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Judge Allows Bradley Manning Supporter To Sue Government Over Border Search
Fluffeh writes "David Maurice House, an MIT researcher and Bradley Manning supporter, was granted the right to pursue a case against the government on Wednesday after a federal judge denied the government's motion to dismiss. 'This ruling affirms that the Constitution is still alive at the US border,' ACLU Staff Attorney Catherine Crump said in a statement. 'Despite the government's broad assertions that it can take and search any laptop, diary or smartphone without any reasonable suspicion, the court said the government cannot use that power to target political speech.' The agents confiscated a laptop computer, a thumb drive, and a digital camera from House and reportedly demanded, but did not receive, his encryption keys. DHS held onto House's equipment for 49 days and returned it only after the ACLU sent a strongly worded letter."
I'm surprised that he wasn't being held in contempt.. or similar.. for not handing over his keys..
This country was founded (in part) to protect people from the very shenanigans going on now re: unlawful search and seizure. Most of this crap is being justified under the umbrella of the "war on terror." The current occupant was elected by in large to combat the Bush era Patriot Act and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps we have met the enemy.
Violating the First Amendment is a violation of Apparent Freedom(tm) and is part of Political Theater(tm).
Violating the Fourth Amendment is a violation of Apparent Secrecy(tmp and is part of Security Theater(tm).
The DHS, in its puppet role over the TSA is in charge of Security Theater(tm) and so had no leg to stand on against the First Amendment.
If proper form were followed, the DHS would have picked a fight with House in a public place away from the border but within view of a political edifice, and "accidentally damaged" the material seized, then claimed it was known to contain child pornogrpahy because someone saw it over House's shoulder.
In short, this was all a failure of Due Process, as they used the entirely incorrect Rail Road in its persuit.
It'll be fixed in post production before air... just you wait...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
First remember that the 4th Amendment does not actually require a warrant before the government can search your property. It just requires that searches be "reasonable." It's just that in most cases the courts have held that reasonableness requires a warrant. Not so, they have said, at the border where travelers expect that they might be searched and where the government has a heightened interest in controlling what moves in and out of the country. Imagine trying to enforce customs regulations without an ability to search! (Note that I don't agree with all of the powers that the government claims flow from this, but this should help to explain why at least some of what they do is OK under the 4th Amendment.)
But the government can't enforce its laws in a way that infringe on other rights. So, for example, the police can't decide to only pull over black people for speeding, even if they were actually speeding. Or, here, the government can't decide to only seize the property of people who belong to the wrong organizations (such as the Bradley Manning Support Network). That would violate the 1st Amendment just as pulling over only black people for speeding would violate the 14th.
caritj.org
What makes this act constitutional is the power granted to Congress under the Constitution to regulate commerce between nations and enforce immigration laws.
It is VERY unlikely that the Supreme Court will touch this principle that has been in force for 230 years.
And what would make it UN-constitutional is if the search and seizure were done to silence domestic political opposition. Which is why the judge is allowing the case to proceed.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Wait a minute! Doesn't this mean if they copy the contents then they may be pirating software, films, and music? .
Imagine trying to enforce customs regulations without an ability to search!
Without the ability to search laptop hard drives? OK, I'll try to imagine that... Done. In fact, it was really easy. Here's how it goes:
You search things like trailers and trunks that carry physical things. Physical things that cannot cross the border via the Internet. Then, you don't search the hard drives, because they are not particularly useful for transporting Cuban cigars or Persian rugs.
Hard drives are only good for transporting data, which can travel just as easily through the Internet, or on a micro SD card that the border agents would not be able to find without stripping the vehicle to component parts. The increased probability of catching even a moderately intelligent data trafficker by checking laptop hard drives is vanishingly small, and utterly insufficient to be reasonable cause for avoiding a fourth amendment violation.
Which is to say; customs enforcement is not remotely credible as the actual, underlying justification for searching a hard drive.
Therefore, the objective of the executive in doing such searches must be something other than customs enforcement. Those objectives may be fine and wonderful things, but they are not directly related to crossing the border. The border crossing is the distinguishing event; the proximate source of reasonableness that prevents a violation of the fourth from a warrantless search. If the infraction in question is not directly related to the crossing of the border, the crossing of the border cannot be the means to satisfy the reasonableness requirement in a rational society.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance