Well…going to stay away from politics for the day…unless there is a ruling in the Trump U. case….and there was a good ruling from a federal court that I wanted to talk about. As you know, the 4th amendment sets out that the government needs a warrant approved by a judge to search your “person, places, or things…” and you also know that police across this country have been violating the 4th amendment at will when it comes to modern day electronic devices such as cell phones since the law has not caught up with modernity…well, now it has. A federal judge has ruled that information gathered by the so-called “stingray” cell phone tracker that has been used for years now without warrants across this country is a violation of the 4th amendment. What this stingray does is “spoof” a cell phone tower…in reality creating a fake tower that all of the cell phones in the area will talk to and recognize as a real one…essentially allowing the police to track a persons movements or the movements of his phone to be accurate, with the judge saying “Absent a search warrant, the government may not turn a citizen’s cell phone into a tracking device.” This is good new for those of us that believe that the 4th amendment has been eroded over the years to allow the police to violate it at will….now, we need to have this ruling used as precedent across the country since there are over 200 organizations who have these tracking devices and are using them without warrants on a daily basis…..
Tag Archives: 4th amendment
A win for us and the 4th amendment..
Well…have been trying to figure out what to write today..there are plenty of topics but none of them have been grabbing me…but, this one just came across my Twitter feed and it is a cheerable moment for me and should be for everyone in the US…and across the world…just this aft, a federal judge has ruled that the gross capturing of all of our phone records by the NSA is unconstitutional…saying that it violates the 4th amendment and that “James Madison would be spinning in his grave…”.
Finally, a judge that has said enough to all this nonsense…anyone who has ever read the constitution knows that the 4th is very simple…you can’t search peoples lives without probable cause that a crime has been committed….and just using the phone is not illegal so the leap to collecting every phone record has to be against the law. Period. The only bad thing is that he stayed his decision until the appeal is completed…but, with how the decision was worded, this judge feels that the plaintiffs will prevail in any appeal…he should have made it immediate…would have saved billions of dollars…a good piece of deficit reduction….geez…
The TSA…again…
Well….there have been developments in the TSA scanner mess that I felt I had to comment on….the more you hear about this great boondoggle of these multi-million dollar machines, the more you just want to say “what good is the TSA?” First, let’s start with the fact that the owners of the companies that make the machines have been spending million of dollars lobbying for their installation across the US…why do they have to lobby if these things are so wonderful and do what they are sold to do? I have a problem with any company making profit on fear that leads Americans to gradually lose their freedom….and with the latest revelation that the machines will only detect explosive material if it is in a block shape; not if it is shaped into anything resembling body parts…or into flat shapes that can then be taped to the body. Yep, that’s right folks..you have given up your freedom and dignity for a technology that does not work…oh, you’ll hear the TSA say it does because they’ve found small amounts of marijuana and a few “sharp objects”….but don’t say what those sharp objects were…a child’s hair comb? When was the last time anyone brought down a plane with marijuana? And, as shown on the show “Mythbusters”, you can just saturate clothing with odorless explosives and then make them explode…what’s next, do we all have to wear a TSA mandated jumpsuit that we are given before we can board an aircraft?
Now…in the last week or so…we’ve seen the unchecked power of the TSA being turned on the pilot that expressed his first amendment rights to criticize the agency by an “investigation” being started into his background and everything else in his life. If that is not terrorism, what is? These kind of tactics are not even done in supposedly backward countries anymore…
Let’s get down to the bottom line, even if you don’t think the 4th amendment violations are enough to justify removal of these imagers, the plain, true fact is that we are being taken again by that wonderful repub combo of big money and fear…just like they did in the last election…aren’t we tired of that yet?