#paper terrorism

[rickymonday-wordsalad]

ricky L pinzon vs california secretary of state - CASE DISMISSED

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The rightwing group swamping US election offices with records requests

Local Labs – which calls its work both political research and journalism – is demanding voters’ details across the country to back claims of

Jen Filfield at The Guardian:

In North Carolina, Local Labs wanted obscure voter records that would take weeks, or even months, to prepare. In Georgia, the company requested a copy of every envelope voters used to mail in their ballots. And in dozens of counties across the US, Local Labs asked for the address of every midterm voter. Local election offices across the country are struggling to manage a sharp rise in the number of public records requests, and extensive requests coming from a little-known conservative effort called Local Labs in at least five states have stymied election officials, according to a Votebeat review of hundreds of records requests, as well as interviews. The requests are broad and unclear, and the purpose for obtaining the records is often not fully explained, leaving officials wondering in some cases whether they can legally release the records. Local Labs is known for a vast network of websites that rely mainly on aggregation and automation, blasting out conservative-leaning hyper-local news under names such as the Old North News, in North Carolina, and Peach Tree Times, in Georgia.

Local Labs’ CEO, Brian Timpone, told Votebeat the company was using records requests in an attempt to expose election fraud that he is sure exists. The company was sometimes getting paid by GOP-backed clients to do so, Timpone acknowledged, characterizing the work simultaneously as both political research and journalism. “We’re just trying to push for more free speech and more transparency,” Timpone said. “And no one else is doing it.” Veteran journalists and those who study journalism ethics say he’s wrong. The Arizona State University journalism professor Julia Wallace – previously the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution – said doing reporting and paid-for work at the same time is not ethical. “That’s not independent, so that’s not journalism,” she said. Timpone is no stranger to journalism controversies: among his previous companies was one that sold cheap content to local news organizations and was ultimately closed after a series of ethics scandals, including plagiarism. To be sure, public records laws exist because the public has the right to know what the government is doing, and ensuring access to records is a critical window into that. Election offices, open records advocates say, should consider proactively and publicly sharing more election records.

But election officials have questions. It’s unclear from the requests when the company is doing the work for a third party or for their news websites, or both, and if the election offices can legally provide the records. One recent Local Labs project offers a clue of what might be to come. After the midterm election, Local Labs was paid by America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a national thinktank that pushes the former president Donald Trump’s agenda, to send public records requests to 100 counties in the US asking for a record of each voter who voted, along with their address and other information. AFPI published the first results of that work in June, in a misleading report that insinuated that thousands of fraudulent ballots were cast in Arizona’s midterm election. “Voter Discrepancies Found in the Arizona 2022 General Election,” the AFPI headline read. But most, perhaps all, of the more than 8,000 discrepancies found were because Local Labs had compared two sets of voter lists from different time periods and including different voters.

Yavapai county officials, for example, showed Votebeat emails in which an elections official tried to convince Local Labs not to publish the broad findings because they were misleading, taking time over days to explain the source of the discrepancies. The warnings went ignored. “They just put the information out, and we are left defending ourselves,” the Yavapai county recorder, Michelle Burchill, said. “Then we are being harassed,” she said, because people believe it.

[...]

Local Labs slam county offices with requests

North Carolina and Georgia election officials say they are frustrated by Local Labs’ broad requests because the company often fails to answer any questions that would make them easier to understand. “I am reaching out for the third time to clarify your records requests to our county boards of elections,” Pat Gannon, spokesperson of the North Carolina state board of elections, wrote to Espinoza on 17 August, asking him to call him. “Obviously we will respond to all public records requests as required by law, but this is immensely frustrating to busy elections officials trying to ensure that all eligible individuals can vote and have their vote counted,” Gannon said.

Records provided by Gannon show numerous Local Labs requests across the state in recent months, for broad information that would take weeks to gather such as all documents with information about election hardware and software, and all absentee ballot applications. These add to outstanding Local Labs requests, including for all absentee ballot envelopes cast in the midterm election, which would take weeks to scan and redact. In Wake county, North Carolina, it took a team of election workers three or four months to respond to a similar request for the envelopes from a different requester – there were more than 40,000 absentee ballots cast in the midterm election there. Danner McCulloh, who processes records requests for Wake county, said each envelope had to be scanned and redacted individually, and then reviewed by a legal team. The result was just envelopes with the voter’s name and address, since state law required the redaction of signatures and other identifying marks.

Local Labs, the right-wing election denier outfit founded by CEO Brian Timpone, filed numerous requests for voting records to fuel their crusade for their twisted lies.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

‘Paper terrorism’: Parents against mask mandates bombard school districts with sham legal claims

Tyler Kingkade and Ben Collins at NBC News:

Jill Griffin had a panic on her hands.

