Border crossing exception is consistent with the government conceived by the founders.
Well, that statement merely begs the question.
By your interpretation there would be no possibility to have reasonable searches based on "reasonable suspicion" or "no reasonable expecation of privacy."
No, of course "reasonable suspicion" and "no reasonable expectation of privacy" are possible bases of reasonable searches, just as they are reasonable. But the question is of course whether the suspicion offers sufficient reason, rising to a standard of a due process warrant even if there are circumstances that prevent that due process. Or whether there is a government power created that can act even when there's no reasonable expectation of privacy, because the Constitution expressly says that the benefit of the doubt on to whom rights are reserved is always to be decided in favor of the people (or the states) when they're not expressly assigned to the Federal government. Which reasonable searches/seizures without due process should be rare, as due process is clearly (and expressly) the nearly exclusive means by which to initiate a search/seizure. And which must remain reasonable, as reasonable people can agree because "reasonable" is a standard based on objective measures of facts and logic, which all underwrite all the rest of our legal standards, all of which are bound by the rules of reason.
So like I keep saying, if there's a reason to search someone, and the method of searching them is itself reasonable (ie. minimizes the violation of the rightful privacy, searches for only that which the justifying reason suggests, etc - the narrowest possible exercise of the search/seizure) then there is the possibility of search/seizure if there's also reason to expect that due process will eliminate the possibility of the search/seizure. Which therefore would give a real reason why not to pursue the due process, but not to forgo the search/seizure.
"Reason" isn't an arbitrary standard. And the requirement for warrants stipulates a process for a reasonable search/seizure. But while it's a standard that is not explicitly exclusive, substitutes for that due process must be rare and just as reasonable - which is also rare. Much rarer than the current "exceptions" that are practiced without protecting our rights, but rather expand the privileged power of some people working for the government.
Of course longstanding traditions where they are consistent with liberty and a government created to protect it are roots of the US legal system and the Constitution that is its basis. But their status as traditions is not the basis.
The word "reasonable" is the stated criterion because that is indeed the actual criterion. The stated rule explicitly states that a warrant is the means by which a reasonable search/seizure is executed. The warrant's origin in a separate, independent (and competing for power) government branch is part of how to ensure that it's reasonable.
But "reasonable" is the standard, which has been nailed down fairly well. However, reasonable people know what "reasonable" means, and can back it up, as I just did in my last posted comment in this subthread.
If these clown record labels spent 1% of the money they insist on wasting fighting their customers and the free promotion and distribution we do for them instead on paying good bands for some of the good new music that kids are always coming up with to amuse their friends, there'd be lots more sales of T-shirts, concert tickets, special "Premiere Day Downloads", licensing to commercials and movies, and all kinds of other ways to milk people's love of good music.
Instead they spend all the money they rip from us for $1 songs and $15 CDs and $20 DVDs on more idiots trying to stop us from listening to music. But then I guess all their "decision makers" wouldn't get paid.
No, the timing of that event was as close as it was going to get to causing any damage to the Earth:
However, since the Earth also travels around the Sun with an average orbital speed of 107,218 km/h, 3 hours earlier the Earth would have been about 300,000 km away from the intersection of its orbit with the projectile's orbit at the time that the South Asian region was rotated towards the projectile's path. So the projectile would have missed the Earth entirely by over 114 times the Earth's radius, about the distance to the Moon, and probably never even noticed by anyone but a few astronomers. Nice try, though.
I don't mean "fringe case" as in a rare legal case, but rather an example of a legal question that's not firmly within the mainstream of consistent justice.
Longstanding traditions of foreign countries are not the basis for US law. The Constitution, which explicitly broke with foreign traditions, is the only basis. And I don't see where the Constitution says the government has the power to search people without a warrant or due process, at the border or anywhere else. Therefore it does not actually have that power. Exercising that power without actually having it is abuse. And since that nonexistent power conflicts with our rights, it abuses our rights. Rights which don't change at the border, since they're inalienable.
There is, however, a reasonable basis for searching everyone (or rather, anyone, especially those "standing out" with a little extra evidence at the border) as they enter the country. Which is that so many people have brought illegal material into the country that applying the search is reasonable - because never applying it is unreasonable in the face of evidence that plenty of people do smuggle contraband when there's no searching.
But we shouldn't believe that such searches are an exception to the requirement that any search be "reasonable". Rather we should understand that the exception is to the Supreme Court's rulings that any search/seizure without a warrant is by definition unreasonable. The abuse of a constructed exception to the fundamental requirement of reasonableness is a much more serious threat than is the exception to the requirement for the warrant, when another actually reasonable basis is indeed at work.
