Slashdot Mirror
Bush Claims Mail Can Be Opened Without Warrant
don_combatant writes to note that President Bush claimed new powers to search US mail without a warrant. He made this claim in a "signing statement" at the time he signed a postal overhaul bill into law on December 20. The signing statement directly contradicts part of the bill he signed, which explicitly reinforces protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval. According to the article, "A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised a review of Bush's move."
So, wasn't the new congress going to start trying to do something about these signing statements? Yay for a horrible abuse of the checks and balances that are supposed to be in our system.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
In 1980 I had an incident where a letter that I sent was opened by postal inspectors.
The letter was a joke and had something written on it that was pro-nuclear proliferation. On the outside of the envelope. This was enough excuse for the letter opener to come out and to require the recipient to show up at the Post Office and pick up the letter directly.
If you drop something in the mail, you are exposing the item to being searched and viewed based upon arbitrary criteria. Make no mistake about it.
Mind you, that was during the Carter administration, for any of you partisan boobs out there.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
This is why slashdot is such a waste of time these days. Or, more accurately, even MORE of a waste of time. Someone posts an obviously butchered, incorrrect version of the 4th amendment and it gets modded to "insightful". Slashdot is not the place to go for constitutional or legal analysis, but it seems to be increasingly filled with idiots opining about it at considerable length anyway. What happened to articles about, you know, technology?
Mail is given to the post office to be delivered according to the rules, and it is those rules that he is changing.
A "signing statement" does not change any laws. And what you call a "safeguard" is what the rest of us call a warrant.
And does anyone actually believe Bush already knew what the word "exigent" means? There's no way he authored this "signing statement" himself.
It's even less useful on technology. You've got folks here on slashdot suggesting Linux as a desktop replacement for Windows if you can believe it.