Trump Regime Is Targeting Anti-Trump Facebook Users

Slowly but steadily the Trump/Pence regime is edging towards authoritarian policies.  Now, with a swing vote on the Supreme Court who views presidential powers akin to those of a monarch, the pace may accelerate.  The narcissistic Trump cannot tolerate criticism and increasingly, in a style like that of Putin and other dictators, wants to stifle opposition and resistance to his toxic regime.  One of the first ways to do this is to silence dissidents or, better yet, find a means to prosecute them.  Freedom of speech quickly goes down the toilet and only officially approved propaganda is free from risk of government interference.  Opposition political organizing likewise is stifled,  These are things Trump and his sinister Vice President favor.  Thankfully, the ACLU is defending Facebook users being targeted by Der Trumpenführer's Department of Justice.  Fortune looks at the ominous efforts to shut down opposition. Here are excerpts:

The Justice Department is trying to force Facebook to disclose information about thousands of people who “liked” a page opposing president Donald Trump.

The DoJ wants to access all the information from the profiles of three activists connected to the “DisruptJ20” protests on the day of Trump’s January inauguration. The protests turned violent in part and, with a couple hundred people having been charged over the Washington, D.C. riots, the authorities are going after online information relating to DisruptJ20.

One of the three being targeted by the DoJ, Emmelia Talarico, was an administrator and moderator for the DisruptJ20 Facebook page, since renamed “Resist This.” According to a legal filing by the D.C. branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the information being sought about that page would include personal details of thousands of other Facebook users who interacted with it.

The page was “liked” by an estimated 6,000 people before Feb. 9, when the DoJ secretly hit Facebook with search warrants. Although the page was public, the department is also after details of those who said they might attend events organized through the page, or who merely reacted to content shared from the page.

The ACLU is representing Talarico and the other two activists, Lacy MacAuley and Legba Carrefour, in the case. It argues that the DoJ is after too much information about the three — their entire Facebook activities covering a 90-day period — and is trying to share this information too widely within the government.

“The primary purpose of the Fourth Amendment was to prevent this type of exploratory rummaging through a person’s private information,” said ACLU lawyer Scott Michelman. “Moreover, when law enforcement officers can comb through records concerning political organizing in opposition to the very administration for which those officers work, the result is the chilling of First Amendment-protected political activity.”

Last month, the website-hosting provider Dreamhost revealed that the DoJ was seeking information regarding the DisruptJ20.org website, which ran off its servers. Following considerable pushback, the DoJ dropped its attempt to extract information about more than a million people who visited the site, but it did succeed in getting a judge to order Dreamhost to hand over other site data.

However, the court also ordered strict oversight for how the Justice Department could comb through the data it received, and forbade it from sharing the information with other government agencies. The ACLU is after something similar in the DisruptJ20 Facebook case.

And if you’re wondering whether Facebook pushed back against the DoJ, it did, at least as far as challenging the gag order that went along with the February warrants. The department dropped that element of the case earlier this month, allowing Facebook to tell Talarico, Carrefour and MacAuley that they were being targeted.

Be very afraid. 

Obama Rejects Trump Immigration Orders, Backs Protests

With the Trump/Pence regime embarked on a campaign that makes a mockery of what most decent moral people view as American values and likely appeals only to white supremacists and Christian fanatics, former President  has finally released at statement that (i) condemns Trump/Pence's anti immigrant actions, and (ii) applauds ad encourages the large scale protests taking place across the country.  No doubt Der Fuhrer will launch a twitter rant against Obama, but thankfully Obama is saying what needs to be said.  It is crucial that decent moral Americans begin to shout in one huge voice that Trump/Pence is NOT acceptable and that the majority of us condemn them and their policies. Despite his delusions of grandeur, Trump lost the popular vote and the vast majority of Americans did not vote for him.  He has no mandate and he is not above the law or the U.S. Constitution.  NBC News has details on Obama's statement.  Here are excerpts:

Breaking his silence only 10 days after he left office, former President Barack Obama backed nationwide protests against President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration Monday.

In a strongly worded statement issued through a spokesman, Obama said he was "heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country."
"Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake," he said.

Shortly afterward, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates — a holdover from the Obama administration — sent a memo to Justice Department lawyers ordering them not to defend the executive order against several legal challenges that were filed over the weekend.

The former president rejected Trump's contention Sunday that his executive orders restricting travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries were "similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months."

The 2011 order did not ban visas for refugees, who by definition don't travel on visas. It tightened the review process for citizens of Iraq and for refugees from the six other countries, while Trump's is a near-blanket order applying to nearly all residents and citizens of all seven countries.

It should be obvious by now to any sentient individual that if Trumps lips are moving, he's lying.