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BlogFrom the Desk of Bob BarrLiberty Updates

‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Prescription for Police Use of Force Would be Unworkable

by Liberty Guard Author June 18, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

JUNE 17, 2020

‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Prescription for Police Use of Force Would be Unworkable

Bob Barr

6/17/2020 12:01:00 AM – Bob Barr

The law enforcement reform bill introduced last week in the House by the Democrat majority – the “Justice in Policing Act of 2020” – contains a number of proposals worthy of serious debate and bipartisan support. However, where the legislation proposes detailed, in-the-weeds standards for the use of deadly force by police officers, it suggests a “one-size-fits-all” solution that would be utterly unworkable and, if implemented, lead to far more serious problems than it could hope to solve.

As to the positive aspects of the bill, for example the proposals for improved and increased training for federal law enforcement officers directly, and for state and local law enforcement indirectly through grants, should garner support from both sides of the congressional aisle and the president as well. A poorly trained officer is in many ways a problem waiting to happen.

The Justice in Policing Act also would reduce the “militarization” footprint of local police departments, by cutting back on the surplus military equipment the federal government has been providing to those departments for the past three decades; everything from fully automatic weapons to armored vehicles. This proposal would help to de-emphasize the military perspective of law enforcement in favor of the civilian, which is and must always be predicated on the Constitution and laws flowing therefrom.

Moving to rein in the use of “no knock warrants” by federal and local police – which very often lead to unnecessarily deadly confrontations – is another positive measure addressed in the legislation.

When the bill gets into the weeds of actual law enforcement, things become more problematic by virtue of its imprecise and overly expansive wording. For example, in seeking to outlaw “chokeholds” by police officers, the legislation declares that any “application [by a police officer] of pressure to the throat or windpipe” of a person being detained constitutes a violation of an individual’s civil rights. It is one thing to outlaw true and purposeful chokeholds; it is quite another to declare that any pressure to a person’s throat or windpipe provides the basis for a civil rights lawsuit against an officer.

Use of deadly force by law enforcement officers is a critical aspect of policing, and always subject to open, vigorous, and reasoned debate. More than other standards under which officers must operate, use-of-deadly-force reviews must consider the circumstances on the ground facing the officer at the very time he or she makes such a decision.

In respecting this, courts have long recognized that the standard by which such action has to be judged, is not an after-the-fact perspective buttressed by 20/20 hindsight. Rather, such force may be employed “when the officer has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

This “reasonable belief” standard may be viewed by critics as providing overly broad and lenient “qualified immunity” for the officer who uses deadly force. In point of fact, it does not immunize the officer from being held accountable for improperly using deadly force. It simply requires the trier of fact (judge or jury as the case may be) to consider the matter from the perspective of the officer’s “reasonable belief” of the dangers he or she faces at the time – not afterwards by some other officer or individual.

It is here that the “Justice in Policing Act” goes off the rails. For an officer’s use of deadly force to be held lawful according to the standards in this legislation, he or she would be judged not by their reasonable perspective of factors at the time, but by how some other law enforcement officer “would objectively conclude, under the totality of the circumstances, that there was no reasonable alternative to the use of force.” Try grappling with that as a juror, or in the first place by the police officer on the ground.

The bill’s language gets even more cumbersome and unrealistic. For example, the bill would require that “human rights organizations” (among other groups) will be consulted to develop further guidelines on the use of force by police officers, in order to ensure such actions are minimized against individuals who may be pregnant, who are “experiencing perceptual or cognitive impairments” (whatever that means), or who might be “suffering from a serious medical condition.”

The GOP would be well-advised to separate out the positive substantive reform measures in this legislation and work with the other side of the aisle to implement them. Republicans, however, should strictly avoid being seen as supporting the many red herrings lurking in the Democrat proposal, such as those relating to use-of-force standards.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7 District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990. He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

June 18, 2020 0 comment
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From the Desk of Bob Barr

What President Elizabeth Warren’s Cabinet Might Look Like

by Liberty Guard Author February 4, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

The Daily Caller

By Bob Barr



Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared at a campaign event last fall that for a person to be considered as her Secretary of Education if she were to be elected President, that candidate first would have to be interviewed and approved by a nine-year old transgendered student. Notwithstanding the sheer lunacy of such a declaration (made by the candidate with a straight face and to a round of applause from her audience), it got me thinking – applying such selection criteria to other positions, what might a Warren cabinet look like?

  • For the post of attorney general, the candidate would be vetted by a panel of convicted felons. This would help guarantee President Warren’s “top cop” would possess extensive, first-hand knowledge of how the federal penal system operates. It also would essentially guarantee we would have an attorney general whose dislike for law enforcement would fit the mold that seems to be the litmus test for Democrat Party candidates – supporting prosecutors who see the police rather than criminals as the bad guys.

  • Secretary of state candidates would have to pass muster by a panel limited to citizens of other countries — preferably countries whose leaders despise the United States and share the Obama administration’s “America last” world view. Advocates of this philosophy adhere to the mindset of today’s Democrat Party, which is that every serious problem facing the world in the 21st century has been caused by the United States.

  • The only candidates who could be considered by Warren’s transition team for the post of secretary of commerce would be individuals who previously worked for the federal minimum hourly wage. For far too long, secretaries of commerce have been people who have demonstrated success in the commercial sector. Many of these pre-Warren administration cabinet officials entered the office as “multi-millionaires” who, in Warren’s opinion, achieved that status only by climbing on the backs of hourly workers and gaming the system rather than through hard work.

  • For treasury secretary, Warren certainly would select someone whose understanding of economics reflects her own minimal knowledge in that field. The transition team panel interviewing for this cabinet post would consist of men and women who reflexively reject any market-based economic model. The field of candidates for this post would be limited to individuals who promise to implement only economic policies reflecting the deeply socialist economic principles espoused by Warren and her senatorial colleague Bernie Sanders. The panel interviewing candidates for this post likely would include a Venezuelan economist and a student who failed Economics 101.

  • The panel for the post of defense secretary in a Warren administration would include former President Jimmy Carter’s daughter Amy (who famously tutored him on nuclear policy just prior to a debate with then-Republican nominee Ronald Reagan in 1980), former Democrat presidential nominee Michael Dukakis (remembered for his knowledge of how to drive a tank) and a representative of the pacifist Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
  • For secretary of the interior, no panel or interview would be needed. Greta Thunberg would be Warren’s obvious choice from day one.

  • Considering the importance of “Medicare for All” as a cornerstone of her presidential campaign, Warren’s panel before which candidates for secretary of health and human services would be vetted would almost certainly include Stanford University School of Medicine research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford (of anti-Kavanaugh fame), the Right Honorable Matt Hancock — who serves as Britain’s secretary of state for health and social care, and the Honorable Patty Hajdu, who, as Canada’s minister of health, is responsible for our northern neighbor’s universal Medicare system (which drives so many patients to the United States for medical care).

  • While there are many more cabinet-level posts which a President-elect Elizabeth Warren would need to fill, no potential list would be complete without noting the panel to which she assuredly would turn to choose a director of the CIA – Rep. Adam Schiff, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and the so-called Ukraine “whistleblower” (who would, of course, remain anonymous in order to preserve his or her sanctified status).

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.



February 4, 2020 0 comment
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BlogFrom the Desk of Bob BarrLiberty Updates

Companies Join With Government to Erase Fourth Amendment Privacy Protections

by Liberty Guard Author January 29, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

Townhall.com

by Bob Barr

In years gone by there existed an understanding that one’s personal information surrendered to private companies was a voluntary choice – the “cost,” if you will, to obtaining the benefit of a company’s goods or services.  Importantly – and constitutionally – such a “trade off” was far different from the government obtaining personal and private information by way of surveillance or other information-gathering actions undertaken without a warrant.  

There was a relatively clear line between private company collection of personal information voluntarily provided, and the government gathering such information without one’s knowledge or consent.  Today, that “line” has been blurred to the point of near erasure.

Government officials, of course, have never been short on creative ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on unreasonable and warrantless gathering of information.  We all are familiar, for example, with the abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act procedures by previous administrations, whereby the federal government was able to unlawfully surveil U.S. citizens’ private communications.  Some of us also may recall the FBI’s use of Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” technicians to browse computers for illegal content while on service calls. 

But with the digital age have come new opportunities for companies and government agencies alike to spy on citizens. 

The rise of social media and other technological advancements — geo-tracking and at-home DNA testing — have led to an explosion of highly personal information shared openly with third parties — and in turn, government agencies as well. Like throwing chum in the water to attract sharks, this treasure trove of data in the hands of private companies has caught the attention of government agencies at all levels; especially law enforcement agencies suddenly freed from the strictures of the Fourth Amendment. 

While some companies, like Apple, have at times put up a principled fight against such incursions, despite backlash from the Department of Justice, most others have shown little hesitancy to cooperating with government agencies. 

Earlier this year, one of the largest at-home DNA testing companies, FamilyTreeDNA, was outed for voluntarily helping the FBI with criminal investigations, without notifying its customers of how their DNA samples were being used. Just this month, a company called Clearview AI boasted it had scraped three billion facial images from public sources, including from social media, to create a facial-recognition product, which it happily shares with law enforcement.

While users may trust that a company or app will protect their data, recent revelations of the cozy sharing relationship between companies and the government prove that such trust is badly misplaced. Even what many people might consider nominal and unimportant data points, such as photos or geolocation information, can be harvested, bundled, and databased in ways that far exceed what is expected, or known, by the users – data over which the original collection company loses control once shared with other companies or government agencies. 

Today’s privacy reality is that it is now impossible to draw a distinction between data harvesting undertaken by the private sector, and that of the public sector. The only realistic assumption must be that any data collected by third parties in the private sector can, and at some point, will, be subjected to law enforcement investigations regardless of when that information was first shared by the consumer, or under what privacy policies. 

The willingness of companies in the private sector to cooperate with law enforcement officials has become the new norm. Absent meaningful state or federal statutory protections of consumer data explicitly stating this data is off-limits to law enforcement without a warrant, this trend will only worsen.

