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Circuit Boards + Soldering Iron == Terrorist?
Search and Seizure asks: "This week, the local police contacted one of my co-workers and informed him that they had been contacted by the FBI who requested that they investigate his apartment. According to the police, while his apartment repair staff were checking his smoke alarm, they had noticed suspicious looking items in his kitchen and had called the FBI because they suspected that he might be a terrorist. What do you do when your landlord suspects that you might be a terrorist and reports you to the FBI?" If the law comes a-knocking, always remember that you can politely ask for a warrant.
"The police officer went on to explain that my co-worker had two choices:
1) Let the local police take a look and explain what the 'suspicious' items were for.
2) Don't let the local police in. The police will let the FBI know, and they will use 'Homeland Security' to come in and do a full search.
He opted for the less drastic choice, and showed the officer the digital camera guts, his in-progress circuitry to take automatic pictures, the tethered balloon that he was going to hook them up to so he could take overhead pictures, and the beer keg that he used to store his beer.
The police officer accepted his explanations and it appears to have turned out okay, but the whole situation is a little disturbing.
What rights do we have to experiment and create in this age of paranoia?"
1) Let the local police take a look and explain what the 'suspicious' items were for.
2) Don't let the local police in. The police will let the FBI know, and they will use 'Homeland Security' to come in and do a full search.
He opted for the less drastic choice, and showed the officer the digital camera guts, his in-progress circuitry to take automatic pictures, the tethered balloon that he was going to hook them up to so he could take overhead pictures, and the beer keg that he used to store his beer.
The police officer accepted his explanations and it appears to have turned out okay, but the whole situation is a little disturbing.
What rights do we have to experiment and create in this age of paranoia?"
Yes, exactly. And now the government has a record of some of the interesting activity he's been engaging in. Perhaps he's gone in a file somewhere, a separate memo has been sent to some higher up State or Federal organization, he's being catalogued in a database...
I think the thing that really scares the shit out of me is the implicit threat and removal of rights that the police officer put forth. Previously, from what I understand, someone could demand that they see a warrant, a judge would have had to specifically grant that warrant, and some rights were preserved. There were some checks and balances in place. Now, all of a sudden, the executive branch can just say "hey, we need to see your stuff, and if you don't let us do it, we'll get someone else to do it. Sucks to be you." Police state, you're looking more and more similar to what we have...
Maybe it's more complex than that. Maybe the people their targetting are generally selectively chosen based on race and religion. Maybe the people being targetted are being detained without their rights being recognized. Maybe these are people who are never getting into the position where they CAN fight it all the way to the supreme court. Maybe their citizenship is dubious or new, maybe their interaction with the larger mainstream society is such that they are not yet familiar with the way things can work. Maybe it costs a lot of freaking money to fight it all the way to the supreme court. I don't know, I'm just throwing some possibilities out there--because it seems like what you are talking about is easier said than done.
The USA PATRIOT Act is not unconstitutional. Maybe sections of it are but the whole thing is not. If you were to go to court on an issue revolving around the act more likely than not the courts would rule only on the section that deal with your particular problem not on the whole act. Courts tend to keep their decisions limited in scope and will only rule on the particular facts of the case at hand unlike a legislative body that passes laws that have a much more broad application.
This is of course a generalization. Sometimes courts will decide on more general issues but it is ussualy done when the legislatures have avoided -most of the time on purpose- dealing with the issue themselves.
I am 26 years old, have lived in the US my entire life, and have never had a firearm of any kind pointed at me. That said, were I crossing a border into another nation, say mexico, there is an understanding that firearms might be present.
As for having the rifle pointed *at* you, I strongly suspect that you are exagerating, or made one of those hilarious jokes that security folk love so much, like "Look out for the bomb in my luggage."
If you're curious why America is so "militant", it's because not too long ago, over 3 thousand people died in an attack that destroyed more commercial space then exists in all of San Francisco. Ask yourself how you might feel if, oh, say, downtown Ottowa was utterly leveled.
I'm no fan of certain clauses of the patriot act, including the allowance for feds to search property without presenting a warrant. But to suggest that there is no reason for this, other than to create a militant police state ignores facts which are fully in evidence.
But I forgot, that I'm not allowed to cite the events of September 11th, because doing so makes me a Jingoist. Curse our surly, greedy, unrefined society!
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
If "your friend" hasn't done anything, "he" shouldn't have anything to worry about.
You aren't doing anything illegal when you go into the bathroom to take a dump, so you have nothing to "worry about" if the FBI wants to send agents in to watch you. You aren't doing anything illegal when you dress up like Tinkerbell and prance around your house, so you shouldn't mind Homeland Security agents watching you doing it. If you aren't doing anything illegal, you should not mind the government sending agents over to read your e-mail, rifle through your personal belongings, listen to your phone conversations, and tail you when you drive somewhere.
I recognize the humorous aspect of your post, but that first sentence really summed up a scary, but all-too-commonly-voiced, sentiment about this subject.
point a loaded weapon at me.
I'm in no way exagerating. I was walking across the grass field under the peace arch with my then girlfriend. We were travelling from Vancouver to Seattle to catch a plane at Seatac. As I didn't feel like spending 400$ on a cab between Vancouver and Seattle, I arranged to have a friend from the US pick me up at the border crossing, and took a (less expensive 80$) cab from Vancouver to the arch.
