AMENDMENT III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Because of its clear text, there have been few court opinions discussing the Third Amendment. The quartering problem has largely been solved today by paying communities to host military bases. When the Supreme Court has cited the Third Amendment, it has been as part of nonoriginalist interpretations that list it as one of the sources of “penumbras, formed by emanations” that create a zone of privacy in no specific clause of the Constitution.
AMENDMENT IV
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.
All of us are familiar with the term, Fruit of the Poisonous Tree. It is a legal term, born of the Exclusionary Rule, which prevents the use of illegally obtained evidence from being used against a defendant at trial. It is the backbone of the fourth amendment. It is what has prevented police from fabricating traffic stops, stop and frisk encounters and using evidence they are not entitled to, under law.
The U.S. Supreme Court examined the Utah case of Joseph Strieff. A case that calls into question our fourth amendment protections when dealing with cops on the street.
Strieff, was illegally detained and searched. However, during the illegal detention, a valid arrest warrant was found. Having already been illegally detained, a search uncovered drugs inside his vehicle. The courts played hot potato with this one, as different decisions flopped around the Utah court circuit. Initially, it was found that the valid search warrant justified the illegal search. The reasoning was unclear, but the court must have been using an “inevitable discovery” mentality when coming to that conclusion. An appeals court overturned the decision and the conviction against Strieff was thrown out. This case then made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices’ voted 5-3 to reinstate the conviction against Strieff.
One argument for the reinstatement was a concept called the Attenuation Exception to the Exclusionary Rule. This Attenuation Exception, which is nothing new and extraordinarily vague, states that evidence obtained illegally can be used if the “connection between the misconduct and the discovery of the evidence is sufficiently weak.”
While this Attenuation Exception is somewhat obscure and vague, it has been used to submit unlawfully obtained evidence for decades. In a nutshell, if the officer can articulate a “good faith” argument for your illegal search or detention, even if wrong, the evidence obtained can be used against you.
The Justice Department, without any warrant or reasonable cause, is doing something that even makes the NSA’s methods of operation pale in comparison.
Ok, not really. It is hard to justify an NSA that eavesdrops on the cellphone calls of free world leaders who are our allies. But really – under the guise of “locating cell phones linked to individuals under investigation by the government,” the US Marshals Service, with direct permission from the Justice Department, is spying on all of us.
Using “Dirtboxes” that act like fake cellphone towers, the Marshals are flying planes around areas that cover “most of the US population.” These boxes trick our phones into reporting in – essentially telling the box who we are and where we are. And they’ve been doing this since 2007.
We have carefully established protocols and processes to help law enforcement officials track the bad guys. They can go to courts and get warrants; they can directly request information from phone companies about established or suspected criminals and their activity, and more. Yet “the program cuts out phone companies as an intermediary.”
It is also quite unclear whether the Marshals are getting court orders to search for the phones they are tracking – yet regardless of any court order; the problem is that they are tracking nearly all of us in this effort to track a few.
On Tuesday, February 28, 2013, the Supreme Court disemboweled the Fourth Amendment. In a 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that citizens cannot challenge government wiretapping laws, in particular the unconstitutional Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and, more recently, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
According to Justice Samuel Alito, millions of Americans can no longer expect the government to uphold the Constitution and prevent the NSA from conducting dragnet surveillance.
The government established so-called “sovereign immunity” last August when the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco dismissed Al Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama following a December 2010 court case ruling the NSA’s warrantless wiretap program was illegal.
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress passed the Patriot Act. It allows federal agents to write their own search warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment and does away with the FISA-issued search warrant requirement, itself blatantly unconstitutional.
“FISA gives the government unchecked authority to snoop on all Americans who communicate with any foreign person, in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment,” Andrew Napolitano wrote in December. “The right to privacy is a natural human right. Its enshrinement in the Constitution has largely kept America from becoming East Germany.”
Alito’s argument rests on the fact that FISA is a secret court. “Yet respondents have no actual knowledge of the Government’s §1881a targeting practices. Instead, respondents merely speculate and make assumptions about whether their communications with their foreign contacts will be acquired under §1881a,” he wrote.
This ruling and the recently renewed FISA ACT pitches the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure into the dustbin of history. It means we are one step closer to becoming East Germany where the Stasi conducted dragnet surveillance with impunity.
Stasi, however, was old school. The modern high-tech surveillance state is infinitely more effective and will be used to monitor the political attitudes of all Americans in dragnet fashion and ferret out for persecution – and elimination – those who pose a threat to the status quo.
The US government has decided all of our data can now be collected without any suspicion of wrongdoing. So this is how it ends, not with a bang but with thunderous chants of “USA”, “USA”, “USA”!
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