The 4th Amendment right to privacy has been so badly violated by the US Federal Government and TSA that the Constitution is no longer valid - the contract is beyond broken, the US government has descended into absolute dictatorship and it is the duty of all Americans to “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” “it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
No-one can violate the 4th amendment. The government is only seen to be violating it because they've chosen to interpret it under a different meaning that somehow allows them to collect private user data en-masse.
The US has privacy enshrined in the highest law of the land, the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. The problem is that the courts have eroded the meaning and allowed loopholes in the name of "national security", which itself is a term that has been perverted.
we need to reduce the level of general surveillance, but how far? Where exactly is the maximum tolerable level of surveillance, which we must ensure is not exceeded?
Easy, at least in America, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, created to protect, not establish, natural rights. Therefore it is prescriptive in the fourth amendment on this issue.
"the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I would contend that we just have a bunch of people who have actively participated in violation of their oaths of office, of which they sign an affidavit (5 U.S.C. 3333) they will not violate while in office, the punishment of which (18 U.S.C. 1918) is removal from office and confinement or a fine.
I think we need to start taking people to court for violation of their oath, but of course proving (5 U.S.C. 7311) “advocate[ing] the overthrow of our constitutional form of government” is the legally difficult problem, so I have been meaning to learn more about legal research to find precedents of this actually being done or other legal precedents where someone has been convicted of advocating X. Of course it might be easier to prove the subsection of being a member of an organization which advocates it.
Of course the privacy issue affects more than just the US, but as former military I take my oath, the only oath I have ever taken (secret oaths speech of JFK anyone?), to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic, very seriously.
I have spent years since I got out and did my Descartes reset trying to understand the current threats to the constitution, and to be frank it's not the terrorists I'm scared of, its the corrupt and the cowardly in the beltway and on wallstreet that I fear are so ready to undermine our freedoms under the obviously false banner of protecting those freedoms.
All three branches of government (and the fourth estate) are corrupted, infiltrated, and subverted from the top down by the surveillance engine, which also happens to double as a blackmail engine. The oligarchy towards the end of the 90's began to understand the threat of freedom of thought on the internet and the surveillance engine has already been put in place, and as William Binney and Thomas Drake have said, now all it needs is the right dictator to "turn the key", and potentially walk the cat back on stored data on dissidents. Remember that protest you attended a few years ago? That thing your wrote? If they are so willing to get rid of things like habeus corpus, what makes you think removal of other things like ex post facto is so far fetched?
That's the slippery slope of unconstitutionality, in that by allowing one usurpation of the constitution because of a thing you agree with (on HN a good example might be the second amendment), you then open the flood gates to allow more and more stripping of rights.
Bottom line is this, get a fucking warrant or it's unconstitutional!
edit: and no, general warrants and writs of assistance don't count as a constitutional warrant.
I feel despair because my government is supposed to be upholding my fundamental right to privacy but, clearly, the Fourth Amendment is something that can be selectively upheld or discarded. So what’s left? For me to hope that some company will respect my “rights”?
Technology destroyed the Fourth Amendment. If the government couldn't fly the helicopter themselves, they would just buy the data, as they already do your cellphone location data, car tag scan data, credit card purchase histories, etc.
It's going to be clearly silly for most people to say that multibillion dollar corporations are allowed to conduct unlimited surveillance on you, but the government can't. The 4A was encoding a legal right to the societal expectation of privacy. We've spent the last 30 years blithely destroying that social expectation via tech. Of course no one much is up in arms in it now - we've trained it out. Big Data and the Fourth Amendment are antitheses. Even if you were to somehow rile up enough people to force some sort of legislation against stuff like this, it's going to happen anyway, illegally, and they'll find a way to get away with it. Consider the myriad abuses of the CIA and NSA. What happened when the CIA spied on Congress illegally as Congress investigated their other illegal actions, and then got caught, then lied about what they were doing? Absolutely nothing, and the guy in charge is now considered a hero by a whole political faction and is a frequent media commentator expounding his opinions as a Trustworthy Expert.
In a world where you're dealing with human beings, you can't have giant repositories of extremely useful data in centralized locations and think that a "don't look at this" sign is going to do you any good. You have to not have giant centralized repositories of data people care about. The Fourth Amendment could only effectively exist in a world where privacy was valued and invading it meant breaking into someone’s home, or his lawyer’s office, or paying people to follow him around all day.
Your right to privacy is your security against unreasonable search and seizure. Fourth amendment. No wonder it's so easy for the government to infringe our rights - we are not taught we have them!
Exactly right. As can be seen via the purchases of large swaths of private location data by the Department of Homeland Security and other government entities, essentially side stepping US citizens’ 4th amendment rights [1].
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution explicitly protects the people from unreasonable searches.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
One might say that you submit to this as part of the deal to get on the plane. But if that were true, it would be between you and the airline, not the government. That means it really should be the airlines that decide how intrusive searches should be. And you would be free to choose an airline whose policies you agree with. And the airline would be free to reject you as a passenger.
The government has hijacked the relationship between you and the people you've hired to get you from point A to point B. Just because of previous lapses in their intelligence efforts enabled some people to do something terrible doesn't mean you lose your rights.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution explicitly protects the people from unreasonable searches.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
One might say that you submit to this as part of the deal to get on the plane. But if that were true, it would be between you and the airline, not the government. That means it really should be the airlines that decide how intrusive searches should be. And you would be free to choose an airline whose policies you agree with. And the airline would be free to reject you as a passenger.
The government has hijacked the relationship between you and the people you've hired to get you from point A to point B. Just because of previous lapses in their intelligence efforts enabled some people to do something terrible doesn't mean you lose your rights.
Regardless of your opinion of Snowden, the 4th Amendment has been trampled. Its words and simple and clear:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I lived through the cold war. I remember how Americans held our country up as the better example when compared to the intrusive internal snooping of the communist bloc.
Technically, much of the Bill of Rights applies to the federal government and all subordinate governments. If they are not allowed to do something, period, it hardly matters if the person they are doing it to is in a particular place or has a particular attribute.
Politicians, realizing that only the citizens may vote, may exempt those folks from their otherwise unconstitutional activities, because others have no effective means to seek redress. My reading of the 4th is that it is a restriction on the conduct of the government, such that it applies to every natural person on Earth.
It may well be that the Supreme Court has not ruled this way because it is overwhelmingly staffed by politically-connected lawyers, rather than linguists and logicians.
The government is not allowed to search anyone, anywhere, without a specific purpose. Drawing a dividing line between foreign and domestic spying is a distraction from the notion that Uncle Sam is breaking the law when he listens in to Joe Terrorist's phone calls from halfway across the world to about 45% of the way around via dragnets and data mining.
We are willing to tolerate some degree of law-breaking when it is clearly in our own interest to do so, but it has gone well beyond that by now. Someone's wrist out there is just aching for a good, light slap.
Sorry fellow Americans, you don't have Fourth Amendment rights anymore.
You've got Fourth-Amendment-As-Defined-By-A-Government-Lawyer-In-A-Secret-Court rights. They're similar, except that Federal agencies can snoop the hell out of whatever you're doing.
You know, to keep our children safe from terrorists.
The intentional violation of the 4th amendment by the government, has a very radical and substantive affect on the American public, both today and even more particularly in the future. The violation of my privacy has an affect on me, regardless of if I know about it: it illegally increases what the government knows about me, against my will and rights; current behavior / beliefs etc can be used against me in the future by a repressive government. Their knowledge base changes their behavior toward me (one way or another), thus an affect upon me.
Simple black and white example: someone takes a dollar out of your bank account every day, but you fail to notice. Does that make it ok? Obviously not, and your freedom is a lot more valuable than a dollar bill. You might not have noticed, but you've lost something.
Another simple black and white example: a law is passed committing me to slavery, but nobody ever comes around to actually enslave me, and in fact absolutely nothing changes - except in government codified documents, it directly states that I am a slave. Has that affected me? Yes, my understood status and rights as a human being have been completely altered. That is the most substantive affect possible, and the same is true about eliminating my right to be protected against warrantless search & seizure. There is little question that when the government alters what it regards to be my rights, thus how it views and treats me, that has a material affect upon my life now and in the future.
That's discouraging to hear. This is why the U.S. Constitution's 4th amendment is so important. The right to privacy isn't only to give citizens peace of mind, but also to prevent governments from tyranizing freely using dissenting information to fuel their persecution.
"... we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."
The right to privacy from the government is a logical consequence of the fact that the government is the servant of the people, put in place to protect and promote the people's interests. The Declaration of Independence describes our reason for instituting a government at all:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ..."
We need no justification for privacy from the government and its proxies. The most upstanding citizen still has the right to keep his affairs private. Even people with nothing to hide have the right to hide it.
We explicitly give the government the power of search, but only when we (through a judge) agree that it's necessary. Without that agreement, they're not allowed:
Amendment 4 - Search and Seizure. Ratified 12/15/1791.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
We explicitly restrict all other powers of government through the 10th Amendment:
Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
We do that because we recognize the tendency of unchecked governments to gather more power to themselves. When a government becomes more powerful than its people, the people are slaves who have lost "the Blessings of Liberty" as listed in the Constitution's Preamble.
Government is a dangerous tool. It's the people who should be watching the government, not the other way around.
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