March 9th

During last night’s meeting, the Pirate National Committee voted unanimously to endorse #ProjectNoCap.

#ProjectNoCap, a project spearheaded by Mr. Beat, aims to uncap the United States House of Representatives, which is currently capped at 435.

Instead of growing with the population as the House of Representatives was meant to, it was capped off and led to what we now have: a bloated system filled with career politicians who don’t respond to your emails or take you seriously.

The branch that was supposed to be most representative of the people in a district is currently not successful in that venture.

The goal is this: uncapping the house would lead to smaller districts (far less than the >700k residents per they currently work with), and thus more intimate representation.

As well, signature requirements, which are currently set to be near impossible for independents and non-DNC/GOP parties, would be drastically reduced and thus, in theory, far more achievable.

Importantly, more districts mean big money politics should be spread far thinner. No more will there be endless funds directed for or major party candidates; in theory, it should spread it so far thin that it should effectively help to remove big money from politics.

All credit goes to Mr. Beat for this project. Since New Year’s Day 2026, Mr. Beat has been emailing his representative, Tracey Mann, in an attempt to get him to introduce or support legislation, or at the very least, explain his opposition to such legislation.

Thus far, as has been the experience of many citizens in our capped-house reality, Mr. Beat hasn’t gotten a straight answer outside of a generic email, not actually answering the question.

In our never ending question to working towards opening up the government, putting individuals before institutions and getting money out of politics, we endorse this project as one that helps to work towards achieving all three.

Mr. Beat posted his email format for an easier copy-paste email. We will copy that below. If you wish to send an email to your representative about uncapping the house (and we encourage that you do), you may use the email below.

Thank you to Mr. Beat for this project, and putting this idea into the public consciousness. This is one, I believe, will make a major difference.

Whether that is in its successes, or in watching how our politicians neglect or ignore the idea, this project will produce meaningful outcomes.

Find your representative here.

Email:

Dear [REPRESENTATIVE NAME],

I am writing as a constituent to urge you to consider supporting legislation to expand, or “uncap,” the U.S. House of Representatives by increasing the number of members.

The House was designed to be the people’s chamber, yet today each Representative serves far more constituents than the Founders ever intended. When the House was capped at 435 members in 1913, the U.S. population was about 92 million.

Today it is more than 330 million. As a result, each Representative now speaks for roughly three to four times as many people as their early 20th-century counterparts.

This has made genuine representation more difficult, distanced citizens from their elected officials, and weakened public trust in Congress.

Uncapping the House would directly address this problem.

Smaller districts would allow Representatives to better know their constituents, conduct more meaningful oversight, and more effectively advocate for local concerns.

It would also reduce the disproportionate influence of money in politics by lowering the cost of campaigning and making grassroots engagement more viable.

Importantly, expanding the House is not a radical idea.

It aligns with the original intent of the Constitution, which anticipated periodic growth in the size of the House as the nation expanded.

In fact, the very first proposed constitutional amendment, promoted by George Washington himself and passed by Congress in 1789 but never ratified, would have established a formula for continual House expansion tied to population growth.

Finally, increasing the number of Representatives would make the Electoral College more representative and help rebalance power away from the executive branch by strengthening Congress as a deliberative body.

At a time when Americans across the political spectrum feel unheard and disconnected from Washington, expanding the House offers a practical, constitutional, and bipartisan reform to bring government closer to the people it serves.

Thank you for your time and for your service to [YOUR STATE]. I hope you will give this issue serious consideration.

Respectfully,

[YOUR NAME]

uspirates.org/endorsed-project…

ICYMI

Arizona – Signature collection was a major topic of discussion during last night’s meeting, and no sleep part of that was last week’s efforts in Arizona. In the days following their first rally, Blase was joined by leadership to assist in collecting signatures.
AZ Capt. Blase Henry and USPP Capt. Jolly Mitch
Pennsylvania – As announced last week, candidate Drew Bingaman suspended his campaign. The big piece of advice from last night’s meeting: take signature collecting seriously. As a candidate, make sure that is one of your top priorities.

