Reverend Captain Kickass

Former national talk radio host, Comedian, Heavy metal guitarist, Parody song artist, and captain of himself

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

🚨 5 Stories the Media Already Buried:

1. 20 major banks, including BofA, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs are launching a joint stablecoin.

2. AG Blanche says ALPR camera's "don't violate Americans' rights" & calls Flock backlash "misinfo."

3. New Mexico AG sues Epstein’s lawyer and accountant, alleging Zorro Ranch abuse cover-up.

4. US Court of Appeals upholds Border Patrol airport phone searches without a warrant or probable cause.

5. Global dockworker strikes disrupt arms shipments and military supply chains linked to Israel's war in Gaza.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

More scary than any Halloween costumes or decorations.

[Dylan Allman @dylanmallman]

Sell your car for cash and deposit it, and your bank reports you to the federal government. Move $5,000 in a way a teller doesn’t like, and the bank can file a suspicious activity report on you. If anyone at the bank tells you it happened, they’ve committed a federal crime. You find out when your account gets closed, if you ever find out at all.

Banks spend $59 billion complying with the Bank Secrecy Act. They filed 28.7 million reports on Americans. Those reports tipped off 275 investigations.

It started in 1968, when a Texas congressman named Wright Patman held a hearing about secret Swiss bank accounts. Patman claimed Americans were using them for tax evasion, stolen Treasury bills, corporate kickbacks and securities fraud. His star witness, U.S. attorney Robert Morgenthau, told Congress that the millions of Americans vacationing in Europe were finding foreign banks ready to help them commit crimes.

Members of Congress warned that the bill would gut the privacy of bank customers, choke honest commerce and hand the Treasury Secretary far too much power. They were right. It passed anyway. Richard Nixon signed the Bank Secrecy Act in October 1970, twenty months before his own men were caught breaking into the Watergate.

Treasury set the reporting line at $10,000 in 1972 and has never moved it. That is about $80,000 in today’s money after inflation, so the net drops lower every year Congress does nothing. In 1986 Congress made it a crime to keep your deposits under the line on purpose, which means the line catches you whether you cross it or not. By 1996 banks were filing suspicious activity reports on their own customers for anything over $5,000 that looked off to them. After September 11 the Patriot Act bolted eleven more sections onto the law, and last year the GENIUS Act extended the same surveillance to stablecoins.

In 2012 banks filed 1,720 suspicious activity reports for every IRS investigation that came out of them. Over the next decade the reports nearly doubled and the investigations fell by half.

Last year FinCEN ordered businesses in thirty zip codes along the southern border to report cash transactions as small as $200. One small business estimated it would go from filing nine reports a week to 50,000. A federal court in Texas found the order likely violated the Fourth Amendment and said it was like using a blunderbuss to target a fly. FinCEN answered by raising the line to $1,000 and stretching it over 126 zip codes and 3.2 million people.

In 1974 Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in dissent that forcing a bank to photocopy your checks gives the government as much of a hand in the seizure as if it had sent someone to break into your home and copy them there. Even the justices who upheld the law warned that your financial records reveal your activities, your associations and your beliefs. Two years later, in United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not protect your bank records at all.

Repeal the Bank Secrecy Act.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

From one Captain to another, RIP Patrick Stewart aka Captain Jean Luc Picard.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

"The open air prison state is nearly complete. Don't forget to take your Soma."

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

Your smartwatch sends data on your heart rate, breathing, sleep patterns, and geolocation.

Your phone’s sensors and touchscreen document patterns that make up your behavioral fingerprint.

Your smart TV uses ACR to identify what you watch, then collects and monetizes your viewing habits.

Your car track your location and driving habits, while Flock ALPRs record where you drive your vehicle.

Your debit card creates a digital transaction record that logs the merchant location and time of day.

There’s no hiding anymore from the constant surveillance of today’s interconnected devices.

Every swipe, step, and spoken word fuels an invisible marketplace where you are the product, sold to the highest bidder, analyzed for exploitation, and locked in an endless loop where opting out is nearly impossible.