The English government would indeed intervene to protect an English citizen officially in the US, as it indeed did in Guantanamo. And the US likewise, as it routinely does in foreign countries that don't have nearly the strength in protecting anyone's rights as the US does Americans'. Those operations are in fact one of the primary functions of America's substantial investment in our foreign embassies and the State Department. If an American is arrested for something illegal in England that does indeed violate the rights the US government is instructed to protect, then the US government is instructed to protect that American even in the foreign country, if the foreign country will not.
There are of course counterweights to that policy. Like the consequences of that intervention, like the threat of war (and thereby the damage to so many more citizens) as reprisal for that intervention, or lesser degrees of that kind of cost. And also weighing against intervention is the complicity of the two governments in the violation of those rights. When those are factored in, there's a lot of dereliction of the government's duty.
But those are the real world exceptions. The basic order of government is exactly as I described, even when honored more in the breach.
Just another example of a fringe case that the Court has left standing while Congress hasn't acted to clarify and fix the laws the Court uses to support its interpretations. Those searches aren't "reasonable", they're just allowed as exceptions, even though the court calls them "reasonable" as a judicial construct. The logic is circular. There's been a lot of that kind of inconsistency that's as old as the Constitution, much of it fixed in amendments.
It's clear, especially in an age where "FISA isn't enough", that Americans need a new Privacy Amendment to the Constitution, because the 4th Amendment wasn't enough to make explicit the implicit security of personal privacy that the Constitution does not empower the government to violate. The borders are just another example of this growing blind spot.
No, the Constitution explains that people create governments (as with a Constitution) to protect our rights. Americans create an American government to protect the American people's rights. Other people create their governments to protect their rights. The rights are universal, but the protection is not automatic. People have to create their governments.
The US government is not obligated, for example, to protect the rights of English people from a tyrannical king if the English haven't created their government to protect their rights from him.
The US government has an interest in helping those people create such a government, both because it would agree that their rights deserve protection and because their protected rights help protect Americans' rights by generally eliminating tyranny that could threaten Americans. But people must create their own governments, just like the Constitution itself says, and just like Americans did (and do today by using the Constitution).
Like you yourself just quoted: the Constitution says the US government cannot violate people's rights. The "citizen" vs "any person" distinction is yet another taint of the original Constitution's acceptance of some Americans as slaves but not citizens, which a few revisional amendments didn't completely expunge. But even slaves were Americans, people, not foreigners.
Published on 16 Jun 2006 by Energy Bulletin. [...] This review has concluded that the likely energy payback of a typical domestic sized rooftop grid connected PV cell is approximately four years.
A domestic rooftop grid can receive something like 400W:m^2 (averaged across weather/seasons/night) here in NYC, generating 72W:m^2 (at the more likely 18% efficient PV). My building is 7.6x21.3m, 162m^2, or 11.655KW. We have 4 apartments, which consume (as the average household in NYC) about 2KW each. So we've got 3.65KW extra, or 31.4% surplus to sell back to the grid.
If PV averaged 40% instead of the 18% I used in these figures, that's only 1/6 the area needed. If the City and state offered tax incentives per grid watt self-generated for 5 years (while those PVs paid back their manufacturing energy investment), most roofs would have them. Consider the extra savings from offloading from our blackout-prone Con Edison grid, and replacing blacktop roofs with something insulating, and NYC would probably show a net energy profit after less than 10 years. Which, like everything else in NYC, would be readily converted to actual monetary profit.
Yeah, rights violations are shown all the time. And those people with the self respect to insist our government protect, not abuse our rights are the only reason that you have any protected rights at all. Every day the courts have people forcing the government to protect our rights, though the government often violates them. If you're going to just give up, at least get out of the way of the rest of us who do the work to protect you, despite yourself.
Rights don't protect themselves. Lift a finger sometime to do your part.
Because we have treaties to that effect, and because the US government will intercede to protect its citizens' rights wherever those citizens go, just as foreign governments would.
The Supreme Court has ruled for centuries that no search or seizure is reasonable without probable cause, and due process that usually requires a court-ordered warrant (as the 4th Amendment clearly states), except in extreme cases like dire emergencies that put the searcher/seizer under a lot of pressure to have justification of both their reasonable basis, and the impossibility of obtaining a warrant.
Exigent circumstances and incidence to lawful arrest (though the latter is not 100%) are reasonable, with implicit probable cause.