Pirate National Convention – On June 6th, the United States Pirate Party will be celebrating 20 years at the 2026 Pirate National Convention in Boston, MA. Those interested in attending in-person should seek to make accommodations as soon as possible, as not only are rooms in the area filling up fast, but the time is quickly approaching. Those that cannot attend in-person are invited to join us via Jitsi, as is available every year. This year’s conference theme will be picked out in two weeks time.

#ProjectNoCap – During last night’s meeting, the board endorsed Mr. Beat’s #ProjectNoCap, which seeks to uncap the House of Representatives and encourages voters to write their Representatives to introduce or support legislation that uncaps the House of Representatives. Presently, Representatives represent >700k residents in every district. This project seeks to not only uncap the house, but serves as an important step in our never ending goals of opening up the government. A more detailed post will come later today regarding #ProjectNoCap.

Through the Spyglass – a new entry in the Through the Spyglass series, Until Everybody’s Free, released on International Women’s Day, looks at Fannie Lou Hamer and her extraordinary fight, as well as the institutions that put her down. In her honor, we remember the woman Dr. King called an “army of love.”

Check out last night’s meeting (which started 30 minutes late, sorry about that, live viewers!)

uspirates.org/icymi-updates-fr…

Not everyone in history gets remembered for their courage and their bravery. Not everyone who was courageous or brave gets their recognition, their flowers.

Sometimes that could be because of being contemporaries with someone more historically famous. Perhaps the shine from someone shines too bright and people miss the contributions of those around them.

One moment in time that is filled with such a type of tragic archetype is the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century.

While truly remarkable men like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X are often held up in high regards. Whereas someone like Dr. King was honored and remembered almost immediately following his assassination, others like Malcolm X saw their greater appreciation come only later down the road, even after meeting a similar fate.

Sometimes, however, fighters and champions of certain causes go unsung when the wheels of history turn past them. Malcolm X and Dr. King hold their place in the collective memory of the United States, but what happens to those whose struggle isn’t so easily discussed? What about champions whose stories don’t fit neatly into narratives and perhaps even contradict the story you’re trying to tell?

Well, today is International Women’s Day. What better time to celebrate than to talk about a truly remarkable woman who falls under that category and whose name has been buried?

Let’s talk about Fannie Lou Hamer.

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in Mississippi on Oct. 6th, 1917; the youngest of 20 children. She and her family were sharecroppers (the successor to antebellum chattel slavery) for the better part of her youth. It would get to the point where Hamer was picking hundred of pounds of cotton daily, and even had to drop out of school at age 12 to help support her family.

Fast forward to 1961, and Hamer receives what she and others called a “Mississippi appendectomy,” aka a nonconsensual hysterectomy, during a separate procedure for a uterine tumor, which was a common means of population control.

Being a black woman in the Deep South, Fannie Lou Hamer saw and felt some of the hardest experiences any U.S. American could ever imagine. In a nation that has climbed from the beginning “All men are created equal,” people like Hamer experienced a United States that treated them as second class citizens at best.

Well, as Fannie Lou Hamer would famously go on to say: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Hamer would go on to join the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. On August 31st, 1962, she and others attempted to vote but failed the “literacy test.” Her boss would fire her and her husband for the mere attempt.

Less than two weeks later, on September 10th, she was shot at 15 times in a drive-by shooting, perpetrated by racists.

As she continued to do throughout her life, she survived.

Trying and failing to pass the test on December 4th, she would get it on the third try on January 10th, 1963.

That same year, returning from South Carolina, Hamer and her cohorts would be arrested and beaten in detention over the course of three days.

Despite everything thrown at Hamer, she persisted. She would help to organize a mock election, the 1963 Freedom Vote, meant to education Black voters on how to vote, and go on to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a necessary move due to southern segregationists blocking her and other Black voters from getting involved in the Mississippi Democratic Party, in 1964.

Despite the national Democratic Party being the advocates of Civil Rights, the lived experiences of Democrat-controlled Mississippi proved national policy was not a blanket application.

At the time, Black voter registration in Mississippi was less than 10%; far lower than other states in the Deep South.

So, in the summer of 1964, she would help to organize “Freedom Summer,” a campaign to register as many Black voters in Misssissippi as possible.

Kicking off in June, the campaign wasn’t without tragedy. Almost immediately, James Chaney and New Yorkers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were ambushed and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Their bodies would be discovered over six weeks later on August 4th, 1964.

