ICE Wants Our Emails

When a government agency comes to an internet service provider demanding information about Americans because of what they have said on social media, the provider should discard the demand, close the door or hang up the phone.

The government is not entitled to rummage through the political opinions, associations, criticisms and angry rhetoric of anyone merely because a government official finds those opinions offensive, threatening to an agency’s reputation or inconvenient to its mission.

Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dramatically expanded its monitoring of social media platforms and has issued administrative subpoenas seeking information identifying users whose posts have criticized ICE. The reported investigations have included Americans and aliens who have not been charged with crimes.

An administrative subpoena is not a judicial search warrant or a grand jury subpoena. It can be issued by one government official to another for investigative authorization; or to an entity legally subject to the issuing agency such as from bank regulators to a banking institution.

Absent that unique regulatory relationship, because there is no intermediary like a judge or a grand jury between the issuer and the target of the subpoena, an administrative subpoena is of no legal significance when issued to a person outside the government or because of speech.

The federal government does not possess a general police power to investigate people because of what they think, believe, say, read, write or post. The feds only possess powers delegated to them by the Constitution. Those powers do not include the authority to create a political surveillance apparatus designed to discover who dislikes them.

The government cannot investigate speech; only genuine crimes. And when a particular person is reasonably suspected of committing a particular crime, the government has investigative tools at its disposal.

But that’s fundamentally different from starting with someone’s speech and asking: Who is this person? Where does he live? Who are his friends? What other accounts does he have? What else has he said?

The proper law enforcement sequence is crime first, suspect second, investigation third. The government cannot constitutionally begin with protected expression and work backward in search of a crime.

In order to commence all federal government investigations, the Constitution requires articulable suspicion that an identifiable person has committed an identifiable crime. A vague government assertion that a social media post is concerning, hateful, extreme, anti-government or potentially disruptive to government operations is not legally sufficient. Otherwise, every person becomes a potential investigative subject simply because he has a keyboard and an opinion.

The First Amendment exists because government officials cannot be trusted to decide which opinions are acceptable.

This applies with particular force to political speech, which is at the heart of the First Amendment. The government may not investigate people simply because they condemn its policies, despise its officials, advocate abolition of an agency or use coarse and inflammatory language in expressing their political views.

And that means hate speech.

“Hate speech” is a moral and social description, not a constitutional category of unprotected expression. The First Amendment does not disappear because speech is hateful. Nor does it disappear because someone hates the government.

All in America have a constitutional right to say that the government is evil. They have a right to say that its officials are tyrants. They have a right to call government agents whatever words come to mind. They have a right to demand that an agency be abolished. They have a right to express hatred of government itself.

The First Amendment was written to protect these sorts of expressions.

The Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has repeatedly emphasized the extraordinary protection afforded political advocacy. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, all innocuous speech is absolutely protected and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to rebut or challenge it. Stated differently, even advocacy of unlawful conduct generally cannot be punished unless it is directed toward producing imminent lawless action and imminently produces it.

https://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2026/08/23/ice-wants-our-emails/

Some military barracks ‘chronically neglected’ due to $285 billion in maintenance backlogs, GAO finds

The Department of Defense does not request enough funding to fully meet its installation maintenance and major improvement needs, a Government Accountability Office report found.

The department sought to fund 90% of its maintenance needs, but the GAO found that the services continue to request funding for only about 80% of their needs, according to the report released Friday. The funding shortfall led to an estimated $285 billion of maintenance backlogs in fiscal 2025.

“DOD has not fully determined the risks to its mission and to the quality of life of its personnel as a result of not meeting its funding goal,” the report reads. “Fully determining and communicating these risks would provide better information to DOD and Congress to weigh budget priorities.”

GAO authors examined Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force military installations across the U.S. and its territories for this report.

The report found that the department does not request the full amount of maintenance funding as recommended by its Facilities Sustainment Model, which estimates the average annual sustainment funding requirement for facilities based on their size, location and other factors.

This contributed to the increased backlog of deferred maintenance needs. Even though in 2014 an Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics memorandum was issued to establish a goal of funding regular maintenance at 90% or higher of the amount estimated by the Facilities Sustainment Model, the GAO continues to find that the services are not meeting that goal.

Instead, the Army, Navy and Air Force requested about 80% for fiscal years 2017 through 2020. The Marine Corps requested funding decreased from 80% to 40% over the past five fiscal years, opting to fund more facility restoration and modernization projects in exchange for reduced sustainment funding, the report says.

Maintenance and improvement projects’ backlogs can contribute to service members’ quality of life and negatively affect installations’ missions.

