Tag Archives: freedom

The Supremes Get One Right

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The Supreme Court ruled Friday that authorities generally need a search warrant before they can obtain broad access to data that shows the location of cellphone users, a decision that sets privacy boundaries in the digital age.
The court, in a 5-4 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, cited the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee to be free from unreasonable government searches.

And

We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information[.]

Yewbetcha.

Privacy!?

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You ain’t got no privacy.  You don’t need any stinking privacy!

Using facial recognition software in combination with image storage houses like drivers license databases can be highly useful in tracking down criminal suspects.

But the combination can be highly dangerous, too, as this attitude by Joseph Michael, Washington County Deputy State’s Attorney in Maryland, demonstrates:

the expectation of privacy ends when you sit down and smile at the government desk.

Pinellas County (FL) Sheriff Bob Gualtieri argued

This is no different than if I laid out all those photos in front of me…and said “No, that doesn’t look like him, that doesn’t look like him, here we go, that’s him[.]”  The only thing is I am doing it in a different way, a more automated way, a more efficient way.

Sometimes that faster, more automated—human-removed—way is less efficient, though, as it removes thought and care and consideration of individual liberty from the process, favoring as it does getting a conviction over getting a just outcome.

Michael’s attitude illustrates the conundrum.  His attitude, the attitude of a Government Man, is precisely why we have a Bill of Rights in our Constitution.  His attitude is just an extension of “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you should let Government snoop if it wants to.”  Folks like Gualtieri can be better trained.  Folks like Michael are unfit for office in a free country.

Norway Gets It

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Norway is asking us to double the number of troops we have stationed there and to move them closer to its border with Russia.  It’s a pittance—700 Marines vs the 330 we have there now—but we need to work with Norway very seriously to figure out how to do this.

Norway said the invitation was about NATO training and improving winter fighting capability.

“Allies get better at training together,” Defense Minister Frank Bakke-Jensen told reporters.

Yewbetcha.  And joint training is especially important in the face of demonstrated Russian aggression and its stationing of nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad.

A Thought on Nationhood

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Germany has one, and it centers on immigrants assimilating into German culture rather than holding themselves apart while taking advantage of the German benefits that drew the immigrants in the first place.  It’s articulated by Joachim Gauck, President of Germany from 2012-2017.  He told Bild

“I find it unacceptable that people who have been living in Germany for decades cannot hold a conversation in German, do not attend parent-teacher conferences or keep their children from going to classes or sports.”

He said people should not shy away from standing up for German values out of fear of being seen as a racist or xenophobe and that there should be “something like binding rules for living together and not several societies alongside one another.”

Absolutely.  A nation’s culture, its ability to rule itself, its very existence are at risk when immigrants as large groups don’t assimilate, and the receiving nation allows that to occur.  The nation ceases to be; it devolves into a collection of disparate groupings who happen to occupy a geographic area.

A Concept of Privacy

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Personal privacy and protections against warrantless searches got a boost from the Supreme Court earlier this week.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that police need a warrant to search vehicles parked at private homes, the second time this month the justices rejected government arguments for expanding the “automobile exception” to Fourth Amendment rules against unreasonable searches.

The case at hand involved a stolen motorcycle parked in the driveway of a private residence and protected from the elements (and perhaps (even probably) from being seen by police) by a tarp.  A police officer recognized from Facebook postings the residence, saw the fact of a motorcycle under the tarp, entered the property, lifted the tarp, and looked over the motorcycle—all without a warrant.

Writing for the Court in an 8-1 decision, Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote

Just like the front porch, side garden or area “outside the front window,” the driveway enclosure where Officer [David] Rhodes searched the motorcycle constitutes [the area where] activity of home life extends….

And

Given the centrality of the Fourth Amendment interest in the home and its curtilage and the disconnect between that interest and the justifications behind the automobile exception, we decline Virginia’s invitation to extend the automobile exception to permit a warrantless intrusion on a home or its curtilage[.]

Justice Samuel Alito was the lone dissenter.

…the officer should have been permitted to search the motorcycle visible in the driveway, just as he could have were it parked in a public street. “Officer Rhodes’s brief walk up the driveway impaired no real privacy interests,” he wrote.

Surprising out of Alito; it seems he doesn’t completely understand curtilage or of privacy.  Notwithstanding, I’d further curtail the motor vehicle exception* allowing warrantless searches to bar such from motor vehicles parked on the street in front of the vehicle owner’s residence (or beside it in the case of a corner lot) or parked in an apartment complex’s parking lot near the vehicle owner’s apartment or in the apartment renter’s designated parking slot.

 

*The motor vehicle exception to the requirement for search warrants allows warrantless searches based on a prohibition era ruling that motor vehicles were too mobile and could be moved before a warrant could be obtained.  That ruling was itself erroneous IMNSHO because it assumed that the police were incapable of keeping a motor vehicle under surveillance until the warrant arrived.