitimate risks. We knew very little about the virus and what might happen. That’s not the case now. The curve is flat. Our hospitals are not overwhelmed. The mortality rate is 1/10th what we thought. At this point, there is not enough uncertainty to justify continuing to destroy the economy and the government intrusion of our liberties. The burden of proof for lifting the restrictions should no longer be on us. Instead of forcing us to prove the infection rates will drop, the government should be obligated to do widespread testing of antibodies in NH and prove that it is still a problem.

This coronavirus is still 10 times worse than the flu so I’m not suggesting we drop all caution. The data does suggest that we should be able to resume most of our activities with a cautious approach while not being sloppy. By now everyone has learned the basics of proper hygiene and many people will be slow to recover from the intense media blitz. Those at risk should take extra caution, just as with any other infectious disease. The other 98% of the population should be able to move forward and rebuild from this disaster. Before we know it we will find that the new normal is the same as the old normal.

Dan Moriarty (see full article)


Fox News:

Manuse told Fox he believes the individual should be allowed to determine what restrictions are best for them.

“I think that that works a lot better than a top-down approach where the governor is telling everybody ‘one size fits all, this is how it’s going to go,'” he said. “That’s authoritarianism. It’s never worked before in any other country. And it’s not going to work in the United States or New Hampshire.”

Andrew Manuse (see full article)

Union Leader:

“The economic engine that provides food, beverages, clothing, shelter, and every modern convenience to the American people took more than a century to build. Yet, at the stroke of many a governor’s pens, the dangerous servant that is government has become a fearful master now poised to destroy our way of life in the name of safety.

The coronavirus did not cause this problem where the cure has become worse than the disease. Centralized government power has stripped us of our ability to manage our own affairs, and it by no means can dictate how we should rebuild them. It is time for the governor and others to step out of the way and let people go back to work so their free enterprise and ingenuity can meet the needs of those who are suffering.”

Former State Representative, Andrew Manuse (see full op-ed)

Manchester InkLink:

Carla Gericke, a Republican state Senate candidate from Manchester, said she attended.

“I went as a concerned non-essential Granite Stater and Republican State Senate candidate (District 20) who believes the government’s response has resulted in the prevention being worse than the cure. The government does not have the right to pick economic winners or losers, nor force us to stay in our homes, especially not when, here in Manchester at least, NOT ONE city employee has lost their job or even been furloughed. Clearly, we are NOT ‘all in this together.’”

Gericke described the crowd Saturday as “an interesting mix of people, from health freedom activists to Free Staters. I didn’t really get an overt partisan slant, it wasn’t ‘Trump-forward’” although there were some.

“There were teachers and nurses and moms, there were politicians and state representatives and masked armed dudes, there were laid-off workers, a few people who have been deemed essential but wanted to show their solidarity, and many who have lost their jobs and want to get back to work,” Gericke said.

She said she went because “at least 124,000 Granite Staters have been put out of work– that’s the population of Manchester and Amherst combined, and that’s a devastating blow to our state’s economic health which we will feel for a long time. Many small business owners will never recover. I went because my favorite Manchester restaurant, the Turkish restaurant Matbah, shut down permanently.”

Gericke said she takes the virus seriously.

“But I am also very concerned about the destruction of the economy with all its  knock-on negatives like increased suicides, more substance and domestic abuse, children dying by the hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries, and I worry about the expansion of authoritarian government policies without proper oversight or citizen control,” Gericke said. ¨If they can lock us down on the say of the W.H.O. now, what is next?”

Carla Gericke (see full article)
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Cameras will “Enable Government to Violate Statute,” So Let’s Authorize Them, Court Rules

by Carla Gericke
written by Carla Gericke

As many of you know, the ACLU-NH has been fighting on my behalf to try to stop permanent police surveillance cameras from being installed in downtown Manchester. Yesterday, I received a court order denying our request for declaratory and injunctive relief, which in plain English means: the City won this round, the police will likely put up their cameras, our rights will continue to be eroded and disregarded with the full authorization of the Courts, and, apparently, we should just accept the stripping away of more and more of our 4th Amendment rights.

