There has been, and always will be, some type of terrorists. So its a perfect opportunity to use this threat (whether real in some cases and not in some cases) to get something approved that you could not normally.
At least with the end of of the USSR, most of the old Cold War communism scare tactics went away. Unfortunately, I don't really foresee and end in the use of terrorism threats to get funding for some new technology or bill to erode more rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_%28Negri_and_Hardt_book...
--Hermann Göring
mine has been turned up to 11 for about 15 years now.
-- Rahm Emanuel
Then within the last few years, a black kid who takes his life savings -- $10,000 cash -- and moves across the country to start a new life is (apparently entirely legally) relieved of it by two police officers and has no means to get it back, despite never being arrested nor charged with any crime.
History shows that it's impossible to trust the government's promise that they'll restrict any new capabilities to the worst bad guys.
1. Does the United States Constitution permit the government to do this?
2. What would this power look like if it were expanded dramatically in scope or in time?
3. What would this obligation look like if exercised indifferently by unaccountable people?
4. What would your worst enemy do with this power?
The list goes on, but points 2, 3, and 4 should be sufficient to cause pause for even the most aggressive supporter of expanding government powers.
[0] https://popehat.com/2016/06/02/libertarianism-as-ten-questio...
Individual liberty is something that we need to defend actively from the government and that can not happen unless we take a diametrically opposite stance and do not concede even and inch of ground.
Example: People who supported civil forfeiture essentially thought that its okay to take things away from crime lords even if the charges are not proved. Now CF is coming after everyone.
I think the right solution here is to starve the beast. Force the government to lower taxes and leave them with substantially less money for needless wars, enforcing idiotic laws and other welfare schemes.
You also can't lower taxes without hurting employment and nobody wants higher unemployment.
>What is to be done
A people that doesn't pay attention to the government gets screwed by the government every time, no matter what rules are in place. That's why Lawrence Lessig is trying to change the rules to encourage people to take part.
Because in non-corrupt situations it's not your responsibility to explain yourself to not be robbed by the police.
Why not require a warrant? The more checks and balances the better.
Is there a way to make obtaining warrants more transparent and straightforward?
It honestly seems like they could design a better system that doesn't get rid of the checks, increases citizen trust, and solves their issues.
But of course it doesn't do that, because the FBI doesn't operate in "good faith", and because it would prefer as little oversight as possible - which is what this request is really about anyway: the removal of judicial oversight, even beyond its rapidly growing abuse of NSLs [2].
[1] - https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160605/09111034626/appea...
[2] - https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2016/04/14/keeping...
Also: make a prominent "clear last hour" option for mobile; I hate following a link from someone and finding a ton of tracking cookies have just been added.
So restoring this option wouldn't help, maybe only using TOR or some VPN proxy would.
Edit: While I'm here, Firefox should also provide an Android URL intent that opens links in a private tab.
You're repeating a common fallacy, namely that warrants are a sine qua non condition for search and seizure. This is false. In the United States, one enjoys constitutional protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
While a warrant goes a very long way towards making a search or seizure reasonable, the two are not to be equated.
A few notable exceptions where warrants are not required:
- The so-called motor-vehicle exception
- The so-called "in hot pursuit" exception
I think we share the same feeling towards this particular case, but it's important to understand the legal arguments being made. The FBI is essentially claiming that it is reasonable to search browser history without a warrant.
Lately?
I think the fact that they completely invented a fictitious science to prosecute cases should have brought serious investigation and televised congressional hearings with daily news coverage...
...but nope.
Scrap it and start over.
So... basically a warrant.
I can see the attack ad now:
"Judge Soandso thinks that terrorists deserve a greater right to privacy than you do. Judge Soandso protects terrorists. Vote Judge Otherguy."
Kinda turns this into a rubber stamp.
"Judge Otherguy's tough-on-crime strategy led to a $1500 DUI charge for an innocent grandmother on SSI who was poisoned by her doctor. Vote Judge Soandso to protect the elderly."
It wasn't even 2 years after the 2001 PATRIOT act that the DOJ was using the provisions for drug cases.
A probably non-exhaustive list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_t...
> Adam McGaughey, the webmaster of a fan site for the television show Stargate SG-1, was charged with copyright infringement and computer fraud. During the investigation, the FBI invoked a provision of the Act to obtain financial records from the site's Internet Service Provider.
I never heard this one before. Using terrorism laws to investigate copyright infringment on a scifi TV show fan site.
A running theme in these cases:
> Millions of phone records were harvested, fed into a database and were searched for patterns of calling to and from numbers of known terrorists. To date, there have been no announced arrests from this program. [..] Furthermore, this information is databased and maintained indefinitely by the FBI.
> By Ellen Nakashima
Meanwhile, maybe it's an effort by this media outlet to downplay, and run interference in favor of government entities, so that people roll their eyes at the misinformation and simply presume the government as incompetant.
Looking at browser history might not hurt most people, but getting a warrant isn't hard, and it's the proper way to do things.
"Ya caaaan't have it!"
As far as I am concerned, they can do whatever they want with people who accept that. Concerning myself, I am always on the outlook for some kind of counter-veiling power, the most interesting of which is Islam. It really retaliates. So, I am positive about it.
