Tag Archives: freedom

Cell Phone Searches

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The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday police must almost always obtain a warrant before searching mobile devices seized when arresting someone….

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the Court’s unanimously held opinion, said

Modern cellphones aren’t a technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life.”

Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cellphone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant[.]

With this ruling the Court, among other things, placed the contents of cell phones outside the permissible warrantless searches allowed pursuant to an arrest that’s for the safety of the police (to ensure, for instance, the arrestee has no weapons or other devices that he could use to harm the arresting officer(s) and/or to attempt escape) and to safeguard related evidence until a warrant otherwise could be obtained.

Someone wrote earlier that this is the ruling that was warranted.

The opinion can be read here.

Gina “Joe” McCarthy is Speaking Again

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In a recent speech to the National Academy of Sciences, the EPA Administrator had this to say in decrying her critics:

…claiming that research is secret if researchers protect confidential personal health data from those who are not qualified to analyze it—and won’t agree to protect it.

By whose definition are the folks who want to see the data for themselves deemed not qualified, Madam? You’re the one keeping the data secret, on what basis do we take your word for it?

Won’t agree to protect what? On what basis do we even conclude the data are personal, when you won’t let us see it—especially given how easy it is to redact the personal identifiers without compromising the data themselves?

Hmm….

The Ground Zero Cross and Atheists

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American Atheists filed suit three years ago against having this symbol included in the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which officially opened late last month. Their suit was tossed forthwith as baseless; US District Court Judge Deborah Batts wrote

No reasonable observer would view the artifact as endorsing Christianity. [The museum curators] have not advanced religion impermissibly, and the cross does not create excessive entanglement between the state and religion.

The group appealed to the Second Circuit which responded by instructing American Atheists actually to make a case and not just bellyache, and to do so by 14 July. In so instructing, the Appellate Court cited an amicus brief provided by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty which argued among other things that

Courts should not allow people to sue just because they claim to get “dyspepsia” over a historical artifact displayed in a museum.

As Eric Baxter, Senior Counsel for Religious Liberty noted,

Taking personal offense is not an injury that warrants invoking the power of the courts to shut down everything you disagree with. The Constitution is not a personal tool for censoring everyone’s beliefs but your own.

Indeed.

IRS and Internal Emails

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Like a lot folks, I’m skeptical about the…accuracy…of the IRS’ lately claim that they can’t find Lois Lerner’s emails from before 2011.

My skepticism flows from a number of sources:

  • Why are they only now discovering the loss, a year after all that documentation was subpoenaed by House oversight committees?
  • The IRS claims a hard drive crash is at the heart of the loss—on what basis are we to believe that a single hard drive held all those documents?
  • The IRS’ hard drives—actually, the material stored on them—like all government hard drives/data, and like all such materials in the private, competitive sector, are backed up nightly: what are we to believe happened to all those backups?
  • Are we expected to believe that a professional IT crew would be so careless as to leave a single hard drive at the core of such a critical system? That they would leave all those backups at mercy of a single point of failure?

Note to those of you who believe the IRS’ claim: perhaps I can interest you in some beachfront property north of Santa Fe.