The Court said:

It could be argued that the City’s planned use will enable the government to violate the statute. However, simply because footage generated by the cameras could be used to violate the law does not mean the installation or use of the cameras itself violated the law…

The Court cannot find as a matter of law that the planned use of the surveillance cameras will violate RSA 236:130 [Highway Surveillance Prohibited]. Instead, the Court can only speculate that, once the cameras are installed, a government employee reviewing the footage will be capable of engaging in additional conduct that will violate the statute. Accordingly, plaintiff’s motion for summary judgement is denied.

Neal Kurk, et al vs. City of Manchester Docket No. 216-2019-CV-00501

By the Court’s logic, every single current pre-crime statute should be invalidated. You know, the ones where they say you MIGHT do something bad in the future, like crash your car if you’ve been drinking, so we will punish you right NOW, even though you didn’t actually do the thing we’re trying to prevent… Yet. (Or at all.)

The Court also failed to fully consider the legislative history, which you may recall, included this testimony from Dpt. of Safety Assistant Commissioner, Earl Sweeney in 2006, that the law would ban a police department from “setting up cameras to monitor, for example, the downtown business district to detect or deter burglaries, vandalism, drug dealing,” and, “Some police departments set up cameras to monitor downtown businesses… we do not believe that this usage would be allowed in NH without specific legislation at a future time legalizing it.”

Given this, it is safe to say we should no longer rely on the truthfulness of testimony given by government agents during the legislative process. Along the same vein, we should also not trust the MPD’s contention that they will not use facial recognition software or license plate scanners. I am willing to bet any comers they will secretly start using this technology in the future, and if the cameras go up, I encourage anyone who is in a vehicle and issued a citation or arrested in the vicinity of the cameras on Elm Street, to contact me.

While this case revolved around a narrow point of law relating to a specific statute, 82% of Granite Staters voted last year to increase our privacy rights, which tells me this matter isn’t over by a long shot.

Right of Privacy: An individual’s right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.

Article 2-b, New Hampshire Constitution, December 5, 2018

I’ll conclude with the following: If you believe government can solve problems by restricting more and more of our rights and making us less free in the name of “security,” why do all stories set in the future revolve around people fighting their dystopian overlords? If the future is so bright in this Brave New World, where are the depictions of their promised land? Where is this awesome future society where, by “giving up liberty for security,” things turn out to be oh-so great for us plebs?

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: When you watch futuristic movies, who are you rooting for? In the Matrix, are you rooting for Neo or Agent Smith? In the Hunger Games, Team Katniss, or District 1 of the Capitol? Because, right now, if you aren’t on my side, you are rooting for tyranny, and it is NOT going to end well. Free people move freely. Free people certainly move freely without being surveilled by a group of people who claim to work for us while also keeping a secret list of their worst people from us.

Want to learn more? Read the backstory here, here, here, and here. Listen to my podcasts on this topic, Living with Lockdowns, Big Brother is Watching, and You Don’t Need to See This List of Bad Cops, Citizen.

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Manchester Surveillance Cameras in the News

by Carla Gericke
written by Carla Gericke

I’m working on a summary of yesterday’s proceedings regarding the City of Manchester’s proposed plans to put up several surveillance cameras downtown. In the mean time, here’s today’s coverage from local media sources…

WMUR:

We want more privacy,” plaintiff Carla Gericke said. “We want the government’s role to be limited and restricted as it’s constitutionally supposed to be. Let’s not turn into a big brother Orwellian surveillance state.”

Union Leader:

Gericke, a liberty activist who has sought state and local office, said she would have no issue with a storeowner installing a camera and voluntarily sharing video with police. ‘Everyone’s working together. That’s a decentralized approach,’ she said. ‘What we’re talking about here is a very centralized approach where it’s centralized in one group of people’s hands. We don’t know really what’s going to happen to the data and I think it’s naive to just say we should trust them.’

Manchester Ink Link:

Carla Gericke, president emeritus of the Free State Project and a Manchester activist who led a protest against the cameras last April outside City Hall.  She is concerned about the cameras having a chilling effect on future protests. She questioned whether the cameras would record future protesters and if the police would use the information to make a database of trouble-makers and renegades.

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