I managed to get hold of an email sent to the White House’s Office of Personnel Management yesterday, and here it is, as sent.
Category: Gummint
Surveillance
Seems as though you can’t do anything these days without being spied on by the fucking Government:
Recent revelations confirm that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has been aggressively expanding its use of facial recognition technology, raising significant concerns about mass surveillance and unconstitutional tracking of law-abiding gun owners.
For years, gun rights advocates have warned that the ATF’s use of facial recognition would lead to mass surveillance of American citizens—particularly those who exercise their Second Amendment rights. Despite repeated claims that the ATF doesn’t engage in biometric tracking, a 2021 Government Accountability Office report revealed that between October 2019 and March 2022, the ATF conducted at least 549 facial recognition searches.
Of course, it’s not actually the ATF doing this (a.k.a. plausible deniability):
The technology was largely powered by third-party vendors, including Clearview AI and Vigilant Solutions, both of which have amassed vast databases of billions of images scraped from social media, DMV records, and security footage. This means the ATF has been leveraging private sector databases to track and identify gun owners without their consent.
The full scale of this surveillance remains unclear, but newly surfaced documents indicate that the ATF has been working with FBI fusion centers, state and local law enforcement, and even foreign intelligence agencies to develop more comprehensive tracking capabilities.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be spied on by anyone, let alone these government thugs.
I don’t care that it helps “security” or any other such panacea. Take your snooping devices and go fuck yourselves.
That said:
Oh, and new-FBI Director / ATF Acting-Director Patel? Take a long, hard look at those “FBI fusion centers” and make them less malevolent — lest you too be labeled as just another government thug.
Information, we’re always being told, is power. And I want the government to have a lot less of both.
Quote Of The Day
“25 million individuals over age 100 remain in the Social Security database even though there are fewer than 100,000 people aged 100 or older alive in the U.S. today.” — DOGE
Let’s hear it for Gummint efficiency. And if it’s not inefficiency… then it’s fucking fraud, and the recipients of said fraudulent payouts need to go to jail.
And while we’re there, the people responsible for checking for and preventing such anomalies should be fired.
Not Revenge; A Reckoning
That lovely quote from the movie Tombstone came to mind when I read that Kash Patel was confirmed as FBI Director by the Senate.
I hope, nay even expect that there’s going to be some kind of Mass Resignation Event among the Fibbie senior management — and there fucking well should be.
There has been a lot wrong with the various alphabet agencies who are nominally charged with looking after the American people, in that they seem to have misinterpreted their remit as “looking at” the American people, much in the way that an owl looks at a mouse.
The FBI has proven itself to be particularly at fault because they’ve gone after concerned parents, Catholics and who knows who else in a totally misdirected — and I use the word advisedly — identification of harmless folks like these as “enemies of the nation”.
How they might regard gun owners like myself we will not speak, because the actions of their vaunted SWAT teams speak for themselves.
So Kash, ol’ buddy, get in there and start rooting out the assholes — I’m pretty sure you know who they are — and don’t content yourself with just firing them; prosecute all those worth prosecuting, just as they have unjustly done to otherwise-innocent people in the past. (Ask the President how it feels.)
And while you’re there, shut down the stupid departments like Human Rights, not because the motives behind their creation were incorrect, but because the people managing them ended up using those motives as a pretext for harassing and indicting people in the most aggressive and venal manner.
It’s called “turning the tables”, and I can think of no worthier targets than the people who initiated and carried out those actions. They have, in short, betrayed their public trust and caused the public to fear, loathe and despise them, and they deserve to be severely punished in consequence.
Quote Of The Day
From Insty, talking about this little concept:
“All those people complaining about DOGE as a threat to privacy — why is it okay for the government to know how much money you make and what you spend it on?”
Why indeed.
Small Beginnings
I submit these two little snippets for your enjoyment contemplation:
First: the I.R.S.:
The Trump administration has executed one of the most significant workforce reductions in U.S. history, targeting over 200,000 probationary employees across multiple government agencies.
It was first reported that Trump’s administration plans to axe around 9,000 jobs at the IRS, primarily targeting employees still in their probationary period. However, as many as 15,000 IRS workers have been identified for possible termination as early as next week.
The targeted employees, many of whom were added during the Biden administration’s expansion of the IRS, reportedly hold non-essential roles unrelated to processing tax filings.
One can only hope that this will end with the department’s complete abolition. I’m not kidding, either.
Second, the CDC:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is poised to lose roughly one-tenth of its workforce due to a Trump policy axing probationary employees as part of a larger effort of the Trump administration to cut the size and scope of government.
This reality comes as the Trump administration orders federal agencies to cut off probationary employees. That includes roughly 1,300 staffers at the CDC alone. Those employees, according to the Associated Press, are expected to receive roughly four weeks of paid administrative leave.
Let’s hope that the reduced CDC staffing means that those quacks will be going after actual diseases like smallpox and malaria, instead of inventing “epidemics” like accidental gun deaths and suchlike. (I’m hopeful, but not optimistic that this will happen; if it doesn’t, shut them down too and leave it to the states to deal with.)
Like I said, this is a good start, going after the low-hanging fruit (“probationary”, “non-essential”, FFS), but let’s not stop there.
