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Senator Introduces Bill To Stop Warrantless GPS Tracking
bs0d3 writes "Right now the police and FBI are able to use GPS tracking devices, stingrays, and other tracking technologies without a warrant. They can read your personal emails without a warrant, they can recall your phone call history, all without a warrant. These are clear violations of the fourth amendment, but time and time again the courts are ruling that the fourth amendment doesn't protect people who use modern technology. This week Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Kirk (R-IL), and Jason Chaffetz (D-UT) announced a bill with bipartisan support called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act. It provides sorely needed legal clarity for the use of electronically-obtained location data that can be used to track and log the location and movements of individual Americans. The G.P.S. Act is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Constitution Project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The full text of the bill can be read online."
Seems like every time something good happens for people's rights, Ron Wyden is always there getting it started. Can't we just clone him and replace the entire senate?
Does "bipartisan support" mean that it has the support of both the major parties, or simply that it has the support of a couple of guys in each but will get voted down by a majority in both?
Jason is not a D-UT he is a R-UT. Please fix the post and do a little fact checking next time...
Actually you are correct. That is indeed how that amendment has been applied.
You are not allowed to have fully automatic weapons, nor armored vehicles or any number of modern weapons.
Even the semi-automatic version of the P-90 is not able to be sold to civilians, there is a civilian model that has had a longer barrel added, but just making it semi-automatic wasn't enough to make it legal. There are plenty of weapons of that type that are much shorter, but how modern the P-90 is apparently scares the regulators.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
"These are clear violations of the fourth amendment..."
If that were true, I don't think that "time and again" the courts would be ruling otherwise, and "legal clarity" would not be required. It's an unsettled area of law.
Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, complete and utter legal ignoramuses do not end up as high-level judges. Certainly some of them may produce rulings with which there is legitimate grounds for appeal (and rulings with which a majority of Slashdot posters disagree), but that does not make those decisions blatantly unjustified from the start.
Personally, I think it's borderline, and I don't know enough 4th-amdendment jurisprudence to make a definitive call.
Nuclear weapons are illegal due to other reasons, and your reasoning is incorrect.
The Second Amendment (Amendment II) to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights.
Samuel Colt invented the first revolver - named after its revolving cylinder. He was issued a U.S. patent in 1836 for the Colt firearm equipped with a revolving cylinder containing five or six bullets with an innovative cocking device.
So by your reasoning the Revolver is covered as a modern weapon.
It's time for our senators to defend the right to arm bears with modern weapons! Won't anyone think of the cubs?
Firstly, the 4th amendment protects against "unreasonable" search and seizure without a warrant. "Reasonable" is open to interpretation.
The thinking goes like this... it's not illegal for somebody like a meter maid to walk up to your car, mark the tire, and walk away. This is one way a meter maid can "track" your car. They, via the chalk mark, must "modify" your tire to do so.
The police can currently track suspects on public roads without a warrant through the expensive, dangerous, and error-prone method of tailing a vehicle. A GPS tracker stuck to the wheelwell produces identical information at far less expense and risk. As long as the whereabouts of the vehicle are not tracked on private property, it produced the exact same data following the car would. Again, neither method requires a warrant. They have "modified" your vehicle no more than our prototypical meter maid.
The job of the courts is to draw the line to decide between the state's interest in the efficient operation of law enforcement and the citizen's interest in having his property untouched by the state. (Your location on public roads is already public data not subject to protection of any kind... it's the collecting of that data that's the sticking point; can they touch your property without a warrant to do so?)
They will just hire a bunch of agents to tail people they want to tail. Costing millions of dollars in vehicles, fuel, payroll and benefits.
Thats the idea. If they want to do surveillance on you, they actually have to do it. It is not supposed to be easy or cheep for the government to make its case. This makes the government put their attention on the cases that matter.
TERRORISTS!!!
EVIL Terrorists!!!
Evil Terrorists are going to get your children!!!
Won't SOMEBODY Think Of The Children(tm)?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Firstly, the position of your vehicle on public roads is not now, and never has been, subject to constitutional protections. Those public roads are public property, and any member of the public, or the state itself, can record data about what vehicles are traveling which roads when. (Just like you can collect data on public airspace usage... there are exhaustive databases that have years of flight tracking for every plane in the US that flew under a flight plan.) That data can be bought, sold, transferred, analyzed, reported on, used in lawsuits or criminal cases, etc. with no restrictions of any kind. This part of the law isn't the least bit vague. A little creepy, yes, but not legally questionable. The only legal questions are on the collection methods, not the data itself.
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous? Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act... an officer can frisk you and your clothing (property) without a warrant during an arrest, but he can't toss your car (another form of property.)
An officer can, under current constitutional law, place a chalk mark on your tire to track how long it has been parked by the roadside. What are the legally significant distinctions between that and a GPS tracker in your tire well? Is that distinction enough to make the device "unreasonable"? There certainly are distinctions between the two, but where is the line of "reasonable" search without a warrant crossed?
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient? The two standards to choose from would be Reasonable Suspicion (no warrant needed) vs. Probable Cause (intrusive enough to make a warrant necessary.)
This is not contorted logic here... it's a legitimate legal question where different judges have interpreted the relevant precedent differently. And it's not one I know the answer to.
But it wasn't until the 1980s that it was taken to mean that individuals have the right to own and carry weapons.
Before then, no legal scholars, no Supreme Court justices, no legislative body actually asserted the notion that the 2nd amendment guaranteed individuals the right to own and carry weapons.
" A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." and all that.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's just wrong. There were multiple states that required individuals to have weapons at the time of the formation of the United States. Not only did private individuals own small arms, some owned cannons as well.