The tragedy was not uncommon for Civil Rights activists in the South at the time, but the murder of two white, Jewish northerners set off a chain reaction that demanded addressing.

Three weeks after the discovery of the bodies would come the 1964 Democratic National Convention. The MFDP would show up and demand their representation, on the basis of the Mississippi Democratic Party having broken the national standard’s rules be systematically excluding Black voters from the primaries.

Fannie Lou Hamer would go on to retell much of what I have told you up to this point: her story, her experiences as a sharecropper and in Mississippi in general. The painful, the hard-to-hear realities a Black woman in Mississippi would be forced to face. A life only made harder because she and others like her would fight to be treated and viewed as first-class citizens; as fellow humans. This was nationally televised, an incredibly important and impactful moment in history.

At least, it should have been. President Johnson would call an impromptu press conference with the sole intent of interrupting coverage of Hamer’s speech.

You see, her lived experiences were not only inconvenient to the national Democratic Party (the party of Civil Rights is actively stifling Civil Rights in the South), but uncomfortable for the predominantly White Southern Democrats in Mississippi and Alabama, who would end up walking out before the end of the convention.

Despite doing everything they were told, and following the rules laid out in front of them, the people on the ground, Hamer and the MFDP, were ultimately ignored in favor of the will of the party.

Vietnam factored in, it’s no wonder 1968 saw massive protests at that year’s Democratic National Convention. A party of platitudes but little action that refuses to listen to their youthful voter base.

(The more things change…)

Hamer, trying to tell her story, was silenced when it didn’t serve the interests of the Democratic Party institution. The plight of the oppressed that the Democratic Party was claiming to help fight for was instead having their voices silenced for raising awareness about how it is on the ground.

Not for nothing, everything you have read was instrumental to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Meaning Hamer, despite being a name often forgotten in recollection of Civil Rights history, played her role and changed the course of United States history.

Her place in history didn’t stop there, and her role in founding the Freedom Farm Cooperative and what that meant is a story for another time. But rest assured: Hamer was not finished after 1964.

A woman like Hamer and a story like hers is one anyone, no matter where you come from, could draw inspiration from. To come from object poverty, abhorrent living conditions, constant struggles, systemic oppression, medical malpractice and having to fight just to be considered an equal human being, Fannie Lou Hamer is as strong a human being as anyone, man or woman, that has ever existed.

Her story is not only important to highlight, and but an important lesson to take away from all of this as well.

When we in the United States Pirate Party talk about “Putting Individuals Before Institutions” in our platform, this is almost a perfect example of what we don’t mean.

Hamer was human. She bled like you or I bleed. The Democratic Party, as an institution, saw her as a token speaker when useful, and a dangerous threat to the narrative when not. They actively choose to silence her in favor of keeping up appearances and geopolitical partnerships within the Democratic Party.

We here in the Pirate Party see her as a tireless advocate of self-determination and greater humanity. We recognize the work she’s done in stripping away the systematic injustices put in place by the state.

And for those of you keeping score at home: she did it without ever winning a single election.

One of the most poignant quotes ever uttered comes from Henry George, “Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.”

Well, this International Women’s Day, take inspiration from a genuine hero of her day. A brave woman and, as Dr. King called her, an “army of love.”

Let no woman imagine that she has no influence. Whoever she may be, and wherever she may be placed, the woman who thinks becomes a light and a power.

uspirates.org/through-the-spyg…

Brussels has a knack for regulating through stealth and with far-reaching consequences simultaneously. The European Commission’s proposed reform of the Cybersecurity Act, informally known as “CSA2,” is no different. Published on 20 January 2026, the new draft regulation will replace the 2019 framework and enter into force together with a reform of the EU’s cybersecurity directive, Directive (EU) 2022/2555.

From Technical Update to Geopolitical Instrument

At first glance, it is a mere technical update. In truth, it represents a paradigm shift in the interplay between market access, digital sovereignty, and political trust in global supply chains. The proposed regulation introduces a new competence for the European Commission to qualify so-called “key ICT assets” in the sectors that fall under NIS2, and, more controversially, to qualify foreign suppliers as “high risk.” This is no theoretical categorization. It may trigger EU-wide bans, including exclusion from cybersecurity certification schemes, public procurement, and standardization activities. In the telecommunication sector, products from high-risk suppliers must be replaced within narrowly defined time limits. This is a structural risk for Brussels. The Commission argues that supply chains are no longer merely commercial networks but rather strategic infrastructure vulnerable to geopolitical pressure.

