The ninth installment of “How to Save America.”
Welcome to the ninth installment of “How to Save America.”
The fourth amendment to he Constitution guarantees our right to be secure in our “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and “no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause..” There are three important things that proceed from this amendment. First, it recognizes that our property is ours-our person, our home, our papers, our effects, they belong to us, not the government. Second, by including our “papers” in the list, this amendment recognizes a right to privacy in our affairs, that our business is not the government’s business. Finally, if the government wants to know our business or take our property it must obtain a warrant that specifically identifies the thing or things to be searched or seized.
In our last installment we saw that as far a seizures go, under civil asset forfeiture laws and others, the power of the government to take your property is not in any way restrained by fourth amendment requirements. They can take anything at any time upon mere suspicion without warrant, arrest or conviction. This is, of course, a gross violation of our property rights and nothing more that outright theft but this is the world we live in in America and we need to adapt to protect our property.
Today we are going to talk about searches, your right to privacy and how the government ignores that right often with our cooperation. First of all, know this, the government can search anything it wants at any time without first obtaining a warrant. While section 213 of the Patriot Act is often blamed for this, it merely codified a power the government had been accumulating for some time. And just like civil asset forfeiture,
the standard is not “probable cause” but “reasonable suspicion.” This means any federal agency can come into your home and search for anything, obtain the warrant after the fact and use what they found in a criminal case against you. Again, this is the grossest violation of our property rights, a violation of the fourth amendment but it all stems from the government’s belief that we are mere serfs or slaves, our property is theirs and we merely use it with their permission and they have the right to inspect it or take it when it so pleases them.
Of course such an overt invasion is usually not necessary anymore. Not with so much of our property and papers in the form of ones and zeros out there in cyberspace. Make sure you understand this, internalize it and learn to act accordingly. Nothing, absolutely nothing that you do on the Internet is private. Nothing. No matter the encryption, no matter what your precautions, anonymity on the Internet does not exist. And even if it does today, the NSA is storing every bit of data created every moment of every day and if they can’t find you today or break your code today, they will tomorrow and just backtrack.
Consider this. There are private data companies out there that boast of having over fifty thousand data points on each and every individual American. I think you and I would be hard pressed to rattle off fifty or one hundred data points about ourselves. They have fifty thousand. And all your information stored online at each of these companies and others you use all the time, like Google and Facebook, are shared with third parties as part of their user agreements. These third party agreements make circumventing the fourth amendment much easier. What is called the third party doctrine states that when you willingly agree to allow your information to be shared with a third party, something included in a vast majority of those user agreements none of us read, the government can obtain it much easier, as can others.
These are things you need to be aware of. The Internet, the web, can be a great tool. It provides great access to information but we need to be aware of the fact that our information is part of that great cache and if we don’t pay attention and control it, the world wide web can easily become a sticky snare. We will go more into this next time.
Until then, may God be with us and may we always act with honor and justice.
The fourth amendment to he Constitution guarantees our right to be secure in our “persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and “no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause..” There are three important things that proceed from this amendment. First, it recognizes that our property is ours-our person, our home, our papers, our effects, they belong to us, not the government. Second, by including our “papers” in the list, this amendment recognizes a right to privacy in our affairs, that our business is not the government’s business. Finally, if the government wants to know our business or take our property it must obtain a warrant that specifically identifies the thing or things to be searched or seized.
In our last installment we saw that as far a seizures go, under civil asset forfeiture laws and others, the power of the government to take your property is not in any way restrained by fourth amendment requirements. They can take anything at any time upon mere suspicion without warrant, arrest or conviction. This is, of course, a gross violation of our property rights and nothing more that outright theft but this is the world we live in in America and we need to adapt to protect our property.
Today we are going to talk about searches, your right to privacy and how the government ignores that right often with our cooperation. First of all, know this, the government can search anything it wants at any time without first obtaining a warrant. While section 213 of the Patriot Act is often blamed for this, it merely codified a power the government had been accumulating for some time. And just like civil asset forfeiture,
the standard is not “probable cause” but “reasonable suspicion.” This means any federal agency can come into your home and search for anything, obtain the warrant after the fact and use what they found in a criminal case against you. Again, this is the grossest violation of our property rights, a violation of the fourth amendment but it all stems from the government’s belief that we are mere serfs or slaves, our property is theirs and we merely use it with their permission and they have the right to inspect it or take it when it so pleases them.
Of course such an overt invasion is usually not necessary anymore. Not with so much of our property and papers in the form of ones and zeros out there in cyberspace. Make sure you understand this, internalize it and learn to act accordingly. Nothing, absolutely nothing that you do on the Internet is private. Nothing. No matter the encryption, no matter what your precautions, anonymity on the Internet does not exist. And even if it does today, the NSA is storing every bit of data created every moment of every day and if they can’t find you today or break your code today, they will tomorrow and just backtrack.
Consider this. There are private data companies out there that boast of having over fifty thousand data points on each and every individual American. I think you and I would be hard pressed to rattle off fifty or one hundred data points about ourselves. They have fifty thousand. And all your information stored online at each of these companies and others you use all the time, like Google and Facebook, are shared with third parties as part of their user agreements. These third party agreements make circumventing the fourth amendment much easier. What is called the third party doctrine states that when you willingly agree to allow your information to be shared with a third party, something included in a vast majority of those user agreements none of us read, the government can obtain it much easier, as can others.
These are things you need to be aware of. The Internet, the web, can be a great tool. It provides great access to information but we need to be aware of the fact that our information is part of that great cache and if we don’t pay attention and control it, the world wide web can easily become a sticky snare. We will go more into this next time.
Until then, may God be with us and may we always act with honor and justice.
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