You Don’t Have Anything To Worry About, Cell Phone Edition:
Federal officials are routinely asking courts to order cellphone companies to furnish real-time tracking data so they can pinpoint the whereabouts of drug traffickers, fugitives and other criminal suspects, according to judges and industry lawyers.
In some cases, judges have granted the requests without requiring the government to demonstrate that there is probable cause to believe that a crime is taking place or that the inquiry will yield evidence of a crime. Privacy advocates fear such a practice may expose average Americans to a new level of government scrutiny of their daily lives.
Other than those privacy extremists, is anyone concerned about this/ Well, Captain Ed:
Federal agents routinely request tracking data from cellphone companies to determine the travel and assembly habits of suspects, and courts have granted them unusual leeway in obtaining the data. Are these terrorist suspects that could present a clear and imminent danger to the lives of Americans? No — just drug dealers and other usual suspects of American crime. Why, then, do the courts allow this tracking without the normal establishment of probable cause?
Ed, Ed, Ed. Get with the program. 9/11 changed everything. And once you give a private company your personal information, you can’t expect the government not to have access to it. Amirite? I am sure libertarian Glenn Reynolds can help you sort this all out.
In all seriousness, if this kind of thing pisses you off and frightens you, and it should, then you should be rooting for Hillary Clinton to win in 2008. Not because I trust her with the sorts of unchecked power the right wing has demanded authorities have during Bush’s tenure, but because I know the surest way to wake up NRO and the Red State and the other alleged “conservatives” to the dangers of this sorts of behavior is to give the power to Hillary.
Svensker
John, you’re missing Capt. Ed’s very serious point, which is: if you’re suspected of terrorism-related activities, the government is Good and Right and Can Do No Wrong Cuz They’re Purtekting Us, not to mention Not Big Enough. BUT if you’re just a common every day criminal suspect, the government is Scary and Untrustworthy and OMG Alert the Media they’re Like the Commies!!!!
It’s a key distinction.
Svensker
To be serious, though, how the heck does this fit into the 4th Amendment? Am I missing something here?
merciless
You’re right, although I think any democrat winning the presidency will be enough to awaken the right to the terrible dangers of the unitary executive. The msm will help them out with this message.
Soon we’ll all find out the truth; that the Bush administration was just a figment of our imagination, and that Bill Clinton has secretly been president all these years (and it’s ALL HIS FAULT), and that the only thing we’ll have to be grateful for is that Hil is post-menopausal, so we won’t have to be afraid of her pushing the nuclear button cuz she’s OTR.
jake
Not that anyone needs to know this, because we don’t have anything to hide, right? Right? But one of the first things I did to my el cheapo cell phone was disable the GPS tracking. I know this doesn’t overcome the problem of triangulating but the only time anyone calls me is when I’m on the damn train and those conversations are very brief.
Maybe this story will bring it home to the fRighties that “snooping because we can” isn’t really such a great idea after all.
John Cole
IF you want all this nonsense to end, get a Democrat in as president, and start using all these powers to snoop around “potentially violent” gun owners and “potentially dangerous” abortion clinic protesters.
Shit would change quick.
Keith
I’m guessing by Monday, it’ll all be the Washington Post’s fault for revealing this important tool in the Wars on Terror, Crime, and Drugs to the Enemy.
Bruce Moomaw
John, John, John, you misunderstand the Right. They aren’t afraid of those powers per se; they’re just afraid ofn them falling into the Wrong Hands — the Wrong Hands being Democrats and other traitors. And so the logical response to threat of Hillary (or some other Democrat) getting hold of those powers is not to eliminate those powers, but simply to take the logical further step by making sure that no such Dangerous Traitors ever have the opportunity to get elected and actually use them — a suggestion which Glenn Reynolds has already openly hinted at.
In short, be very careful waving around the threat of Hillary (or any other Democrat) in possession of such powers. There’s a good chance that the current GOP will respond not by demanding the abolition of those powers, but by demanding the abolition of Democrats. And given the number of Christian Right fanatics which we now know exist in the US military, it’s not quite impossible that they could pull it off, Pinochet-style.
Wilfred
It’d change quicker if people stopped buying cell phones because the premise of a private conversation has already been compromised. Boycott cell phones as a privacy issue and watch the manufacturer/telephone company axis storm the White House in less time than a typical cell phone call.
bernarda
See this fifties video of a Defense Department propaganda program with the great Jack Webb: Red Nightmare.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGbW4a4EAAE&feature=related
Parts 2 to 4 are particularly good in being involuntarily funny. Almost everything applies to the Bush Regime.
r€nato
I’m pretty well convinced – and I say this in all seriousness, not as snark – that most anti-4th Amendment Republicans think, whether they are consciously aware of it or not, that if Hillary or any other Dem is elected and starts to use all these lovely powers which Bush left behind for her, they can turn on a dime and suddenly rediscover their reverence for the Constitution and checks on abuses of government power.
These are, after all, the people who were incessantly crying, “RULE OF LAW! RULE OF LAW!” over a trifle, as if it’s justified to impeach a president if he so much as jaywalks.
So, while it’s somewhat useful to point out their hypocrisy and the danger of a ‘unitary executive’ by asking rhetorically, “would you want President Hillary to have these powers?”, I’ve yet to meet the Republican upon whom this very pointed question makes any impact at all. Because in the back of their mind, they don’t think Hillary will get elected and even if she is, the Clinton witch-hunts taught them that they can eat their cake and have it too.
Darkness
Another thing you can expect one month into a Hillary regime, the MSM and the Republicans will be saying saying: Hey, that Iraq war was going so well, it only took 6 months and 2 billion dollars, but all of a sudden, geesh, Hillary has already blown the whole thing. Gods, the carnage, the suffering, the millions of refugees, and holy crap a trillion and a half dollars, it must be a new record, a democrat wasting a trillion and a half dollars on a war in just thirty days!!
Yeah, you can bet this will be the meme, and the 24% will be so happy to hear it, they will cry tears of pure blessed holy water. Their brains are explosion-proof, ya’ know. Must be nice to live in their heads, I have to admit.
Enlightened Layperson
I read that Glen Reynolds post. The reader he cites is suitably vague. Sure, it is legitimate to disagree with the war and dissent and even engage in mass civil disobedience (have any of you noticed all the anti-war civil disobedience going on?), but Democrats and war opponents have gone too far. He signally fails to say what the Democrats have done that goes too far, but it may be wanting the US to lose so they can win elections. (Civil disobedience, OK; thought crime, treason!)
Rudi
Your regular land line phone isn’t any safer. Land line phoes using digital signal and VoIP are just as vulnerable. Maybe a climb up the pole to call Mr. Drucker…
srv
This is pretty much tantamount to Capt. Ed admitting that he has something to hide.
Just how many of the prosecutions under the Patriot Act have been ‘terrorists’, Capt. Ed?
gypsy howell
Oh John, you amuse me! Did you sleep all through the 90s? You actually think the Republicans will want to enforce the Constitution if Hillary is elected? No. That’s not what’s going to happen. What will happen is they will unleash the “power of the rightwing blogs,” the media crazies and the Ken Starr Chamber to hound her from office and get Republicans elected again, so they can proceed with dismantling whatever is left of the Constitution.
cd6
OMG John, now that you’ve posted about this, all the terrorists who visit balloon juice will know about it and stop using cell phones and/or moving places.
Way to blow it. Normally I expect this kind of treason only from the New York Times.
You belong in Gitmo. I’m alerting Michelle Malkin right now.