External laws requiring early warning systems for software vulnerabilities to national authorities, the absence of an independent judicial review procedure, or proof of malicious cyber activity may all be taken into account in a high-risk assessment. This is a clear extension of the debate, which was hitherto confined almost entirely to the 5G providers. CSA2 extends the debate to other areas. In this process, it enshrines a European ideal of digital sovereignty that is less about rhetorical moments on industrial policy and more about wielding regulatory muscle. But the ideal of sovereignty is a fraught one in the digital politics of Europe. The European Pirate Party, whose manifesto sees the digital revolution as an opportunity for democratic transformation rather than technocratic consolidation, has long argued that resilience must never come at the cost of transparency and basic rights. The Pirates’ program calls for open standards, accountability of state power, and robust judicial safeguards whenever digital governance is expanded. CSA2 does expand governance.

When Stronger Enforcement Meets Sharper Deadlines

The Commission will gain implementing powers to exclude certain actors from using specific ICT components or to specify mitigation measures that vary from supplier-transparency obligations to bans on remote data processing from nations outside of the EU. Non-compliance will incur fines of up to 7 percent of global annual turnover for the most serious infractions, a severity that matches the EU’s toughest enforcement instruments. The telecommunication sector will have sharper corners. Mobile network operators will have no more than 36 months to strip out components from suppliers that are deemed to be high-risk once a list is published. Fixed and satellite communications will follow a schedule that will be determined in further implementing decisions. The implication is clear: in strategic communications infrastructure, caution defeats gradualism. However, CSA2 also proposes to update the European Cybersecurity Certification Framework as established in Regulation (EU) 2019/881. Certification will no longer be exclusive to products and services. For the first time, it may also include an organization’s overall cybersecurity posture, maturity, readiness, and governance structures. This is a result of a broader regulatory strategy.

Cybersecurity is no longer a property that is inherent in hardware and software; it is a systemic property of organizations and, by extension, markets. The certification frameworks would be established by ENISA under the Commission’s mandate, with periodic reviews at least every four years. There would be little room for Member States to establish their own schemes if there are schemes in the EU. Harmonization and simplification are what the supporters of this regulation see. Centralization is what the opponents might see. ENISA is poised to take on a much bigger role. It is not only going to be responsible for the establishment of certification frameworks but will also be involved in EU-level risk assessments, administer the European Vulnerability Database under NIS2, and coordinate the EU Cybersecurity Reserve and crisis response efforts across borders, such as EU-CyCLONe. The challenge for digital rights campaigners is not that Europe needs improved cybersecurity. It clearly does.

How Security Ambition Threatens Democratic Safeguards

Ransomware attacks, state-sponsored hacking, and supply chain attacks have shown the weaknesses. The challenge is whether new powers like blacklisting suppliers, EU vulnerability registers, reporting mechanisms, are matched by similar robust safeguards on transparency, judicial review, and democratic oversight. The Pirate Party’s manifesto is crystal clear that the digital revolution must empower citizens and strengthen basic rights, not lock them into a permanent state of technological exception. CSA2 is not a surveillance bill. It is framed in industrial and security language.

But its architecture is part of a broader pattern: the progressive enhancement of regulatory and operational capabilities at the EU level in the name of resilience. The legislative procedure will now proceed to the European Parliament and the Council in the ordinary legislative procedure. The negotiations are likely to stretch into 2026. As amendments are tabled and compromises are struck, the debate is likely to polarize around familiar European divides-security vs. openness, sovereignty vs. global interdependence, harmonization vs. decentralization. In this debate, CSA2 will show whether the Union can build a more secure digital space without sacrificing the very values that made it a self-proclaimed global leader on digital rights in the first place.

europeanpirates.eu/europes-new…

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

The U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, all parties to which have abysmal recent records on press freedom, is sure to bring an escalation in censorship and retaliation against journalists. That makes it a perfect time (as it has been for over a century) to reform the Espionage Act, one of the primary weapons the government uses to stifle whistleblowing and war reporting. Read on for more.

