County Commits Unlawful Surveillance of Calvary Church Members
Federal court filings reveal extraordinary surveillance of people who attend Calvary Chapel using cell phone data
Practice of Spying
A recent look into the ongoing federal contest between Calvary Chapel San Jose and the COUNTY OF SANTA CLARA reveals extensive Civil Rights violations by County Counsel James R. Williams and his minions. According to documents filed last November in UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA, SAN JOSE DIVISION, James R. Williams- a Soros Fellow- has not only been directing his underlings to secretly spy upon people who attend Calvary Chapel by recording their movements from the neighboring church’s parking lot and attending services, but he has acquired and used cell phone data to track people who attend Calvary Chapel without first getting their express permission.
Deep Surveillance
In what clearly appears to be one of his desperate attempts to create criminal profiles on healthy Christians who are doing nothing more than worshipping God and communing together, Williams hired SafeGraph, a geofencing1 data provider out of Denver, CO, to acquire and provide the private cell phone data. According to Safegraph’s Web site, the records can be used to provide “precise POI footprint data”. But that’s just the basics. If a customer is interested, the data can be used, for example, to identify race, age, educational attainment, home location, household income, spend, etc., or to visualize vaccination rates with movement patterns. Perhaps this is the selling feature that caught James’ eye.
Tapping His Alma Mater
In order to analyze the data provided by SafeGraph, did Williams hire an Big Data analyst or Analytics Engineer? No. Williams used taxpayer funds to gratuitously hire a professor from his Alma Mater, Stanford Law School. The County paid professor Daniel Ho $800 per hour to analyze the data, allegedly using RegLab, to develop profiles tracking the movement of staff and attendees. He then delivered an opinion for the County stating,
“Given available knowledge about the spread of COVID-19 in indoor spaces with unmasked activity…there were strong reasons to believe that Calvary posed an unusually high risk.”
As Ho has boasted in his bio, he has partnered with Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Labor to provide similar privacy invading services, but “The collaboration with Santa Clara County was awarded the Innovative Practice Gold Award for ‘the highest level of program innovation’ to serve ‘community during the COVID-19 pandemic’ by the National Association of County and City Health Officials.”
Civil Rights Violations
The County’s extraordinary degree of surveillance of the private lives of people attending church is a gross violation of Civil Rights Act 42 U.S.C. §1983 and 18 U.S.C. §242 and §243. The monetary penalties awarded to victims for such crimes by public servants are shown in the table below. If you would like to participate in a federal Civil Rights lawsuit against Williams and Cody for these egregious violations, send an email to help@passagetoliberty.com.
If Nothing Else, Learn This
“I have nothing to hide” is the response upstanding, law abiding people often give when urged to secure their communications, de-activate cellular location tracking (even though tracking is still possible with it off), remove themselves from social media, and structure their affairs as if they are criminals being hunted by the FBI. We’ve issued this warning for decades, even when the FBI was not as openly corrupt as it is today, and at a time when electronic technology was not equipped with such robust listening, watching, tracking and other surveillance features. Hopefully this article will serve to jolt the minds of those who still think they have nothing to hide, and move them to take privacy counter measures. Passage To Liberty offers training in this area. You can sign-up here.
Geofencing technology uses radio frequencies, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons to identify the movement of smart phones in a particular, pre-defined area. It is routinely used by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to identify and track “persons of interest”, such as those who attended the January 6th, rally in Washington, D.C. in 2021, or people who stand outside abortion clinics with signs.