Cyrus
Here’s the Fourth Amendment:
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure this is how the Fourth Amendment works in real life… police need a warrant to search for anything in a situation where a private individual would have a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” based on the “unreasonable searches and seizures” part. Technology complicates this — recall the warrantless wiretapping thing and how no one knows where a phone call is routed through and stuff — but a lot falls under the bit about personal effects. To use a straightforward example, if the police want to know about something that’s in or being done in a private home and not plainly visible from outside, then they need either a warrant issued by a judge and they need probable cause (another technical term) to believe that something criminal is going on in order to get that warrant, or they need explicit consent to come in from the homeowner who is familiar with their legal rights.
In this case, though, they aren’t getting warrants, they often don’t have probable cause so they couldn’t get warrants, and people have a reasonable expectation that they are not being watched most of the time and their location is not being reported to the government any time they’re carrying a cell phone. The only reason this policy isn’t completely and blatantly and straightforwardly unconstitutional is that it’s not the government doing the monitoring, it’s just private cell phone companies… who are then giving it to the government without probable cause, despite an expectation of privacy, etc.
Bruce Moomaw
Actually, Enlightened Layperson, let’s quote Reynolds reader Scott Wallace:
“The problem, to me, goes beyond the war. It goes to the very heart of the democratic ideal — that the loser on any issue, to a certain extent, needs to shut up and get on board, as payment for being allowed to participate. Its like poker — you don’t put your chips on the table, play some hands, and then take your money out of the pot if you should lose — because other people put their money down in good faith, and would have paid up if they had lost.
“The left has made it perfectly clear that the only legitimate outcome of any debate is the one where they get their way. If they don’t, they grumble, and protest, and tear apart, and sabotage, and try to delegitimatize the other side — what they never do is say ‘well, people have spoken, we disagree, we will continue to state our side, but within limits, and now let’s go forward and make this work’.
“A marriage based on an arrangement like that is never going to work. And a nation based on a democracy won’t either, because the other side decides two can play that game. And eventually it is going to occur to one side that if the power struggle became more of a, say, ‘historically traditional’ model, there seems to be a enormous differential in the potential of each side to field strength on the physical plane. At that point, it becomes tempting, and less aggravating, for one side to just cut the Gordian knot.”
Kind of hard to misinterpret the threat in those last two sentences, isn’t it? Of course, given that a consistent 65% of the American people in the polls now favor pulling all our troops out within a year (which isn’t exactly any sane person’s definition of “losing politically”), any attempt at a military coup may not work out quite the way the Reynoldsites think. But then, if they manage to get enough armed troops on their side, they can always emulate Burma. (And that’s quite apart from Wallace’s hilarious claim that only the Left “grumbles, and protests, and tears apart, and sabotages, and tries to delegitimatize the other side.”) In any case, let me congratulate Reynolds on his invention of an entirely new political ideology: Fascist Libertarianism can’t have been easy to come up with.
salvage
What has killed more Americans; drugs or terrorists?
If that’s Ed’s reasoning than he should cheerfully exchange some liberty for security and demand that suspected drug dealer’s phones are tracked 24/7.
tballou
You are so right about this. Yet another glaring aspect of the “conservative” hypocrisy of the past seven years has been their complete and total abdication of all our rights to Bush, whilst completely ignoring that the other foot will fall someday and someone else will be in charge, with Hillary Clinton being their worst nightmare.
Which brings up my conflict over Hillary – she really could be almost as bad as Bush in this regard. I pray to God that she won’t, and that she will respect the Constitution and the rule of law, but what if she just follows the precedents set by Bush? Won’t that be a lot of fun?
MobiusKlein
If they can get one phone’s location, they can do it for many.
Then it’s just a question of correlating the phones, their locations, and you know who is associated with who.
Find out all people who go NEAR a (drug dealer / pedophile / terrorist / opposition figure.) and you can unravel networks of your choice.
Tim in SF
I followed that link, read the post, found it ridiculous and full of holes, but was unable to find any place to leave a comment. Some of the problems with that post were egregious bad, dishonest, or plain stupid, but there’s no place to point it out.
