Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment

[doh_phooey]

Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment

by Laurence H. Tribe

The escalating controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

The Supreme Court held in 1967 that electronic eavesdropping is a ''search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, recognizing that our system of free expression precludes treating each use of a telephone as an invitation to Big Brother to listen in. By 2001, the court had come to see how new technology could arm the government with information previously obtainable only through old-fashioned spying and could thereby convert mere observation -- for example, the heat patterns on a house's exterior walls -- to a ''search" requiring a warrant. To read the Constitution otherwise, the court reasoned, would leave us ''at the mercy of advancing technology" and erode the ''privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted." This decision, emphasizing the privacy existing when the Bill of Rights was originally ratified in 1791, was no liberal holdover in conservative times. Its author was Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the dissent. This issue should not divide liberals from conservatives, Democrats from Republicans.

These two decisions greatly undermine the aberrant 1979 ruling on which defenders of the NSA program rely, in which a bare Supreme Court majority said it doubted that people have any ''expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial," since they ''must 'convey' numbers to the telephone company," which in turn can share them with others for purposes like ''detecting fraud and preventing violations of law." Unconvincing then, those words surely ring hollow today, now that information technology has made feasible the NSA program whose cover was blown last week. That program profiles virtually every American's phone conversations, giving government instant access to detailed knowledge of the numbers, and thus indirectly the identities, of whomever we phone; when and for how long; and what other calls the person phoned has made or received. As Justice Stewart recognized in 1979, a list of all numbers called ''easily could reveal . . . the most intimate details of a person's life."

The Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unconstrained snooping by Big Brother -- made bigger by an onrush of information-trolling technology that few foresaw in 1979 -- is bipartisan. It is a guarantee that cannot tolerate the pretense that numbers called from a private phone, unlike the conversations themselves, are without ''content." That pretense is impossible to maintain now that the technology deployed by NSA enables the agency to build a web with those numbers that can ensnare individuals -- all individuals -- just as comprehensively and intimately as all-out eavesdropping.

MORE at link

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0516-26.htm

[liberal N proud]

1. Oh but wait, they are going to replace those old amendments with new

more moral ones.

Out with those archaic old amendments to make room for the gay marriage ban and the flag desecration amendments.

Welcome the the new bu$h plan for democracy.
:banghead:

[kath]

5. Well, they certainly have pared down the Bill of Rights. See this article

"Bill of Rights Pared Down to a Manageable Six"
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27610

But you're right, they need to add back your two new ones. So that gets us to eight...

[doh_phooey]

6. The Roberts Court and your rights

[lyonn]

2. We need more "Tribes" speaking for us

This guy is good. Another quote:

".......the Constitution's Fourth Amendment shield for ''the right of the people to be secure" from ''unreasonable searches" is a shield for all seasons, one that a lawless president, a spineless Congress, and a complacent majority of citizens -- who are conditioned to a government operating under a shroud of secrecy while individuals live out their lives in fishbowls -- cannot be permitted to destroy, for the rest of us and our children."

[Supersedeas]

7. the M$S would rather talk to screaming faces than Constitutional scholars

[Giant Robot]

3. Could be summed up in a simpler manner

Saying "Bush Wipes Ass with Constitution."

[doh_phooey]

8. it's already on the market

[kath]

4. Awww, come on, Larry! The Fourth Amendment is obsolete, don'cha know?Just

like the Geneva Conventions. Only more so.
Get a brain, Moran.

[doh_phooey]

9. Constitutional Imbalance

[sweetheart]

10. Those damn redcoats

The drugs war has long totally undermined the 4th, it is but a shell,
as once the asset forfeiture thinking gains momentum, everyone's a
criminal depending on how much money they want to steal today. Oh,
the joys of neoliberal democracy and its viral spreading to every
country on earth, colonzing them to the new bottom.

[doh_phooey]

11. Judge Shred