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Ask Slashdot: Best Country To Avoid Government Surveillance?
simpz writes: Which country is best to choose for hosting Internet services and locating VMs to avoid government surveillance (both NSA and local)? It should be a country with good connectivity to the US and Europe, but have strong legal protections from mass surveillance. People talk about Switzerland, Norway and Iceland (even Spain). Anyone worked through the pros and cons of each of these? I'm not concerned about legitimate (with court order) surveillance, just the un-targeted mass surveillance most governments seem to do. I don't believe this bad behavior should be rewarded or made easy.
The Fourth Amendment only applies to "unreasonable search and seizure." Reasonable search and seizure, or uses of governmental information-gathering capabilities that are not "search and seizure", do not require a warrant.
Depends what you mean by "require". It is completely, blindingly obvious that both the spirit and letter of the 4th amendment is to stop the government digging through your private papers without a warrant.
Bullshit. If the Army has a commander-in-chief justification for going through your papers it can do so.
This is why they can read your papers at the border, it is the reason the union Army could search suspected confederate spies and gun-runners without being accompanied by a District Court Judge, etc. Those don't use the Search and Seizure power, so they are not affected by the Fourth.
And, BTW, if you're arguing the spirit of an Amendment is violated by doing precisely what the Amendment says (ie: not using this info in Court), then you're never gonna do very well in Court. Particularly since we have five Textualists in the Supremes.
The commander-in-chief justification doesn't actually have to be terribly strong. The Army's Japanese detention program detained hundreds of thousands, and technically the Court ruling against the program only meant that ex-Californian Japanese could live in any US state but the three on the Pacific Coast, not that the Feds did not have the power to throw them out of Cali.
Just because the government decided to do it anyway and has trapped people in a kafkaesque situation where you can't stop them unless you can prove they're doing it and can't prove they're doing it unless you can get a court to make them stop, doesn't mean it's allowed.
Black's Law Dictionary defines Search and Seizure as "These are the methods used to detect an punish crime that includes searching and taking property and data that can be used by the prosecution of the criminal."
Which came first, the 4th amendment or Black's law dictionary. The 4th was created because the King of England had his minions digging around in dissidents papers looking for evidence of wrongdoing. So they made a law which said "no digging without a warrant".
looking for evidence of wrongdoing Wrongdoing implies criminal behavior. After all, opposing us militarily isn't necessarily wrong, so detaining Laura Secords of the world does not imply we have a legal case against them.
Now you have a bunch of liars and fools pretending the meaning and intent is not clear by redefining what various words mean in order to justify it.
The history and language of those who wrote the 4th make the meaning entirely clear.
Americans.
I love us, but frequently our delusion that the Founders were definitely only interested in defending personal freedom, and would have preferred the British over-running DC to even the most trivial violations of said freedom forces us to say things that are simply ridiculous.
The reason for the Constitution was not to give us the glories of limited government, or protect our rights from DC; it was to eliminate limits that made the Articles of Confederation unworkable. The Fourth is actually an excellent example of this, applying itself only to law enforcement powers (because arresting people like the aforementioned Laura Secord without a warrant was both necessary to the survival of the Republic and impossible if the military's seizure power was dependent on a Judge having the paperwork), explicitly allowing searches and seizures when they were not "unreasonable," also allowing unwarranted searches when the suspect agrees (because then it's not a use of the Search Power), etc.
The major point of the Fourth was actually to prevent Obama from rigging the election in Hillary's favor by shenanigans involving the Feds.