We apparently chose the cars-only side to walk up to, because a solier inspecting a car snapped up from his work, aimed his automatic rifle at us, and yelled at us to go around to the other side. When I tried to talk to him, to ask him to put the gun down among other things, he just screamed harder at me.
When we did go inside, the US military guys tried to play good cop/bad cop on why I felt the need to enter the United States. It was complete BS, and an example of exactly how silly US customs is. On the way back, the Canadian border guard was nothing but courtieous to us. I don't even think they had M-16s!
As for Sept 11, Canada had the whole FLQ thing in the 1970s. Trudeau invoked the war measures act. However, once the situation was taken care of, the war measures act went away. Why isn't the patriot act going away? Why must the US continue to militarize and occupy foreign nations not related to the terrorist attack?
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Most people don't have a clue about circuit boards and soldering irons except what they've seen in some stupid action flick. It is highly plausible that some people would just assume that "there is some really wierd shit going on this apartment look at all these tools and wires and uhm... stuff I better call the FBI this looks like the bomb I saw in ."
In the end, this incident just wasted some public servant's time. Same as the circuit board incident. Unless or until people get good at recognizing what a bomb detonator really looks like, things like this are bound to happen.
Since you are obviously expert in all things bomb-detonator, what does an "average" bomb detonator look like?
Oh... wait! I remember - I saw it in a movie! A "Bomb detonator" is that black box, about 9 inches long, 4 inches wide, and about 2 inches tall, with the big, red lettering on the top that says "Bomb Detonator" on the top of it, and has a few red and white snap wiring terminals on the side, right?
No?
Are you sure?
We live in a modern-day paranoia. We've been abusing the people of the Middle East selfishly for decades in order to satiate our wasteful addiction to crude oil, and now we pay the price of bad karma.
What really sucks is that there are real solutions to our energy needs. Linked is but one example with a total initial cost of about $169 billion, about as much as the $162 billion the most recent Iraq war cost to wage that would almost completely eliminate our dependence on foreign oil and dramatically reduce the Carbon Dioxide production of the United States.
I just hope and pray that someday, we find a leader that will actually lead us towards a better world, because we sure as hell don't have one today.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It probably goes something like this.
1. Maintainance worker sees circuit boards, gas baloons, etc. in circuit-board-guy's apartment.
2. Thinking he's a hero and is about to foil a major terrorist plot, worker over-reacts and calls the FBI. (Note that the appropriate action if the worker suspects illegal activity would most likely be to call the local police.)
3. FBI takes worker's report, along with many other reports of people possing items that might be used in an attack, but are probably harmless. They don't want to pull resources off of other, probably more important tasts, in order to check out circuit-board-guy. Instead, they relay the report to the local police (who should have been contacted instead of the FBI in the first place), just in case circuit-board-guy really is planning some kind of attack.
4. Local police also assume that circuit-board-guy is harmless, but want to go take a peak just to be sure.
5. Local police show up at circuit-board-guy's door. They tell him what's going on (why not, he's probably innocent). Circuit-board-guy explains his hobby, and everybody goes away happy.
They way I read it, the FBI and the local police handled it well. Nobody had their door kicked down or property searched/seized involuntarily. The only place where something went wrong was worker's decision to call the FBI over a circuit board.
There are a number of comments to the effect that circuit-board-guy should have told the police to f*** off unless they had a warrant. While that would have been circuit-board-guy's right, I don't think it would have helped anything. By letting the police in and explaining his activities, circuit-board-guy did two good things. First, he defused suspicion (hopefully) that he might be planning some kind of attack. Second, showed the police that there are valid reasons for innocent people to have circuit boards and soldering irons hangin around their homes.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
Now, I don't want to come off as anti-american (though it is fairly easy to feel that way these days), but do you US citizens realise that this sort of stuff is starting to flow on to the rest of the world? Many of us live in countries not governed by religious, paranoid, low-iq, war-fetishists. We like that we don't need to go around pretending there are terrorists everywhere in order to "exact vengeance" for ONE incident (which, lets face it, PALES next to some of the things that the US have done to other countries) 3 years ago.
Because the US is so influential on the western political stage though, we almost have to fall in line with your head lunatic. PLEASE get rid of this fucker. PLEASE vote for someone with some intelligence. And also, if you know your neighbours or friends are morons who will vote for any asshole who can wave a flag and spout some jingoistic bollocks, please have them killed. Cheers.
Prisoner #655321
The only things you have to worry about these databases is that they don't get into the wrong hands. Any other worrying would be because you either did something wrong, or are thinking about it.
That's some pretty big handwaving there. The ordinary citizen probably doesn't have to worry; nobody will bother digging up the dirt on them. But what if you decide to become politically active? Or if you get in the way of somebody with a lot of money and few scruples?
It's a guarantee that databases like this will be misused; the only question is how much it happens.
you have the right to ask for a warrant, and we will come back using some national security law and turn your house inside out.
Or you can just let us in now voluntarily without a warrant.
Doesn't that sort of remove the point of having a system of needing warrants?