Well, no surprise, instead of actually delivering mail, the Postal Inspection Service is now worried about scanning for “inflammatory” content. Not actual crimes mind you, but people trying to protest or organize rallies. And not just any protests, like the “peaceful” protests last summer, but any that would be considered “right wing.”
I predict that not only will the USPIS (yup, that’s an acronym only the government can get behind) not find a whole lot, but it will simply drive people underground. It’s too easy to simply not use social media to organize, and if you’re really smart, you’ll organize using something like Signal, which actively makes fun of government organizations trying to break its code and encryption. Anyone using Facebook to organize is a fool and won’t last long.
I’m not a fan of government abusing authority to monitor for non-crimes, so here are a ton of resources you should use to keep the Postal Service’s “elite” force from spying on your non-COVID friendly BBQ:
Identity and Privacy Guide. Yup, its a government site. For SEALs. Because lots of foreign governments want to use social media to identify and influence Special Operators. So you can use the same guide they do for keeping their information safe.
NCIS Social Media Handbook. Not as cool as the TV show, but this guide helps you secure most of the privacy settings on popular social media.
Identity Force Blog. A good read for actual outlines of how bad things happen online.
Ironically, none of these cover Parler or Gab, both of which are considered bad places to be, or so Wikipedia told me, and I would trust Wikipedia to never, ever lie to me.
Here’s the reality. While stupid people will use social media to organize and commit crimes, those are easy to find. I’m more worried about the people with real skills organizing off social media. Those people could plot high end crimes that we’ll never see coming. Those are people like the Unabomber, who unlike the fools on Facebook actually killed people and was difficult to track down. These people will require actual focus, time and effort to track down and stop, and that’s exactly what we aren’t doing when we waste time scanning social media.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
If you receive your news only from mainstream media outlets then you probably don’t know that Adam Toledo, a thirteen-year-old Chicago seventh-grader, was likely a member of the Latin Kings gang, a criminial organization whose reach is worldwide.
Toledo was killed in a police shooting at 2:30am on March 29, It was a Monday, which is what my parents called “a school night.” That night the young teen was with a 21-year-old, Ruben Roman, who was on probation for gun crimes.
Chicago’s former police superintendant, Garry McCarthy, places the blame on Toledo’s death on street gangs, not the cop shot who shot him. “They have the ‘shorties’ who they give the gun to,” McCarthy told WBBM-AM. Toledo apparently was one of those “shorties.” Youngsters such as Toledo, if caught, usually end up in the more lenient juvenile court system, although with Kim Foxx as Cook County’s prosector, the adult courts are quite lenient too.
Police officers were responding to a reports of gunfire in the Southwest Side Little Village neighborhood when they found Roman, who was quickly taken into custody, and Toledo, who ran. In a just-released police bodycam video, which is difficult to watch and contains profanity, it appears that about a second before he was fatally wounded, Toledo dropped his gun.
There have been scattered local media reports about Toledo’s reputed membership in the Latin Kings. A British newspaper, News Corp’s The Sun, has been quite direct. Of the national media that has spoken up, left-leaning “fact-checking” site Snopes classifies such speculation as “Research in progress.” But for the most part the big-time national media hasn’t reported about Toledo and his apparent Latin Kings ties.
To be fair the Chicago Sun-Times reported a few days after the shooting, “Chicago police leaders warned their cops that factions of the Latin Kings planned to retaliate following the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old. Gang members were instructed to ‘shoot at unmarked Chicago police vehicles,’ CPD warned.”
Chicago police leaders warned their cops that factions of the Latin Kings planned to retaliate following the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old. Gang members were instructed to "shoot at unmarked Chicago police vehicles," CPD warned. https://t.co/8va2IwLE9N
The national mainstream media clearly has another of their narratives to protect, in regards to this one, it’s that racist police officers are indiscrimanetly shooting members of the minority community, particularly young ones. Meanwhile, the Hey Jackass! site says as of today, 165 people have been shot to death in Chicago so far this year–and 759 others have been wounded. Of those killed in 2021, again according to Hey Jackass, over 90 percent of the victims were minorites. And finally, yet again according to the same source, there have been only eight police shootings in Chicago so far this year–three of them fatal.
Some people are unfairly blaming Toledo’s parents for his death. Good people sometimes raise kids who end up bad. Toledo was reporting missing by his mother on March 26, three days before his death, but he returned home the next day.
At 13 there was plenty of time for Toledo to turn his life around.
The Chicago Teachers Union, which for months has stubbornyl blocked school re-openings despite the fact that children are the least harmed age group by COVID-19, said in a statement, “Adam Toledo was loved. He was one of ours.” While students have been truant since the first schools took in kids, remote learning leads to even more of it. Chicago’s elementary schools only opened, part time, for in-class learning a few weeks before Toledo’s killing. The high schools re-open in a similar fashion only tomorrow. In February, the Centers for Disease Control, declared with safeguards, it was safe to re-open schools, even without vaccination.
The COVID-19 school lockdown continues in America’s biggest cities, despite clear evidence that children are unlikely to become seriously ill from that virus.
One unintended consquence of the closing of public schools to all but remote learning is more crime–and especially more carjackings.
It is no longer just conservative media calling attention to the link to the school lockdowns and carjackings in big cities. Although CBS was artful in its report in a story last week. “Investigators say the trend is driven by 12 to 15 year olds with time on their hands during the pandemic,” CBS News said. These kids have more time on their hands because their schooling consists of Zoom instruction something CBS omitted in its story.
Last month a 66-year-old UberEats driver, Mohammad Anwar, a Pakistani immigrant, died while clinging to his vehicle in Washington DC after being tased in a carjacking by two girls, a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old. A bystander took video of the crime–which has gone viral.
“You know, idle minds are the devil’s playground. And a lot of these kids, they’ve been idle for a year and a half now without going to school. And that’s been a big problem,” Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo told Fox News last week.
In that CBS story referenced earlier it was also reported, “The number of carjackings has exploded during the pandemic. Carjackings have increased by more than 100% in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Minneapolis. They are up more than 343% in Washington, D.C.”
Let’s look at Chicago. The pusillanimous nature of the local media creates an opening for straightforward sources. One of those news sites is Hey Jackass! and it reports the raw numbers of carjackings. Well sort of. Stick with me on this one. In 2019 there were 603 reported carjackings and 1,396 last year. So far in 2021 there have been 404. But here’s the kicker. “Carjacking data comes directly from the CPD’s own data set,” Hey Jackass! warns, “so add 20% to obtain the true number.”
There’s a lot of speculation about why carjackers commit their crimes. Thrill is probably one of them, but also often vehicles are carjacked to aid other crimes. Perhaps it’s a mix of the two. Just last night, another great local crime site, CWB Chicago, told us of a 55-year-old woman who was pushed to the ground inside a Target parking lot as her Audi was carjacked. The criminals drove away with her car and the one they arrived in, a Kia, which was likely carjacked near the University of Chicago a couple of hours prior. Percentage-wise since 2017 the arrest rate for Chicago carjackings has been in the single digits, according to Hey Jackass!
On April 19 Chicago’s public high schools are scheduled to re-open, although how that occurs varies from school to school. Of course the recalcitrant Chicago Teachers Union, citing new COVID-19 numbers, is opposed.
Once the school lockdowns end–and I believe they will one day–don’t expect the carjackers to give up their horrible hobby.
Businesses in Chicago, already suffering from 13 months of lockdowns, rioting, and looting, are receiving another hit. Suburbanites, for good reason, are afraid to travel to the city. And the carjackings occur in all neighborhoods, rich, poor, and in between.