The government has been chipping away at the 4th Amendment since the start of the War on (some) Drugs. The stop-and-frisk policy in New York is just one of the latest steps in destroying privacy in this country.
Now the DHS has decided that the freedom from suspicionless searches doesn’t apply near the nation’s borders.
“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.
The President George W. Bush administration first announced the suspicionless, electronics search rules in 2008. The President Barack Obama administration followed up with virtually the same rules a year later. Between 2008 and 2010, 6,500 persons had their electronic devices searched along the U.S. border, according to DHS data. According to legal precedent, the Fourth Amendment — the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures — does not apply along the border. By the way, the government contends the Fourth-Amendment-Free Zone stretches 100 miles inland from the nation’s actual border.
Did you catch that? 100 miles inland. That includes shipping ports. That means that around 2/3rd of the nation’s population, around 190 million, lives in these areas that are free of the 4th Amendment restrictions.
The DHS has already set up 33 “internal checkpoints” deeper in the country.
The expansion of the police state in America would be mindboggling to anyone living as recently as the 1980’s or 1990’s. It doesn’t seem to matter which political party is in power.
Click below for the full article.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/10/1185972/-The-slow-death-of-the-4th-Amendment