“By requesting less funding for installation maintenance and improvement projects than its models and experts recommend, DOD has chosen to accept some degree of risk that mission or quality of life will be negatively affected,” the report says.

In past reports, the GAO has found that barracks maintenance were “chronically neglected” and resulted in poor conditions of enlisted service members that affected their quality of life. Thousands of service members lived in substandard barracks, with some hosting potentially serious health and safety risks, a 2023 report found.

Of the 31 recommendations issued in 2023, the department implemented 19 as of April 2026. But many remain unaddressed, such as establishing an oversight structure for barracks, the report says.

The GAO found that challenges in hiring and retaining key maintenance workers are seen in remote and isolated locations and other obstacles include private sector employment competition as well as federal hiring, pay and work eligibility practices.

Military departments have not fully identified the extent of maintenance workforce shortages or created plans to address the hurdles.

The GAO also found that installations rely on maintenance work order data systems to respond to needs, but the tracking is limited and the data is generally unreliable for determining the effectiveness of maintenance performed across the services.

In the report, the GAO made 13 recommendations, including strengthening departmental oversight, determining risks associated with funding maintenance below levels proposed and improving maintenance data reliability.

The department fully or partially concurred with 12 recommendations and did not concur with one.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/08/21/some-military-barracks-chronically-neglected-due-to-285-billion-in-maintenance-backlogs-gao-finds/

Britain is ‘participating in and intensifying’ Ukraine conflict – Kremlin

The UK has greenlit plans to give Ukraine classified data to allow it to produce long-range missiles domestically

Britain is directly participating in the Ukraine conflict and actively working to prolong it, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, after London announced it would grant Kiev access to classified technical information needed to assemble long-range cruise missiles domestically.

The UK government has authorized European defense manufacturer MBDA to release classified information concerning British-made components for SCALP, the French-produced version of Britain’s Storm Shadow. The air-launched missiles use shared French and British technology and have a range exceeding 250 km.

The move was confirmed by Downing Street on Monday and by Prime Minister Andy Burnham personally during his visit to the Ukrainian capital on the same day.

“The UK was the first to gift long-range weapons to Ukraine back in 2023,” he said, referring to deliveries of Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles. “I am pleased to confirm today that I have approved” Kiev’s request to share the missile-production technology as well, the prime minister added.

Responding to the announcement, Peskov said Britain is “participating in this war on the side of the Kiev regime” and is “methodically and regularly adding fuel to the fire and scheming to prevent any development of the peace settlement process.”

“Our armed forces are carrying out the relevant work and obtaining the necessary data in order to identify the production sites for such missiles and other military equipment, and are taking measures to destroy these locations,” Peskov added.

London said the decision to release the information would allow “the French and Ukrainians to move forward with the Ukrainian assembly of the missile.”

“The Ukrainian people should be in no doubt: The UK is behind you today and for as long as it takes,” Burnham said ahead of his visit to the Ukrainian capital, where he met with Vladimir Zelensky and chaired his first meeting of the ‘coalition of the willing’, established by Britain and France under his predecessor, Keir Starmer.

Moscow has maintained that the UK and other suppliers of weapons to Kiev are directly responsible for the deep-strike campaign, which it says has frequently hit civilians.

According to the Sunday Times, drones manufactured by BAE Systems and another unnamed British company have been used to hit targets in Russia over the past six months, including two oil refineries. The UAVs reportedly include the Nyan, a jet-powered drone produced by a BAE Systems subsidiary.

In a statement last week, the Russian Embassy in London called the UK “an accomplice and co-perpetrator of the bloody crimes and terrorist attacks” committed by Ukraine. It warned that “the deeper its involvement in the conflict and the greater its support for Kiev’s terrorist machinery, the higher the price it will pay.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that London will face consequences if it continues supplying drones used by Ukraine for strikes deep inside Russia.

“We have every right to regard the proudly proclaimed direct involvement of British missile forces in strikes against Russia as participation in the war, with all the consequences that entails,” Lavrov said.

https://www.rt.com/news/644572-uk-give-ukraine-classified-data-missiles/

>>24970202

>boomers are dumb af

got easy street life and let the devils inside the gate for therest of us

>>24970208

go fuck yourself entitled fucktard

>>24970282

Ivanka Trump talks about her conversion to Judaism with GOP megadonor Miriam Adelson at an Israeli-American Council event during Trump's first term.

"I never normally talk about this, but we're amongst friends…"

"I actually converted before [Jared and I] became engaged…"

I wonder how much of an influence this had on Trump's philo-Semitism?

https://x.com/infolibnews/status/2092035656767984105