Is it a blog if there are no comments allowed? I don’t think so. It looks more like an online publication more focused on selling ads than in contributing something valuable and rational to the debate.
Fuck that putz. Dumb website. I’ll never go there again.
Bruce Moomaw
“(And that’s quite apart from Wallace’s hilarious claim that only the Left ‘grumbles, and protests, and tears apart, and sabotages, and tries to delegitimatize the other side.’)”
Note that the only possible technique the Left could use to “sabotage” the Iraq War effort without having an actual majority of legislators on its side is through the Senate filibuster — and we know which party is far more enthusiastic about using that against the political majority in this country at the moment, don’t we?
The continuing mystery is how Reynolds got his law degree in the first place. Possibly out of the same cereal box where his wife found her psychology degree?
jcricket
I like the little dodge here. Bush and Cheney are well aware of it, and that’s why they’ve focused a ton of efforts on allowing themselves to decide who is a terrorist suspect, enemy combatant, etc. – so they can avoid all that pesky oversight stuff.
Again, does the right wing intentionally ignore the history of why the concept of requiring warrants was invented (hint: it has something to do with an imperial monarch deciding who was/not a criminal)? And, in more recent history, are they intentionally avoiding reading anything about the history of FISA (hint: has something to do with spying on American citizens despite claims to the contrary).
It’s one thing to be unaware of some bit of history 300 or so years old. It’s another thing to intentionally will away the entire history of America in the 20th century because you desperately want to believe that giving Dear Leader unlimited power will keep you from wetting the bed at night.
John – I’m a broken record on this, but it really is all projection on the right. They call everyone traitors, weak, afraid, etc. because they are.
The Other Steve
What I find curious about this, is that the meme is dependent upon all the jackassery of the Republicans in the 1990s.
Bill Clinton caused Ruby Ridge, after all! you know, the shooting that happened before he took over as President.
You know what, forget being nice. I just want you to go fuck yourself. In 1992 one of the reasons I voted for Bill was because of how overbearing the police had become. Bill did something about it. The COPS program and other initiatives were designed to get more cops on the street, so they didn’t feel like they were under constant threat. Further, it put cops into community initiatives where they were working with the people on the street… which was a two way street in gaining trust.
So yeah, seriously, you can all go fuck yourself.
The Other Steve
What, what a grade A fucktard.
jcricket
People keep saying this, but I think the combination of a Democratic Congress and the “newly reinvigorated” (I jest) Republican opposition will prevent her from aggressively pushing the boundaries of executive power like Bush did.
Remember, Bush achieved so much because he installed similarly bat-shit insane people in every branch of the government, and the Republicans resisted or dismantled oversight bodies vigorously for the 6 years they were in charge.
I don’t think Hillary’s going to find her “John Yoo”, nor do I think she will have that concentrated backing to do what Bush has done.
That doesn’t mean she’ll be as liberal as we want, or will aggressively roll back anything Bush has done. I just don’t think she’ll be out there championing the cause of warrantless wiretapping or bombing Iran like the current administration. And simply “running out the clock” (in a sense) on Bush’s policies is enough to let them die the death they deserve (much like letting the tax cuts expire).
jcricket
See, this just goes to prove the point that Ed is a douche-bag
So regardless of who they claim you are or what crime they claim you did, they are not to be trusted with spying on American citizens or legalized aliens without a warrant.
Not ever.
Bill Arnold
My as-few-features-as-were-available phone from about 3 years ago has a setting for GPS, and I assume most new phones do as well, perhaps with a third setting for continuous tracking:
Settings->Location
– Location On
– E911 Only
At the very minimum, even without A-GPS, the phone company knows which cell you’re in.