Oh somebody's thinking of the cubs alright. It's when the bunny gets involved that you have a problem.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
It's interesting to note that, if the 2nd Amendment does not protect an individual right, it is the single largest example of redundancy in the Constitution due to the powers granted to Congress regarding regulation of military forces. It would be like adding an amendment that says "A well regulated economy, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to engage in interstate commerce shall not be infringed." Guess that would be used to ban interstate commerce while intruding on the previously codified Commerce Clause (and other notable sections), but it really should be in the Bill of Powe^H^H^H^HRights so that we can be sure it's regul^H^H^H^H^Hprotected. That view makes absolutely no sense, since such redundancy appears nowhere else and is completely contradictory to the well-documented purpose of the original Amendments to the Constitution. "The right of the people" is used repeatedly, and yet this one instance it's purported to mean something completely different from every other usage in the document. In simple English, it reads "In order that goal A may be accomplished whenever it becomes necessary, right B must be continually protected from infringement." Conveniently left out is any clause invalidating the right should goal A be accomplished via other means.
Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886) is actually the more pertinent case (tangentially, even the Dred Scott case is more pertinent than Miller), and specifically touches on the Amendment protecting an individual right. Miller simply declared that a firearm must have some military purpose to be specifically protected, and completely sidestepped discussing the actual meaning of the 2nd Amendment.
Most of the rest of the arguments have as much factual integrity as Bellesiles' great book of historical fiction.
If by "1980s" you actually meant to say "1880s," you'd be much closer to correct. Anyway, if you bothered to look at the vote records for the initial amendments proposed, and changes to those proposals, you'd see that any of those whose purpose was to more strictly clarify the 2nd Amendment were voted down. That includes wording to specify a strictly individual right and those that clearly denoted it as a collective right (specifically, the phrase "for the common defense" after "bear arms").
Yes, Scalia holds some stupid opinions. All of the Justices do. Like Stephens, who believes that other explanatory clauses regarding government powers do nothing to restrain Congress from uses not covered in the scope of the explanation, but believes the explanatory clause of a specifically-guaranteed right does for individuals.
Stephens believes something different. That definitely shows I learned all this from Wikipedia and didn't read all the text available. I take it everyone with a different interpretation is automatically a parroting moron? Not the best way to back up your argument.
There are inconsistencies, yes, all of which were pretty clearly acknowledged at the time as the compromises they were in order to get the document out the door. There's also a process for fixing them, which has been used successfully in the past. As for redundancies, not so much. Redundancies and inconsistencies are not really the same class of creature either, but grouping them together and then explaining away the half I wasn't talking about is called something when used to rebut a position ... what was that again? Or, perhaps, your original assertion that the Founders were very specific and thoughtful only means they were specific and thoughtful when it supports your preconceived notions?
I suppose it's somewhat admirable that you're able to admit you advocate for ignoring the process when it's convenient for ends you support; most people aren't willing to do that even if it's clear that's what they believe. All that really does, though, is open the door for it being ignored for the ends supported by whoever is in control at the time. Sometimes failure via a set process is better than scrapping the process and occasionally getting good results (at the cost of being much more subject to the whims of political fancy). That's because there are many people who are not fundamentally decent people, and they ruin it for everyone else.
As for handgun access being slow suicide, I guess suicide means violent crime rates that have been nearly in free fall for the last 20 years.
Yes, it's entirely likely that Americans are simply more violent. I've believed for a long time that the problems are rooted in culture, rather than the "sin and temptation" model of why firearm accessibility is bad. It's another social control using the same failed model by targeting an accessory to the problem, rather than the root of the problem.
It's even less applicable than arguments for the illegality of drugs, because there are drugs that are quite simply physically addictive. Firearms, on the other hand, are only addictive to the extent that any activity undertaken obsessively can be addictive. There are legitimate and useful purposes, and there are non-legitimate and destructive purposes. The use of bans provide little more than the appearance of safety, because it is nearly impossible to strictly enforce them on bad actors without completely destroying the fabric of a free society. If it was within my power to blink and eliminate firearms universally and forever, I would. The more fractured the bannings (like we have had with the local/state model in the US), the less effective they are at doing anything other than disarming the most responsible people. It's little more than security theater, and people can already be prosecuted for improper use. Bans add absolutely nothing positive to the equation unless you believe that legal access is the primary source of violent crime. Since they do nothing to stop illegal access, even that is a tenuous position. It's great in theory, but we've had a long history of actual practice to look at and the two don't match up. They never have; it's unlikely they ever will.
I'm not so much an originalist (then again, if that word means anything, few people are; Scalia certainly is not) as someone who views the Constitution as a necessary impediment to changing the way government works. Government brings out extremes in people, and is an invitation to abuse by the worst parts of humanity. The process for changing the way government fundamentally works should be slow and deliberative, because the faster it is the harder it is to highlight and stop abuses of power and/or process before they become institutionalized. By ignoring the process, it legitimizes playing fast and loose with the framework that restrains the worst parts of government. What you end up with is a bipolar model where you have extreme swings of good and bad, rather than stability and consistency. When you throw in extreme partisanship, such as we see in modern US politics, it makes the highs and lows even worse. The good that can be done has the counterpoint of allowing, even encouraging, worse abuses using exactly the same rationalization.
If humanity was fundamentally decent, that sort of model would work fine. Then again, if humanity was fundamentally decent we wouldn't really need the model at all. At the end of the day, it's always about mitigating the bad. When the balance is between mitigating institutionalized abuses and non-institutionalized abuses, the former should always come first.