News headlines this week revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration “abandoned an internal proposal” to use surveillance cameras for photographing vehicle license plates near gun shows in the US to investigate “gun trafficking.” The automated license plate scanners take pictures of every vehicle that passes their field of view and record the information in a database that can be used to track a vehicle’s movements over time.
DEA emails detailed a planned cooperation between the DEA’s National License Plate Recognition initiative and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to scan and record the gun show attendees’ license plates.
The time and place mentioned in the email coincides with known information on the Justice Department’s Fast and Furious criminal gunwalking operation run out of the Phoenix ATF Field Division office, just two miles from the DEA office. The DEA has denied any involvement with F&F, but here we have evidence of close communication between the two agencies about illicit activities at the same time as F&F.
Although DEA and ATF claim they didn’t proceed with this, don’t believe for a second that Big Brother isn’t watching you, or that they aren’t breaking the law themselves.
And the civil case of former ATF agent Jay Dobyns against the ATF appears to be picking up steam, after revelations that ATF/DOJ evidently concealed evidence, made secret threats against witnesses, and conducted illegal surveillance of attorneys and witnesses, in what appears to be a criminal conspiracy, causing the judge in the case to say that he believed that Justice Department attorneys had “committed fraud on the court.”
The ATF and DOJ committing crimes? Who’da thunk it?
In a major development this week concerning discrimination in the provision of financial services and products to firearms related businesses due to “Operation Choke Point,” a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) program designed to pressure financial institutions to cut off those services, top FDIC officials admitted wrongdoing and said they would cease practices that had the effect of encouraging such disparate treatment.
But also this week, the Obama administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sent a bulletin threatening banks to be silent about the administration’s new programs supervising and investigating private bank account holders. Apparently under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act [Dodd-Frank Act], institutions can’t tell customers why they’re being cut off. Both Chris Dodd and Barney Frank are vehement anti-gunners.