The automobile exception is unjust, though there is a strong argument that natural rights are unbalanced by human augmentation by machines. This philosophy also finds the reason why the right to bear arms described in the 2nd Amendment goes too far, required justification in its statement in the Constitution (unique among any defined rights except copyright, itself not nearly as stable a right as any others), and leaves so many Americans unconvinced of its status as an actual "right", rather than a privilege. In fact, practically everyone accepts that driving a car is a privilege, even though our traveling freely is a right, and that car registration and driver licensing (if perhaps not driver/car insurance) is a completely just infringement on the "freedom to drive". The container exception you mention is just an extension of that dubious exception to a very clear right.
The border exception is another exception that is really just abuse that we accept because we've been intimidated into accepting the authorities infringing our freedom.
There really aren't any exceptions to the appropriate protection of our rights. When there is no conflict with someone else's rights, there is no exception. Like at the border.
Manufacturing solar PV cells is usually said to cost quite a lot of energy. But how much exactly (on average)?
How many joules are consumed from raw materials to a deliverable PV cell of a given output wattage? Of the old "about 15%" (really about 20-25% these days), and of these new proposed "avalance" PV material ones?
I want to compare that energy cost to the cells' projected energy contribution over their lifetime, which is about 30+ years for today's PV cells. How long would the new ones last in typical service?
It still means everything to me. I'm not conceding our homegrown tyrants their ultimate victory by conceding them the Constitution, even if they have the upper hand for now.
No they cannot. Un-Constitutional treaties conflict with the Constitution, which is itself more potent than any mere law. It is in fact the creating statement of the government itself, and no mere law can contradict it and remain standing.
Un-Constitutional judicial rulings are void, even if today's generation of judges, executives and legislators are too anti-American to be governed by that simple fact. It's just "might makes right", and not actually right or just. And likely to eventually be overturned, as those kinds of miscarriages of justice generally are through the course of American history.
Unless we just grumble and accept it. In which case it'll all stick. And we'll deserve it for our own failures to create a just government.
Rights are universal. Whether the US government is obligated to protect the rights of anyone other than a US citizen is a matter of much debate, all inconclusive. But abusing those rights of any citizen makes a mockery of liberty. At the hands of a US government employee under official orders, such a mockery makes a travesty of the basis of the US government as a government created by American people to protect those rights.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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Well, that statement merely begs the question.
No, of course "reasonable suspicion" and "no reasonable expectation of privacy" are possible bases of reasonable searches, just as they are reasonable. But the question is of course whether the suspicion offers sufficient reason, rising to a standard of a due process warrant even if there are circumstances that prevent that due process. Or whether there is a government power created that can act even when there's no reasonable expectation of privacy, because the Constitution expressly says that the benefit of the doubt on to whom rights are reserved is always to be decided in favor of the people (or the states) when they're not expressly assigned to the Federal government. Which reasonable searches/seizures without due process should be rare, as due process is clearly (and expressly) the nearly exclusive means by which to initiate a search/seizure. And which must remain reasonable, as reasonable people can agree because "reasonable" is a standard based on objective measures of facts and logic, which all underwrite all the rest of our legal standards, all of which are bound by the rules of reason.
So like I keep saying, if there's a reason to search someone, and the method of searching them is itself reasonable (ie. minimizes the violation of the rightful privacy, searches for only that which the justifying reason suggests, etc - the narrowest possible exercise of the search/seizure) then there is the possibility of search/seizure if there's also reason to expect that due process will eliminate the possibility of the search/seizure. Which therefore would give a real reason why not to pursue the due process, but not to forgo the search/seizure.
"Reason" isn't an arbitrary standard. And the requirement for warrants stipulates a process for a reasonable search/seizure. But while it's a standard that is not explicitly exclusive, substitutes for that due process must be rare and just as reasonable - which is also rare. Much rarer than the current "exceptions" that are practiced without protecting our rights, but rather expand the privileged power of some people working for the government.
Of course longstanding traditions where they are consistent with liberty and a government created to protect it are roots of the US legal system and the Constitution that is its basis. But their status as traditions is not the basis.
The word "reasonable" is the stated criterion because that is indeed the actual criterion. The stated rule explicitly states that a warrant is the means by which a reasonable search/seizure is executed. The warrant's origin in a separate, independent (and competing for power) government branch is part of how to ensure that it's reasonable.
But "reasonable" is the standard, which has been nailed down fairly well. However, reasonable people know what "reasonable" means, and can back it up, as I just did in my last posted comment in this subthread.