This is … touchingly straightforwardly misleading. Suspects not necessarily lawbreakers, and for that matter, most citizens are not 100 percent law abiding. It’s good that courts are involved, but the involvement appears to be minimal:
Chuck Butcher
Let’s look at something a bit different to illuminate this 4th A discussion. If you were an 18th century writer you would have found the use of a dependent and independent clause in a sentence to be illuminating and quite clear. Words would have meant what they mean exactly and you would be satisfied. So, we have the current and several decades long debate about the meaning of the 2nd A.
The word “Reason” was held in special regard in the 18th century, the definition and connotation of “the use of facts and logic to achieve a solution” were over-arching. The “reasonable” modifier would have immediately been understood to entirely rule out judgements based on “feelings.” Try that today.
What was meant and why it was meant is generally well spelled out in the papers surrounding the Ratification and they hold important information. Two Hundred years later the spector of the misbehavior of government towards its citizens engaged in by George III is ignored in George II.
HyperIon
i clearly remember some crazy leftie remarking (after passage of the PATRIOT act) that it would result in the same tools being used against activities that had nothing to do with terrorism. silly moonbat.
i’m getting on record here in case Condi is about to comment “No one could have imagined….”
Barry
Darkness Says:
“Another thing you can expect one month into a Hillary regime, the MSM and the Republicans will be saying saying: Hey, that Iraq war was going so well, it only took 6 months and 2 billion dollars, but all of a sudden, geesh, Hillary has already blown the whole thing. Gods, the carnage, the suffering, the millions of refugees, and holy crap a trillion and a half dollars, it must be a new record, a democrat wasting a trillion and a half dollars on a war in just thirty days!!”
And Faux News will run a count of the number of days since Clinton was elected, and
SaddamOsama BinHusseinBin Laden has been on the loose.scarshapedstar
So his commenters predictably declare that “drug dealers” are a worse threat to national security than terrorists, anyway.
So much for “never forget”, eh?
RSA
Back to the Glenn Reynolds link, above:
Reynolds points to a Fox News poll in which 19% of Democrats answer Yes to the question, “Do you personally think the world would be better off if the United States the war in Iraq?” He’s an idiot.
Do I think that the world would be better off if 50% of the world’s population were magically eliminated? Probably, yes. Do I want this to happen? No. Do I think that the world would be better off if George Bush were assassinated tomorrow? Probably, yes. Do I want him to be assassinated? No.
scarshapedstar
I wouldn’t even bother qualifying it like that. Americans have a faith in our military that’s passed from mere magical thinking into religious conviction. It’s been a cancer on our nation for half a century and it’s metastasizing. I wish it didn’t take more people dying for people to actually notice the bloody nose we’ve been given. Maybe we’d question the wisdom of throwing 500 billion dollars at old white guys each year, the largest welfare program in the history of humanity, in exchange for Rods from God and other retarded vaporware, all in the hopes of standing atop the piled bodies after Armageddon. Imagine if George Bush had spent $2 trillion on revitalizing our country’s infrastructure, on ending the addiction to oil that ensures endless war.
But that wasn’t sexy enough for the wingnuts. That wasn’t a satisfying climax to all those ten thousand word Stephen Den Beste essays, all those chain emails, all those Instapundit posts about how 9/11 was the work of barbarians who hate freedom itself and that’s that and we have to exterminate them all. And so off to Iraq we went, God help us.
I wish we could just declare defeat and pack up and leave Iraq tomorrow.
But we won’t. We’ll stay there until not only is the military irreparably broken but the fabric of our society as well, with the wingnut dead-enders shrieking the whole way about how we have to keep digging deeper and deeper into that pit or else the terrorists win. And we deserve to lose, really and truly. We had our moment of truth and we revealed ourselves as savages with a lot of empty rhetoric about loving freedom. We could have changed course, had a second Manhattan Project, changed the course of humanity for the better. But instead we chose viciousness, and after a million dead Iraqis we still can’t admit that we lost, big time.
Well, I can. And so can the rest of the 19%. Everyone else is waiting for Godot, I guess.
