Ruby Ridge

by on August 23, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Right now, 30 years ago, the FBI, ATF, and US Marshals were involved in a standoff at Ruby Ridge. Randy Weaver bought land on Ruby Ridge in Idaho in 1983 to get away from it all. A neighbor disputed a land deal between them in 1984, lost in court, and soon began telling the FBI and Secret Service that Randy Weaver wanted to kill the Pope, the President, and the Idaho governor. That started an FBI and ATF investigation that resulted in an ATF informant soliciting Weaver to make two sawed-off shotguns for him in 1989. The ATF tried to blackmail Weaver into being an ATF informant after that, but he declined the invitation. So the ATF said he was a bank robber (he wasn’t) and got a grand jury to charge him for making and possessing illegal weapons. ATF agents posed as broken-down motorists in January 1991 and arrested Weaver when he got out to help them, so they could inform him of the charges against him. And that was just the beginning of the Ruby Ridge affair.

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The Fourth Amendment

by on August 22, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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Dawn

by on August 21, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Dawn DeMarco found many rich and noble traitors to Earth just by looking at balance sheets or a financial reports over the years. She had a gut instinct better than any cyber I’ve ever known when it came to digging up financial skullduggery, and she never stopped hunting once she was on the scent. Dawn spent hours every day just pulling records of military contractors and looking to see if she could see any indications of fraud. Then she would dress up and go to a ball or party at night to maintain her cover as a socialite who went to all the best of each, before coming back the next morning to search through more financial records. And she pulled in her posse of misfits to help her scan records. None were as good as her, but she taught them and their cybers what to look for and turned them into probably the best team of forensic accountants in known space. They literally weaponized math to catch traitors, and that is awesome on every level.

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Dawn

by on August 20, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Dawn DeMarco had a real eye for accounting and other business running skills, which made her real good at being able to find discrepancies. Show her a financial report and she would know everything that mattered about the company in a minute or three. Wait another few minutes and she could come up with a way to infiltrate the organization and find out if her instincts were right. Sometimes she was wrong, and in those cases a report of her studies and how to fix the problems she found would often appear on the owner’s desk in the middle of the night. It was her way of helping people who were honestly trying their best, and she followed their progress in the years and decades that followed. I can’t tell you how many companies she shepherded like that. Seriously. I really can’t. It would break a whole lot of privacy agreements. But I can guarantee that you’ve bought some of their products. She’s that good.

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Dawn

by on August 19, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

You might think that Dawn DeMarco was all about the parties if you don’t look close. It’s certainly the image she projected for all to see. The more people saw her as that, the more dangerous she was to those with ill intent. We really did think alike in that way, and I loved having her on my team. Or as it sometimes felt, me being on her team. She truly was so much more than just the debutant of the ball though. She had a mind for intelligence that was scary, and her family had trained her to run the family businesses when she grew up. To managed all the money they made in all the different ventures that made the formal balls of her youth possible. She was absolutely amazing at understanding money and where it went. It made her real good at her job.

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