If these clown record labels spent 1% of the money they insist on wasting fighting their customers and the free promotion and distribution we do for them instead on paying good bands for some of the good new music that kids are always coming up with to amuse their friends, there'd be lots more sales of T-shirts, concert tickets, special "Premiere Day Downloads", licensing to commercials and movies, and all kinds of other ways to milk people's love of good music.
Instead they spend all the money they rip from us for $1 songs and $15 CDs and $20 DVDs on more idiots trying to stop us from listening to music. But then I guess all their "decision makers" wouldn't get paid.
I don't mean "fringe case" as in a rare legal case, but rather an example of a legal question that's not firmly within the mainstream of consistent justice.
Longstanding traditions of foreign countries are not the basis for US law. The Constitution, which explicitly broke with foreign traditions, is the only basis. And I don't see where the Constitution says the government has the power to search people without a warrant or due process, at the border or anywhere else. Therefore it does not actually have that power. Exercising that power without actually having it is abuse. And since that nonexistent power conflicts with our rights, it abuses our rights. Rights which don't change at the border, since they're inalienable.
There is, however, a reasonable basis for searching everyone (or rather, anyone, especially those "standing out" with a little extra evidence at the border) as they enter the country. Which is that so many people have brought illegal material into the country that applying the search is reasonable - because never applying it is unreasonable in the face of evidence that plenty of people do smuggle contraband when there's no searching.
But we shouldn't believe that such searches are an exception to the requirement that any search be "reasonable". Rather we should understand that the exception is to the Supreme Court's rulings that any search/seizure without a warrant is by definition unreasonable. The abuse of a constructed exception to the fundamental requirement of reasonableness is a much more serious threat than is the exception to the requirement for the warrant, when another actually reasonable basis is indeed at work.
That would be a downed UFO.
The English government would indeed intervene to protect an English citizen officially in the US, as it indeed did in Guantanamo. And the US likewise, as it routinely does in foreign countries that don't have nearly the strength in protecting anyone's rights as the US does Americans'. Those operations are in fact one of the primary functions of America's substantial investment in our foreign embassies and the State Department. If an American is arrested for something illegal in England that does indeed violate the rights the US government is instructed to protect, then the US government is instructed to protect that American even in the foreign country, if the foreign country will not.
There are of course counterweights to that policy. Like the consequences of that intervention, like the threat of war (and thereby the damage to so many more citizens) as reprisal for that intervention, or lesser degrees of that kind of cost. And also weighing against intervention is the complicity of the two governments in the violation of those rights. When those are factored in, there's a lot of dereliction of the government's duty.
But those are the real world exceptions. The basic order of government is exactly as I described, even when honored more in the breach.
Just another example of a fringe case that the Court has left standing while Congress hasn't acted to clarify and fix the laws the Court uses to support its interpretations. Those searches aren't "reasonable", they're just allowed as exceptions, even though the court calls them "reasonable" as a judicial construct. The logic is circular. There's been a lot of that kind of inconsistency that's as old as the Constitution, much of it fixed in amendments.
It's clear, especially in an age where "FISA isn't enough", that Americans need a new Privacy Amendment to the Constitution, because the 4th Amendment wasn't enough to make explicit the implicit security of personal privacy that the Constitution does not empower the government to violate. The borders are just another example of this growing blind spot.
No, the Constitution explains that people create governments (as with a Constitution) to protect our rights. Americans create an American government to protect the American people's rights. Other people create their governments to protect their rights. The rights are universal, but the protection is not automatic. People have to create their governments.
The US government is not obligated, for example, to protect the rights of English people from a tyrannical king if the English haven't created their government to protect their rights from him.
The US government has an interest in helping those people create such a government, both because it would agree that their rights deserve protection and because their protected rights help protect Americans' rights by generally eliminating tyranny that could threaten Americans. But people must create their own governments, just like the Constitution itself says, and just like Americans did (and do today by using the Constitution).
Like you yourself just quoted: the Constitution says the US government cannot violate people's rights. The "citizen" vs "any person" distinction is yet another taint of the original Constitution's acceptance of some Americans as slaves but not citizens, which a few revisional amendments didn't completely expunge. But even slaves were Americans, people, not foreigners.
A domestic rooftop grid can receive something like 400W:m^2 (averaged across weather/seasons/night) here in NYC, generating 72W:m^2 (at the more likely 18% efficient PV). My building is 7.6x21.3m, 162m^2, or 11.655KW. We have 4 apartments, which consume (as the average household in NYC) about 2KW each. So we've got 3.65KW extra, or 31.4% surplus to sell back to the grid.