Enlightened Layperson
Bruce Moomaw,
All right, so Scott Wallace is not quite coy enough about what he is suggesting. But he is remarkably vague as to what exactly the Democrats have done that is so heinous as to disqualify them as the loyal opposition and justify discarding the democratic system and going ahead with his military coup.
jake
I think he’s very plain:
Don’t you see? The Democrats dare to object to anything the “other side” does. Clearly, Democrats should be seen and not heard, otherwise they have no right to complain when they get a spanking.
Frankly, I think there’s about 30 metric tonnes of projection in Scotty’s piece, but what do I know? I’m just a grumbling, protesting, tearing, sabotaging and delegitimizing [sic] Dem.
Bruce Moomaw
Yes indeed. We can’t have all that grumbling and protesting and trying to delegitimize the other side (otherwise known as democracy) in wartime. And since the War Against Terror, by its very nature, will be permanent — well, you see the situation.
Ted
Oh but you have to go back there sometimes. Glenn’s fantasies about being transformed into a cyborg (I kid you not) are unintentionally hilarious. The man’s mind, it seems, never matured beyond 14.
Hmmm, let’s see. Ah, here we go.
jake
IM IN MI BOOTZ, STOMPIN ON UR FACE. 4EVA!11
craigie
All Hail Queen Hillary!
Truly, that is the one legacy of George W Shrub that we can all agree on!
demimondian
You know what’s odd?
The constitutional basis for not requiring a showing of probable cause for tracking a cell phone is actually pretty strong. If I walked down the street, carrying a strobe light that flashed in a characteristic pattern which was unlike the pattern carried by any one else’s strobe light, then I wouldn’t expect the cops to need a warrant to track me, right?
When you carry an active cellular phone, that’s exactly what you’re doing — the phone broadcasts its own location on a regular basis so that local cells can find it to call it when the need arises. So of course you can be followed. Seriously, why would you expect it to be otherwise?
ThymeZone
Welp, when I read the original post here, I get stuck on this passage.
Putting aside all the meaningless churn over what the world will or wont be like if HRC becomes president, I can’t but wonder what in the world would make anyone think that it’s possible to “wake up” the folks you refer to.
I don’t think they’re asleep. I think they’re crazy.
I don’t think you rehabilitate them, I think you have to disempower them and marginalize them.
ThymeZone
Again we agree, and really, I find it as disturbing as you should.
But this is a continuation of a train of thought from last week sometime, no? The privacy thing. The thing is, in a world of advancing technology, the pretense of privacy just goes away.
Try to imagine that everyone has Superman’s x-ray vision. do you now have privacy in your living room? Privacy is a temporal and imaginary thing. It only exists when you can provide its means. Once you provide the means for its interrpution, it’s gone.
Was the inventor of the celphone required to also invent the means to protect privacy in the middle of the celphone’s natural intrusion into your world? I don’t think so. Anyone who puts a celphone in his pocket is basically saying to the wired world, “Here I am. Find me.”
I love to watch people around here flap their gums about privacy. It reminds me of the time I lived in a place where I could hear coyotes howl at night as I fell asleep. That familiar baying at the moon is the perfect metaphor for a “debate” here about privacy.
demimondian
I probably should find it more horrifying than I do, but, oddly, I don’t, for two reasons.
First, when Amazon (or Google or Microsoft or Axciom or Checkpoint) tracks you, that information is being swallowed up by a private entity. If that entity goes into bankruptcy and is dissolved, then any contract you and it is immediately void, including, of course, any terms of use of any data it may hold about your past behavior. (I know, you’d like to say “your data”, but it *isn’t* your data, it’s the other entities data. Quite a different thing.)
Government-held data is somewhat different. If the Government is dissolved and can no longer answer for the provenance of the data it holds about me, then there are other, far more complicated problems that will also need to be solved. So, paradoxically, I feel less troubled by a police officer tracking me than I would about my own employer tracking me.
ThymeZone
That makes sense to me.