The public deserves to know when Iran war reporting is stifled

Journalists covering the U.S. and Israel’s new war on Iran should be telling their audiences not only what they know but what they were prevented from finding out, and by whom.

That doesn’t just mean an occasional editorial bemoaning threats to press freedom. Those are valuable, but on their own, they turn speech suppression into a side issue. With an unprecedented censorship infrastructure surrounding this war, it’s anything but that. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern wrote about why reporting should include acknowledgment and explanation of how censorship impacts what the public sees and reads in each story.

• Read more

Florida should not get its own mini-CIA

If Florida enacts House Bill 945, it will create a national first — a CIA-style structure at the state level that blurs the traditional line between state law enforcement and intelligence work. And it likely wouldn’t remain a local experiment. Red states often borrow aggressively from one another’s policy playbooks, on everything from gerrymandering to anti-abortion laws to transporting immigrants to Democratic-led states.

Stern, along with FPF’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper and Florida First Amendment Foundation Executive Director Bobby Block, wrote for The Guardian that state-level intelligence offices empowered to scrutinize residents based on ideology are sure to be used against journalists.

• Read the op-ed

A judge finally called a newsroom raid what it is

When a judge orders a journalist not to publish a story, everyone recognizes it as a prior restraint — the most serious First Amendment violation there is, according to the Supreme Court, and one that has never been allowed against the press. But when the government kicks down a reporter’s door and walks out with computers, or seizes a news photographer’s equipment at a protest, that’s often seen as something different.

It’s not — in both cases, the reporter is left unable to publish news, which is the harm that the prohibition on prior restraints seeks to avoid. Magistrate Judge William Porter’s February order restricting how prosecutors could search materials seized from Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson recognizes this reality by treating the seizure of her materials, containing terabytes of data, source communications, and works in progress, as a prior restraint. We’ve been critical of other aspects of Porter’s order but he at least deserves credit for that.

• Read more

Assange case coming back to bite ‘conventional’ journalists

For years we warned that the Espionage Act prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, started by the first Trump administration and shamefully continued by the Biden administration, would lead to attacks on more conventional reporters, regardless of official claims that Assange wasn’t really a journalist so the press needn’t worry.

In the past two months, the federal government and its defenders have used the Assange case to normalize and defend everything from seizing Natanson’s devices in violation of federal law to accusing journalist Seth Harp of illegally “leaking” identities of government officials. FPF Executive Director Trevor Timm explained this troubling trend in a video (and we’ve got plenty of other great video content on YouTube).

• Watch it here

Help our SecureDrop team make our lives online more secure

WEBCAT, a new software tool under development at FPF, has just entered alpha testing. The goal of the project is to allow web browsers to verify the origin of code before they run it. By guarding against hacked web servers, WEBCAT aims to make our lives online more secure.

We invite adventurous web users to try out our Firefox browser extension, and web application developers to experiment with our new decentralized web domain enrollment system.

• Read more

What we’re reading

Nashville reporter who has detailed ICE activity detained in South Nashville stop

Nashville Banner
We don’t yet know if Estefany Rodríguez’s detention was in retaliation for her reporting, but we certainly wouldn’t be surprised. Immigration and Customs Enforcement abductions of immigrant journalists take the reporters best equipped to cover the agency’s activities off the beat.

Photographer indicted after Minnesota church protest coverage

U.S. Press Freedom Tracker
Junn Bollmann is the latest journalist charged for covering the same church protest that prompted the Trump administration’s outrageous arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. The Justice Department will likely lose these cases, and the journalists should sue.

Chicago appeals court vacates judge’s use-of-force injunction on immigration agents

Chicago Tribune
The 7th Circuit has apparently decided it’s in the business of correcting “injustices” no one asked it to correct. The one it chose to start with? An already dismissed order restraining violent immigration agents from assaulting journalists.

Prairieland ICE shooting trial jury gets closer look at ‘antifa’ materials defendants owned

KERA News
“Zines are really like this little atomic unit of freedom of the press with simple pamphlets that you just pass around. It begs the question of whether the prosecution believes that we should have a First Amendment in the first place,” said Lydia Koza, wife of defendant Autumn Hill. Also, read our 2025 op-ed on how the federal case in Texas threatens press freedom.