Any breach of personal privacy is a danger to individual liberty, but the true threat is the consolidation of these breaches over time, eventually leading to a comprehensive profile of every citizen that includes information such as DNA profile, facial recognition, health and financial histories, online activity, and real-time location. This is, after all, precisely what China is doing with the massive “social credit” system it is quickly implementing for its entire population. You can bet social media companies and internet search engines in our country are paying rapt attention to how that process unfolds, and explains why these companies are opposed to even the most basic legislative reform proposals.

January 29, 2020 0 comment
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Uncategorized

Bob Barr on The Ingraham Angle

by Liberty Guard Author January 28, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 28, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Former US Attorney & Clinton Impeachment Manager, Bob Barr, on Impeachment

by Liberty Guard Author January 28, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 28, 2020 0 comment
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Blog

Schiff’s Concerns About Rigging The 2020 Election Are Real, But Misdirected

by Liberty Guard Author January 27, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

The Daily Caller

by Bob Barr

In one of his more outlandish pronouncements during last week’s never-ending impeachment managers’ Opening Argument in the Senate trial of President Donald Trump, Rep. Adam Schiff declared it vital that the President be found guilty and removed from office right now, because he has shown himself to be an electoral “cheater.” As seen through the hate-colored lenses by which Schiff and his Democrat Party view the political landscape, if Trump remains in office November’s election results cannot possibly be trusted.

While voters clearly have reason to be concerned about vote manipulation, it is not Donald Trump who should worry us; it is Google.

“Search engine manipulation effect” (SEME) has been familiar to behavioralists for several years. It is the process of manipulating internet users’ preferences through deliberate but subtle – more precisely, surreptitious – algorithmic changes in search engine preference rankings.  One way to achieve this is through the “autocomplete function” that search engine Google provides users to facilitate their searches; directing them based on secret algorithms and user history.

The autocomplete function used by internet search engines completes a search term or phrase being entered by a user before the user deliberately completes it himself or herself. In this way, the search engine interposes its search preferences for those of the user, in such manner that the user is not consciously aware of such manipulation. While the vast majority of instances in which a search engine engages autocomplete are those in which the user is simply searching for a factual term or phrase (e.g., “the Bill of Rights was ratified in what year?”), there is far more room for the search engine to subjectively direct a user when the query is more open-ended or includes a hot-button political term or name of a candidate.

Extensive research by Robert Epstein, a self-described center-left supporter of Hillary Clinton, established that search algorithms utilized by Google had “suppressed negative autocomplete search results relating to Hillary Clinton.” This was described in a December 2016 article in The Guardian, but more recently Epstein testified last July before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution chaired by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, that “[i]n 2016, biased search results generated by Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.”

Epstein went on to testify that, “biased search results can easily produce shifts in the opinions and voting preference of undecided voters by 20 percent or more – up to 80 percent in some demographic groups.” Despite assurances in 2016 from Google that its use of algorithmic-based autocomplete processes are unbiased and designed simply to “prevent offensive terms, like porn and hate speech, from appearing” in a user’s inquiry, Epstein testified that “Google employees deliberately engineer” such processes “to change people’s thinking.”

Epstein also discussed the manner by which Google manipulated tens of millions of voters at all levels of government, through its selective “Go Vote” reminders; under the guise of performing a “public service.” He concluded his startling congressional testimony by noting that, “Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015.”

Epstein did not limit his expert testimony to simply identifying the problem of search-engine voter manipulation; he suggested a remedy. He recommended the federal government address this grave and worsening problem not by censorship, which some in Congress have endorsed, but rather by declaring the “database [Google] uses to generate search results .  .  .  to be a ‘public commons,’” accessible to other search platforms.  This would prompt and promote competition in much the same way a similar move decades ago against AT&T, ushered in an era of phenomenal and innovative competition in telecommunications.

Whether those in Washington will listen to non-partisan experts like Epstein and do something to rein in the uncontrolled manipulation of voters by Google and other search engines, remains to be seen.

However, if attention continues to focus on the specious, anti-Trump scolding of Adam Schiff and the Democrat Party in the lead up to this November’s election, the more likely it becomes that Epstein’s dire warnings of massive voter manipulation by Google and other search engines will in fact take place – which is, after all, exactly what the Democrats want.

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

January 27, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Clinton Impeachment Manager Reacts To Trump Defense Team’s Opening Arguments

by Liberty Guard Author January 25, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 25, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Bob Barr on PoliticKING with Larry King

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author
January 22, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Bob Barr on Bloomberg Radio

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

Guest host Greg Stohr, Bloomberg Supreme Court reporter discussed the lastest impeachment news with guests Bob Barr, former Republican Georgia Congressman and former House Manager for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and Bloomberg politics editor Anna Edgerton.

January 22, 2020 0 comment
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Media Appearances

Bob Barr on Savage Nation

by Liberty Guard Author January 22, 2020
written by Liberty Guard Author

https://t.co/qGZxBWz4No?amp=1

January 22, 2020 0 comment
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