Internet Insecurities

Section 6 of Firearms Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 prohibits a registry of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions. The pertinent language of Section 926 reads:

No such rule or regulation…may require that records required to be maintained under this chapter…be recorded at or transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the United States or any State or any political subdivision thereof, nor that any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions or dispositions be established.

However, there are numerous government lists of gun owners: National Firearms Act of 1934 registry; state and local registries; Federal Firearms Licensees’ records; etc. 

If you think your personal and gun information is secure, think again. There are marketing companies that legally search these government lists and will provide lists of gun owners, including personal information on them.  And most troubling, Legal Insurrection just wrote an article that wasn’t about firearms but gave some troubling statistics about government records that should scare gun owners:

In 2020, reports indicated the number of exposed government records increased…from four and a half million (4.5 million) breaches of records in the first quarter of 2019, to seventeen million (17.0 million) breaches in the first quarter of 2020.  (Emphasis added.)

And things have only gotten worse.

The IRS can provide whatever privacy assurances it likes, but the record of government data breaches and purposeful leaks, and the resulting harm to millions of individuals, is well-documented and will continue to occur.

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Many people get some or all of their news from social media.  Legal Insurrection also wrote about on-line fake identities meant to mislead you about the writer and meant to give that writer more credibility.  The article was about misleading information that was being posted on-line about Israel by people under fake names and biographies.  But the warning applies to us all:

Now we know that it was all a massive foreign influence operation of fake MAGA accounts meant not to promote Trump, but to turn Americans against Jews and Israel and to sow chaos and division among actual Trump supporters.

If it’s happening on X, it’s happening elsewhere on social media.  (Emphasis added.)

However, there is some hope -on X - until the scammers figure out a way around it.  Legal Insurrection explained and gave examples of the fakes they uncovered:

X has turned live a “location” function that lets you know from where the account is posting (and whether they are trying to hide location through a VPN). The result is that many of the most manipulative supposedly MAGA accounts were frauds posting from abroad. 

So many “America First” accounts turned out to be from Pakistan, Egypt, and other places that have no connection to America whatsoever.

They’re doing their best to somehow radicalize Americans against Israel.

Accounts like @1776General are interesting. It has 141k followers. Bio says: "Constitutionalist, Patriot, Ethnically American, Colonial Stock, 1620 Host on Ethnic American Broadcast."  And it's based in Turkey.  (Emphasis added.)

What about all the other social media platforms? 

We recognize the sources of some information (such as ‘Brady’, ‘Everytown’ and ‘Moms’) and we can discount it as propaganda.  There is enough misleading information already out-there by these organizations that we know are anti 2nd Amendment, we don’t need more misinformation from cowards hiding their true identity.