Bruce Moomaw
Parenthetically, isn’t it time we started referring to him as ” ‘Captain’ Ed” in quotation marks — since he isn’t a real captain and it’s ridiculously pretentious (and rather misleading) for him to imply that he is?
Peter Johnson
Bingo. If you carry around a device — be it a strobe light, a cell phone, or a boombox — that announces its presence loudly, you can hardly be shocked when authorities use said device to track one’s movements.
MobiusKlein
But ya’ll are missing the point. The Government is not tracking the cell phones directly – they are getting the records from the private company, that are held for you.
Additionally, there was a Supreme Court ruling about police using IR scopes to guess which houses had Pot growing in them. The court ruled that high tech searches without warrant are unconstitutional. Cite
FYI, don’t be shocked to find out that somehow, the companies or govt has more specific location information than they tell us. There are directional antennas, you may be near two or more cells – allowing triangulation.
The could even be tracking a suspected terrorist’s cell, and intercept all the calls occurring in an area around him. Or keep track of other phones that come around that phone repeatedly. Would you need a FISA warrant for that?
Hunter
wrt what Bruce Moomaw, ThymeZone, and especially gypsy howell (who hit it on the head) were saying:
some thoughts on our shiny new counterintelligence state
Of course, Hillary might save us all from ourselves (it seems doubtful Obama has the bureaucratic knife-fighting skillZ to conduct the necessary purges) but it seems unlikely she’ll find it in her interest to try. It seems even less likely that the libertarian fascists (a TRULY American formation if there ever was one) will decide that fascism isn’t so cool, after all. Much easier (and pre-scripted!) for them to spend a few years demonizing our first non-white male head of State…
Hunter
For the people who won’t click to read the whole thing (which they really should), a sample:
We’re not big fans of Kerr over at now-to-be-Virginia-based ODNI. (DIA is happy, they get their old new HQ back at the air force base. But the commute from the Maryland siders to the Herndon “secret” location is going to be one hell of a bitch. So their psychic misery and dependence on bad books on CD is at least some compensation). But we digress. Where were we? Oh, yes. Kerr. He at least had the honesty to spit the truth in everyone’s face testifying before the Senate. His paraphrase: “[Screw you], you don’t have and never will have privacy anymore, the PNSS has erased the 4th Amendment. You only do what we tell you and THIS is your future.”
…
Can such a future be avoided?…Nothing is set in stone, but it will require Will and Action. Both. Either alone will fail. Who among the Democrat candidates understands the scale of roll back required? Conceptually? The actual people that must be purged. Who can identify and the train over the course of years trustworthy cadres to restore the Constitution? The Democrats will require some of their counter intelligence to avoid penetration as well. Do they know how to set that up? The scale is sobering. We are not talking about just 2 new Justices, or coming up with 5 Appellate nominees. The new Administration must make it a senior priority to reach down into the bowels of DoJ, into the corners of ODNI, NSA, OSD, etc. from the clerks to the top — and pull out the innards. Purge.
In the absence of a purge, should a Democratic Administration come to terms with the encroaching and gloating Permanent National Security State? The frog gets used to another 10 degrees or so. A poorly executed purge that is beaten back by the Movement peddled as anti-American? Fodder for 2012 Restoration. Threading a needle, indeed.
Svensker
Call me naive, but I’ve never understood the “problem” with high-tech devices vis a vis the Constitution. Obviously, the Framers didn’t envision cell phones or e-mail, but it seems to me that these things are the modern version of our “papers” which are supposed to be secure. Some people argue that much of what we do in the modern world is “public” in the sense that our information is available to many private entities, data about us is collected all the time, etc.
My answer? So? What does the fact that online companies collect data about my shopping habits have to do with the government?
From my non-lawyerly reading of the 4th, what it comes down to is : it ain’t the government’s bidness to snoop on me or my stuff without a warrant. Whether that means entering my house illegally, poking through my mailbox, intercepting phone calls, monitoring my e-mails, or tracking my movements with the cell phone, it ain’t their business. It’s not a “right to privacy”, it’s a right to be secure in my person. Having the DIA keeping track of me is the opposite of being secure.
