Though the FBI’s early morning raid on the LRN.FM & Free Talk Live studio on Sunday did result in LRN.FM being off-air for several hours, thanks to the outpouring of support from the liberty community, we were back on the same day! Multiple people contacted me to offer their extra computers and phones and so we were able to scrounge together enough equipment to get some audio back streaming that same afternoon. My show, Free Talk Live, did not miss an episode.
LRN.FM – The Liberty Radio Network was back up to full capacity by Tuesday, with its dozens of liberty-oriented shows from around the globe airing live and via podcast around-the-clock across multiple continents via satellite and globally via internet streaming.
One of our listeners (Virgil Vaduva of Cell 411) created a GoFundMe to raise $5,000 for replacing our stolen computers and it passed its goal in 24 hours! It was an amazing show of support from our listeners and supporters in this time where the federal government has set its destructive sights on us. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed. No thanks to the local haters who fraudulently reported the GoFundMe as fraudulent, which did get it pulled down temporarily until GoFundMe could investigate and of course returned the fundraiser to online status. As usual, the haters have nothing intelligent to say and must resort to underhanded, dishonest tactics to try to harm us. Love will win in in the end.
Thank you again for your support during these most difficult days. We will continue to broadcast the message of liberty 24/7 thanks to your help. The GoFundMe has ended, but if you still want to help, please join the hundreds of FTL & LRN AMPlifiers and contribute $5 a month to our efforts.
There’s not much good one can say about the FBI’s raid on the LRN.FM studio on Sunday morning, but the news coverage has been pretty good. Free Talk Live host TJ the Spy and I have given multiple interviews on the raid to NH-based media, plus liberty-oriented bloggers have weighed in. Here’s a quick rundown:
At 6:00 a.m. on March 20, 2016, members of the FBI, New Hampshire State Police, and Keene PD executed a federal search warrant on our studio in Keene, NH. The search team was greeted without incident upon presentation of the warrant and the studio was secured by investigating officers.
According to the search warrant, the FBI ran an undercover TOR .onion child pornography website from their government servers in Virginia from February to March of 2015. This website was designed to deliver, besides the pictures of abused children, a piece of malware that breaks the anonymity of TOR and identifies the true IP address of the person attempting to access the website. Other information, including the computer host name, username, and MAC address were also supposedly captured by the FBI. Pursuant to an investigation into violation of 18 USC 2252 (child pornography), the FBI seized approximately 46 computer and electronic devices from our studio. No charges have been filed.
Although the seizure of our equipment was inconvenient and resulted in Free Talk Live’s internet network’s (LRN.FM – The Liberty Radio Network) audio feed going offline temporarily, we will have our studio back to normal operations within 48 hours and will continue serving the high quality, liberty-oriented shows our listeners love. No episodes of Free Talk Live have been interrupted.
We look forward to the results of the FBI’s forensic examination. Many people had access to the LRN wireless network and studio computers over the previous year. If someone accessed a child pornography website from our network, it is without our knowledge. However, we feel that in a country that has a free press, journalists should be allowed to investigate all aspects of society, including criminal ones.
Free Talk Live and all of its hosts, as if we should have to, officially denounce child pornography, child rape and child exploitation. We further remind everyone that the only organization that, at this point, is guilty of having anything to do with child porn is the Federal Bureau of Investigations, who admits to distributing pictures of exploited children, a crime worse than what they are accusing their website visitors of doing.
The search and seizure Warrants are, last we heard, sealed. We encourage anyone interested in obtaining them to contact the FBI.
Did facebook silently delete the news about the topless ban proposal going down in flames? The evidence says yes. The original Free Keene post to facebook has mysteriously disappeared, which means that the nearly 1,000 people who liked and shared it prior to its deletion have all had their shares disappear from their pages.
Presuming the original post was reported by some prudes (despite having a “safe” preview pic), shame on facebook for not even letting us know of the removal.
So yeah, that confirms it. Facebook sent the censored preview photo to a blacklist of some sort, so one can still share the original article’s link on facebook, but no preview pic will come up.
Should you wish to share the story again on facebook, here’s what you have to do to make it a little tougher for the prudes to attack:
Then, once the pic is uploaded – type in whatever you want for the post, and drop in the link to the article.
That’s it!
Facebook never should have blacklisted the already-censored preview pic – it’s been posted countless times before and does not show any areola. I specifically made that version with facebook in mind, which should be obvious given the graphic used to censor. The pic in question has been attached to other articles that have been shared a lot on facebook, so WTF? If you try to share the link to the pic via a facebook post, it does give you a link to report their decision as wrong, which I did, and you are welcome to do as well. I have no idea if it will make a difference.
The horrible bill (HB 1525) that would enact a prohibition on female toplessness went down in flames 18-0 this week in the NH house criminal justice committee. It was a decisive move by the committee and came after a long public hearing where an overwhelming amount of people opposed the bill in verbal and written form.