Some of the best news stories start with a public records request

Poynter
Nearly everything is fair game for a records request at public universities, “even the amount of money dining halls spend on ranch dressing,” write student journalists for Michigan State University’s The State News.

The New York Times takes the Pentagon to court

Columbia Journalism Review
The Pentagon’s media policy is “unconstitutional, but ... what they say after the fact makes their arguments even worse,” Timm said. They “admitted that they don’t care if people break this as long as they agree with them.”

Use our action center to tell Congress to pass Rep. Tlaib’s bill to fix the arcane and dangerous Espionage Act so the government can no longer treat whistleblowers and journalists like enemy spies.

• EMAIL CONGRESS

freedom.press/issues/press-mus…

When a judge orders a journalist not to publish a story, everyone recognizes it as a prior restraint — the most serious First Amendment violation there is, according to the Supreme Court, and one that has never been allowed against the press. But when the government kicks down a reporter’s door and walks out with computers, or seizes a news photographer’s camera at a protest, that’s often seen as something different.

It’s not. In both cases, the reporter is left unable to publish news, which is the exact harm that the prohibition on prior restraints seeks to avoid. Magistrate Judge William Porter’s February order restricting how prosecutors could search materials seized from Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson recognizes this reality. Porter treated the seizure of her devices, containing terabytes of data, source communications, and works in progress, as a prior restraint — a recognition long overdue, and one that courts have been notably reluctant to make explicit.

We’ve been critical of other aspects of Porter’s order. He should have required that Natanson’s materials be returned outright and should have sanctioned prosecutors for omitting the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — a law that prohibits exactly this kind of raid in most circumstances — from their warrant application. He admitted the Trump administration has a track record of falsely claiming national security threats, but deferred to them anyway. But at least he framed the issue correctly before his anticlimactic conclusion.

There’s actually an argument that seizures are worse than orders not to publish. Traditional prior restraints are so nakedly unconstitutional that news outlets sometimes opt to just ignore them, dare the court to hold a journalist in contempt of court for reporting the news, and publish anyway. That happened in Colorado, where a reporter from BusinessDen defied an order to return court records the court itself had released. The judge backed down.

But you can’t choose to ignore a seizure and risk contempt. When the FBI has your hard drives, you don’t have the option of printing the story anyway.

Plus, a traditional prior restraint targets specific information that the government claims (almost always falsely) poses some kind of extraordinary threat, the most famous example being the Pentagon Papers. A seizure of a modern journalist’s devices captures everything from stories in progress to research notes to contacts, most of which have nothing to do with whatever law enforcement is investigating. The seizure of Natanson’s materials likely killed far more stories than any targeted court order ever could have, which also increases the potential chilling effect among other journalists’ worried about losing not just one scoop, but all of their hard work, by publishing materials that upset the government.

The seizure of Natanson’s materials likely killed far more stories than any targeted court order ever could have.

Florida journalist Tim Burke faced the same predicament. Agents raided his Tampa home in 2023 and walked out with essentially every piece of equipment in his newsroom. The seized data included reporting that had nothing to do with his purported crime of violating computer fraud laws by publishing newsworthy information (outtakes of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ye, formerly Kanye West, where the recording artist went on antisemitic rants) that he found on an unencrypted website.

The seizure was, for all intents and purposes, an indefinite prior restraint on his First Amendment right to report and publish newsworthy information. The government prevented Burke from reporting for more than nine months before even indicting him. Then the indictment sought forfeiture of his computers, claiming that his reporting in progress was criminal “contraband,” an argument the government is now floating in Natanson’s case as well.

The raid of the Marion County Record is another example. Police in Kansas walked out with computers, phones, and reporting materials, forcing the newspaper to pivot in order to publish its next edition on time. It makes little difference to the impacted journalists whether the government says “you can’t publish this” or “you no longer have what you want to publish.”

Less dramatic infringements can have the same effect — journalists covering civil unrest, for example, might be working with a single phone or camera. Seizure of those devices stops them from publishing their coverage (and potentially exposes their sources) just like a newsroom raid. The latter are relatively rare, but the former happens all the time.