Any lawyers are welcome to tear this apart.
ThymeZone
Well, you might want to read up on the subject of modernity and privacy (or lack thereof). This book is an okay place to start, search for it on Amazon and then browse the similar books you’ll see listed there.
Another good choice:
demimondian
DougJ, you’ve already been outed, dude, and I’m not willing to be an unintentional accomplice to your games, particularly when you’re simply wrong.
If Americans want a right to privacy to be clearly recognized by the courts, then one needs to be added as an amendment. Otherwise, the question of what privacy is is going to lead to untenable confusion over time. [Yes, evocation of Clinton intentional, on many levels simultaneously — ed.] As long as we cling to the outdated life raft of the reasoning behind Griswold v. Connecticut, we won’t move past the whole debate.
Conversely, if we aggressively pursue a mandated definition of privacy, we’ll take back the debate from those who seek to take it away incrementally. OK, if the cell phone example is different from the strobe light case, tell me why. As the law stands now, I don’t see it. If the law is wrong, then rewrite it. Show me the failure cases of the current law, and show me how to fix them.
But don’t invoke some mythical “natural rights” argument. Such arguments are the libertarian equivalent of the authoritarian appeal to social order, and, like them, are the best indicator of a lie.
Peter Johnson
But it is the terrorists bidness to try to kill all of us, isn’t it? There are real issues here. So drop the paranoid anti-Big Brother rhetoric, shall we?
ThymeZone
The world has always been full of sociopaths.
So what? Are ya skeered?
ThymeZone
Just had to share. I can’t write anything better than that.
jcricket
Truer words were never written :-)
ThymeZone
Thanks …. I think.
Chuck Butcher
Svensker,
If you took your idea to those involved in Ratification and explained exactly what you’re talking about they’d probably agree with you. The problem is that there is little push to actually conform to the original philosophy, it is rather to tighten restrictions on civil liberties rather than on government. The question of where conservative judges will come down is not actually very clear. The concept of ‘strict constructionism’ does not always mean conservative nor does it not mean it.
The real test comes on the reasoning regarding the justifiable restrictions on rights. Since it is long standing philosophy that there is a standard to apply, we’ll have to see. The 2nd A case now in the SC may give some insight, it is rare for the SC to have to rule on a very basic right, ordinarily it is extensions of them.
Xanthippas
I’m sorry, but arguing that this sort of thing is okay for terrorists, and then naively wondering why the government would want to use it against “ordinary” criminals like drug dealers and whatnot, is incredibly stupid. OF COURSE the government will use the power as often and in whatever way they see fit and can get away with, and such is the cost of arguing for a lower bar.
jcricket
It was one of those back-handed complimentos (like a mento, only snarkier) :-)
But yes, I fear the Daily Show and The Onion will have to shut down as the right is now parodying themselves without any help.
JWW
I don’t like it, but then again I am not a criminal, as most of you most likely are not. I think there is an invasion of privacy, but I really am not that concerned. If they come to my home, kick the door in, cuff me, give me the run around and release! Then answer why? Give me the correct answer, I can live with that. If you have no or very little knowledge of Bending technology, you should. Yhe best geeks can route a call through any active number, power bill, gas bill, pre-identified cell phone. Law enforcement take all precautions to avoid mistakes, if a few slip by, give them a break. They are going where the information leads them.
Wasn’t there a recent case where a judge needed to be contacted, found unavailable, locked doors, no email requests taken. Hmm, I think it was a death row inmate, needing an Appeal. Maybe we should look at our legal system, not those who are called to appeal to it for confirmation.
Craig
Spot on, John!
If Hillary is elected, how many nanoseconds will pass before wingnuttia takes up the cry of “Restore the Constitution!”