NYC has an average 25850 people per Km^2, with an average household of 2 people. A square KM of PV could generate 72MW for those people's requirement of 26MW. Even if only 1/3 of the City's area were PV, we'd power ourselves completely.
If PV averaged 40% instead of the 18% I used in these figures, that's only 1/6 the area needed. If the City and state offered tax incentives per grid watt self-generated for 5 years (while those PVs paid back their manufacturing energy investment), most roofs would have them. Consider the extra savings from offloading from our blackout-prone Con Edison grid, and replacing blacktop roofs with something insulating, and NYC would probably show a net energy profit after less than 10 years. Which, like everything else in NYC, would be readily converted to actual monetary profit.
Spoken like a true slave to the authoritarians.
Yeah, rights violations are shown all the time. And those people with the self respect to insist our government protect, not abuse our rights are the only reason that you have any protected rights at all. Every day the courts have people forcing the government to protect our rights, though the government often violates them. If you're going to just give up, at least get out of the way of the rest of us who do the work to protect you, despite yourself.
Rights don't protect themselves. Lift a finger sometime to do your part.
Because we have treaties to that effect, and because the US government will intercede to protect its citizens' rights wherever those citizens go, just as foreign governments would.
I'm talking about the US part. Canadians will have to find their own grounds on which to resist.
The Supreme Court has ruled for centuries that no search or seizure is reasonable without probable cause, and due process that usually requires a court-ordered warrant (as the 4th Amendment clearly states), except in extreme cases like dire emergencies that put the searcher/seizer under a lot of pressure to have justification of both their reasonable basis, and the impossibility of obtaining a warrant.
This country wasn't born yesterday, you know.
Exigent circumstances and incidence to lawful arrest (though the latter is not 100%) are reasonable, with implicit probable cause.
The automobile exception is unjust, though there is a strong argument that natural rights are unbalanced by human augmentation by machines. This philosophy also finds the reason why the right to bear arms described in the 2nd Amendment goes too far, required justification in its statement in the Constitution (unique among any defined rights except copyright, itself not nearly as stable a right as any others), and leaves so many Americans unconvinced of its status as an actual "right", rather than a privilege. In fact, practically everyone accepts that driving a car is a privilege, even though our traveling freely is a right, and that car registration and driver licensing (if perhaps not driver/car insurance) is a completely just infringement on the "freedom to drive". The container exception you mention is just an extension of that dubious exception to a very clear right.
The border exception is another exception that is really just abuse that we accept because we've been intimidated into accepting the authorities infringing our freedom.
There really aren't any exceptions to the appropriate protection of our rights. When there is no conflict with someone else's rights, there is no exception. Like at the border.
Er, he's an impeachable tyrant.
Manufacturing solar PV cells is usually said to cost quite a lot of energy. But how much exactly (on average)?
How many joules are consumed from raw materials to a deliverable PV cell of a given output wattage? Of the old "about 15%" (really about 20-25% these days), and of these new proposed "avalance" PV material ones?
I want to compare that energy cost to the cells' projected energy contribution over their lifetime, which is about 30+ years for today's PV cells. How long would the new ones last in typical service?
It still means everything to me. I'm not conceding our homegrown tyrants their ultimate victory by conceding them the Constitution, even if they have the upper hand for now.
No they cannot. Un-Constitutional treaties conflict with the Constitution, which is itself more potent than any mere law. It is in fact the creating statement of the government itself, and no mere law can contradict it and remain standing.
Un-Constitutional judicial rulings are void, even if today's generation of judges, executives and legislators are too anti-American to be governed by that simple fact. It's just "might makes right", and not actually right or just. And likely to eventually be overturned, as those kinds of miscarriages of justice generally are through the course of American history.
Unless we just grumble and accept it. In which case it'll all stick. And we'll deserve it for our own failures to create a just government.
That doesn't mean the abuse of your rights at the border is right or just. Just that it's a more likely place for abuse.
Rights are universal. Whether the US government is obligated to protect the rights of anyone other than a US citizen is a matter of much debate, all inconclusive. But abusing those rights of any citizen makes a mockery of liberty. At the hands of a US government employee under official orders, such a mockery makes a travesty of the basis of the US government as a government created by American people to protect those rights.
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100% Redundant
Someone show me where there's another comment posted before I posted mine that is a detailed discussion of what this judgement really means for the possibility of indexing content without liability for the possible lawbreaking of the other people who actually publish the content.
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100% Troll
You TrollMods are colossal idiots.