Teachers and staff members of her school district in Bethalto, Illinois, a small town outside of St. Louis, were suddenly worried that they would not be paid. They had seen videos posted online in which a parent who objected to the district’s Covid mask mandate said that she had filed a claim against the district’s insurance, causing the schools to lose all federal funding.

Griffin, the Bethalto schools superintendent, has spent weeks dealing with the fallout.

“You have district officials who are spending time on things like this, rather than on what we need to be spending time on — making sure that our classrooms are covered right now in the middle of a pandemic,” Griffin said.

The parent’s claims were baseless. She had no ability to use the mask mandate to file a claim against the district’s insurance policy, or affect its federal funding in any way.

But the scare tactic has become a familiar one. A growing number of school districts across the country are facing similar challenges from parent activists who have adopted strategies and language that are well known to law enforcement and extremism experts who deal with far-right “sovereign citizen” groups in the U.S. The Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League call it “paper terrorism.”

The parents’ strategy is simple: Try to use obscure and often inapplicable legal claims to force a school district to make a policy change. And while the claims have no legal standing, they have been effective at spreading confusion and wasting school districts’ resources, even though the paperwork doesn’t require a formal legal response.

The parents and activists have organized through a new group called Bonds for the Win, which is named for a financial instrument at the heart of the pseudo-legal effort. The group’s members have spent the past two months bombarding school administrators with meritless claims over Covid policies and diversity initiatives. These claims allege that districts have broken the law and therefore owe parents money through what are called surety bonds, which government agencies often carry as liability insurance.

Bonds for the Win’s claims are not legitimate, according to education officials, insurance companies and the FBI. But even though the group has won no legal battles, it has already celebrated some successes in overwhelming districts with paperwork, intimidating local officials and disrupting school board meetings.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the purpose of a local school governing board,” said Julie Cieniawski, president of the Scottsdale Unified Governing Board in Arizona, which was one of Bonds for the Win’s first targets. “I do believe it has kind of become a central meeting point for people to share their grievances and not specifically about our district. It’s almost like living in a reality TV show when you’re experiencing it.”

In at least 14 states, Bonds for the Win activists attempted to serve sham paperwork to school districts, in several cases causing commotions that required police intervention. And the number of people joining their cause is quickly growing as misinformation about the strategy’s effectiveness circulates.

[...]

The new strategy comes as school boards across the U.S. continue to serve as the front lines of a broader culture war that began in the midst of the 2020 presidential election and debates over pandemic-related safety measures. Parents have targeted school boards with activism ranging from recall petitions to criminal complaints over books available in school libraries. Bonds for the Win is using these battles as a way of drawing in followers, demonstrating how quickly a faulty fringe tactic can generate momentum as frustrated parents join forces with conspiracy theorists.

Miki Klann, a QAnon adherent in Scottsdale, Arizona, who has said she believes AIDS is a hoax and that the Earth is flat, founded Bonds for the Win in December. She did not respond to requests for comment, but has described her goals in numerous videos posted online.

“We’re hoping that the parents start standing up and calling these people out for the crimes against humanity that they’ve been coerced to commit,” Klann said in a recent video uploaded to BitChute. “We want the people to understand their sovereignty.”

The group’s strategy of intimidating government bodies with paperwork has been used in the past by sovereign citizens, loosely affiliated right-wing anarchists who believe federal and local governments are operating illegitimately.

“During the pandemic, you saw more and more of these pseudo-legal statements from people proclaiming that they didn’t have to wear a mask, citing various federal laws that just were not applicable at all,” said Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “Whether it’s connected with the sovereign citizen movement or not, it is a form of paper terrorism.”

“Paper terrorism” is a well-known tactic among anti-government extremist movements. The term originates from terminology that law enforcement officials used to describe the tactics of the Montana Freemen, an anti-government, self-described “Christian Patriot” militia that illegally declared its township in Montana outside the authority of the U.S. government.

For years, the group “buried local judges, sheriffs and county attorneys in a forest of paper,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, assailing local government offices with baseless lawsuits and fake court judgments. After an armed standoff in 1996 in which the Freemen refused to leave their foreclosed land, the group surrendered to authorities.

Bonds for the Win doesn’t explicitly describe itself as part of the sovereign citizen movement. However, it is taking a route similar to that of many anti-mask and anti-vaccine movements that have grown during the pandemic by borrowing tactics and faux-legal verbiage from sovereign citizens to fit their own purpose.

The faulty insurance claims focus on surety bonds, which school districts and other government agencies often carry as liability insurance in case an employee commits a crime like embezzling money. Typically, only the district — not private citizens — can file a claim, according to insurance companies, but parents following Bonds for the Win apparently believe they, too, can file claims over Covid precautions and other complaints. Activists say that once they file these claims, either the insurance company or school officials will have to pay a financial penalty to parents. This is not the case, insurance companies and districts say.

NBC News has an excellent report on the trend of far-right activists angered over COVID mitigations (esp. mask mandates) pushing QAnon/SovCit-linked paper terrorism "surety bond" challenges to school boards designed to bury them in paperwork.

See Also: EdWeek: Mask-Mandate Opponents Are Bombarding Districts With Insurance Requests. Here’s Why

Read the full story at NBC News.

[newstfionline]

In Paper War, Flood of Liens Is the Weapon

By Erica Goode, NY Times, August 23, 2013

MINNEAPOLIS--One of the first inklings Sheriff Richard Stanek had that something was wrong came with a call from the mortgage company handling his refinancing.

"It must be a mistake," he said, when the loan officer told him that someone had placed liens totaling more than $25 million on his house and on other properties he owned.

But as Sheriff Stanek soon learned, the liens, legal claims on property to secure the payment of a debt, were just the earliest salvos in a war of paper, waged by a couple who had lost their home to foreclosure in 2009--a tactic that, with the spread of an anti-government ideology known as the "sovereign citizen" movement, is being employed more frequently as a way to retaliate against perceived injustices.

Over the next three years, the couple, Thomas and Lisa Eilertson, filed more than $250 billion in liens, demands for compensatory damages and other claims against more than a dozen people, including the sheriff, county attorneys, the Hennepin County registrar of titles and other court officials.

"It affects your credit rating, it affected my wife, it affected my children," Sheriff Stanek said of the liens. "We spent countless hours trying to undo it."

Cases involving sovereign citizens are surfacing increasingly here in Minnesota and in other states, posing a challenge to law enforcement officers and court officials, who often become aware of the movement--a loose network of groups and individuals who do not recognize the authority of federal, state or municipal government--only when they become targets. Although the filing of liens for outrageous sums or other seemingly frivolous claims might appear laughable, dealing with them can be nightmarish, so much so that the F.B.I. has labeled the strategy "paper terrorism." A lien can be filed by anyone under the Uniform Commercial Code.

Occasionally, people who identify with the movement have erupted into violence. In Las Vegas this week, the police said that an undercover sting operation stopped a plot to torture and kill police officers in order to bring attention to the movement. Two people were arrested. In 2010, two police officers in Arkansas were killed while conducting a traffic stop with a father and son involved in the movement.

Mostly, though, sovereign citizens choose paper as their weapon. In Gadsden, Ala., three people were arrested in July for filing liens against victims including the local district attorney and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. And in Illinois this month, a woman who, like most sovereign citizens, chose to represent herself in court, confounded a federal judge by asking him to rule on a flurry of unintelligible motions.

"I hesitate to rank your statements in order of just how bizarre they are," the judge told the woman, who was facing charges of filing billions of dollars in false liens.

The sovereign citizen movement traces its roots to white extremist groups like the Posse Comitatus of the 1970s, and the militia movement. Terry L. Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombing conspirator, counted himself a sovereign citizen. But in recent years it has drawn from a much wider demographic, including blacks, members of Moorish sects and young Occupy protesters, said Detective Moe Greenberg of the Baltimore County Police Department, who has written about the movement.

The ideology seems to attract con artists, the financially desperate and people who are fed up with bureaucracy, Mr. Pitcavage said, adding, "But we've seen airline pilots, we've seen federal law enforcement officers, we've seen city councilmen and millionaires get involved with this movement."

Sovereign citizens believe that in the 1800s, the federal government was gradually subverted and replaced by an illegitimate government. They create their own driver's licenses and include their thumbprints on documents to distinguish their flesh and blood person from a "straw man" persona that they say has been created by the false government. When writing their names, they often add punctuation marks like colons or hyphens.

Adherents to the movement have been involved in a host of debt evasion schemes and mortgage and tax frauds. Two were convicted in Cleveland recently for collecting $8 million in fraudulent tax refunds from the I.R.S. And in March, Tim Turner, the leader of one large group, the Republic for the united States of America, was sentenced in Alabama to 18 years in federal prison. (His group does not capitalize the first letter in united.)

Sovereign citizens who file creditor claims are helped by the fact that in most states, the secretary of state must accept any lien that is filed without judging its validity.

The National Association of Secretaries of State released a report in April on sovereign citizens, urging state officials to find ways to expedite the removal of liens and increase penalties for fraudulent filings. More than a dozen states have enacted laws giving state filing offices more discretion in accepting liens, and an increasing number of states have passed or are considering legislation to toughen the penalties for bogus filings.

One state employee said it was scarier to engage with offenders who used sovereign citizen tactics than with murderers, given the prospect of facing lawsuits or fouled credit ratings.