Porter is not the first to recognize this dynamic. The Supreme Court has said that seizures of materials protected by the First Amendment run “the risk of prior restraint” and can’t be justified by probable cause alone. As one federal appellate court put it, “The government need not ban a protected activity … if it can simply proceed upstream and dam the source.”

But the judge may be the first to put it so plainly in the newsgathering context. He deserves credit for understanding the constitutional implications of silencing Natanson and not shying away from expanding the legal concept of “prior restraints” to seizures of electronics that the courts that developed that jurisprudence decades ago could never have anticipated. Maybe next time, he’ll follow through with the right remedy — ordering the immediate return of all the seized materials and sanctioning the prosecutors who took them under false pretenses.

freedom.press/issues/a-judge-f…

The following was submitted by a Pirate supporter using the pseudonym “Hoodlump”, advocating for and sharing money advice on how to move away from the banking system towards credit unions. This article is apart of the project “Message in a Bottle”, allowing supporters of the US Pirate Party to submit editorial articles to the United States Pirate Party website.

Remember when the legendary redditor “DeepF****ingValue” ignited the hilarious short squeeze against giant hedge funds in 2021, essentially teaching the masses that it is in fact possible to shake the ground under the financial vultures that we once thought were untouchable?

It seemed like everyone went from not giving those giant hedge funds much thought to suddenly and collectively becoming aware of sinister financial practices that were always present.

Many learned what hedge funds were, what short-selling is, who the stock exchange is really for (when RobinHood banned further purchases of the GME stock) and, most importantly, that collective action seriously makes waves.

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that the correct action in our time is going to be a financial one.

After all, to whom do each and every one of us, regardless of who we are in the workforce, must answer to? Who sits at the top of the chain of command?

Ultimately, it is the shareholder; the enemy to all humankind itself.

It took for me to land a job within a financial brokerage firm to learn one important thing about banks:

They have an alternative.

While banks exist as a for-profit enterprise, using the money we all deposit as their own investment capital so that the returns can be dispersed among the vultures that already own everything, credit unions are not-for-profit.

They work the way banks are intended: for community.

The “shareholder” is you.

Instead of investing your money in weapons, tobacco, private-owned housing, etc., the credit union is allowed to invest only in the ventures that another member takes up.

According to the Credit Union National Association, credit union members save an average of $179 per member (or $376 per household) annually simply by banking with a not-for-profit cooperative rather than a shareholder-owned bank.

[1] In addition to the moral imperative, banking with a credit union actually offers better financial incentives.

(Of course it does, right? When you remove the greedy shareholder, the money suddenly becomes available to you.)

CUs offer lower fees, better savings account rates (if you don’t already know, please learn about certificates of deposit), and better loan rates.

If you want to start a business, the CU will give you personal support, as they are more directly concerned with your success, as you are not an inconsequential borrower.

When I learned about this, I immediately made the switch. I want to tell everyone and their mother and father to do the same.

Actually, I want to scream it until everyone falls in line.

We should not leave one nickel in excess to be invested by the companies that are ruining our lives and our planet.

If you have a 401k, it is a bit harder to tackle but you should absolutely still take ownership there as well.

One day, I took a look at mine and saw it was absolutely littered with weapons manufacturers, big pharma and big tech companies, and while that’s not surprising, we should not accept that either.

Your 401k likely looks the same, and if you don’t have it in you to research 100 different companies to do an ethics check and reallocate your retirement funds, don’t be shy about getting someone on the phone to help you.

You don’t need your money to be sitting in the top 500 American Companies’ hands for your golden years to be secure.

There are generally other options, and if for you there are none, perhaps you can cease any further deposits from your checks and look for better ways to invest your money yourself.

We don’t need to be relying on this broken system anymore to take care of us, because it’s clear it isn’t even trying to take care of us.

In an endless mission to put individuals before institutions, it’s important to teach said individuals how to put themselves first. This is one way you can do that.

The onus has been on us a long time now. It’s time to stop being dismissive or careless about our money, and instead be skeptical, accountable, and as the jits say, standing on business.

Sources:

[1] Credit Human

uspirates.org/message-in-a-bot…