The digital prison is here. The bars aren’t metal, they’re invisible, but most won’t realize until it's too late.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

@deaflibertarian It is too much to ask - because the incentive for it does not exist.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

@naomibrockwell @MEGAprivacy *Swoon*

[Financial Physics @FinancialPhys]

Perfectly stated,

And, he has a British accent…

Unlike my American accent

This means take him more seriously

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

The IRS sent armed agents into a family bakery and drained $68,382 from its bank account.

Their “crime”? Depositing their OWN CASH in amounts under $10,000.

Then the government demanded ANOTHER $160,000 and a guilty plea to a FELONY.

The IRS called it “structuring”: deliberately keeping deposits small to dodge bank reporting rules.

DAVID VOCATURA: “I said to them, ‘Maybe I should get a lawyer.’ And they said, ‘You don’t need one, step in the back.’”

“Until the day they came in, I had no idea what structuring was.”

“I’m a law-abiding citizen. I can’t remember the last time I got a speeding ticket.”

Nearly three years after seizing the money, a prosecutor came back with a deal that carried up to FOUR YEARS IN PRISON:

DAVID VOCATURA: “They wanted us to pay another additional $160,000 in fines and plead to a felony charge of structuring.”

They refused.

You bake bread for three generations.
You pay your taxes.
You put your own money in the bank.
And the IRS treats you like a criminal, demanding nearly a quarter million dollars.

CONTEXT: Fortunately, the IRS didn’t get away with this one. Hours after the Institute for Justice sued, the IRS agreed to return all $68,382.22. Two weeks later, it withdrew a grand jury subpoena demanding eight years of the bakery’s business records. Crazy that they tried to ruin a business over depositing money into their own bank account.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

@brucefenton It'll be even more interesting if/when AI agents create their own cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

...and no, I ain't paying a god damn dime for the supposed privilege of writing more. Fuck you.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

@JasonBassler1 I didn't invent the term but have been using "Flocksuckers" where appropriate.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

@ClownWorld Uncommon Sense. It's the new phrase. Kinda like "Cognitive Stockholm Dissonance Syndrome". I feel like the language we use must evolve to more accurately describe things.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

...and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on ....

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

"The idea that because one device can track you, any other devices to track you are acceptable - is the thought process of the feeble-minded. This is how freedom dies."
-Me

[Orwell Day @OrwellDay]

They are hiding Flock cameras now, secret compartment found in speed radar box

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

⚠️ Flock charges $3,000 per year per camera.

There are 119,121 ALPRs mapped in the U.S.

$3,000 × 119,121 = $357,363,000 taxpayer $ spent to constantly surveil the same people paying for them.

You’re paying rent to your own panopticon.

[Jason Bassler @JasonBassler1]

The 5-Step Flock Cancellation Starter Pack™

✔️ FOIA Template

Force your city to produce contracts, invoices, hit rates, false positives. I already drafted the template.

https://t.co/wc37lguFB9

✔️ 8 Ways to Legally Take Down Flock

Legal pressure points. Bureaucratic chokeholds. Policy judo. Use their own paperwork against them.

https://t.co/3lUcMuAYDh

✔️ Expose Illegal & Unsafe Flock Installations

Most Flock cameras are installed wrong. Cities routinely violate federal and local safety standards when they install these things. Also zoning violations, ADA obstructions, even poles on private property.

https://t.co/zyloHYX6pX

✔️ Rate/Review Businesses Using Flock

If they want to spy on the public, the public gets to review the experience. Incentives work. Speak up.

https://t.co/isUkEuyP2P

✔️ 5 Flock Watchdog Sites

Crowdsourced intel on deployments, failures, misreads, abuses, and the cities already backing out.

https://t.co/e6FKGYumnr

Surveillance only works when you stay quiet.
Flock dies when we start asking real questions.

[Reverend Captain Kickass @KickassReverend]

Like the hydra, where you cut off one head and another grows in its place, that's how government works too.

[Naomi Brockwell priv/acc @naomibrockwell]

Vilifying Palantir or Flock alone is a trap.

They're just 2 examples of 1000s of surveillance companies.

The enemy is the entire warrantless mass surveillance industry, and that's what we have to dismantle.