Friday, October 4, 2013

Constitutional privacy down the DRANO?


Goodbye Fourth Amendment? Goodbye Constitution?

When I was growing up, the beef with the Supreme Court — beginning with the Warren Court — was that it kept finding individual rights that supposedly  weren’t there. Now, the worm seems to have turned 180 degrees. Now, individual rights seem to be disappearing one by one.

Latest, personal, example: checking out at Target the other day the clerk requested my picture government ID — my driver’s license — which she used her laser reader to record the bar code on the back with — because I was buying a bottle of Drano, which she explained to me could be used to make illegal drugs.
http://qctimes.com/news/local/illinois-to-require-id-for-some-cleaner-purchases/article_239ea346-3361-11e1-9a15-0019bb2963f4.html

Ipso facto, the government may not constitutionally record IDs of people because they — remotely — might commit a crime.

My answer to the late executive trampling on Fourth Amendment privacy is federal legislation making it a crime to instigate massive intrusions -- at least the most massive examples: broadband NSA snooping, 20 square blocks of homes searched in a Boston suburb searched, NYPD’s random stop-and-frisk practices.

But, what national policy can stop legislatures from hatching heavy privacy invading schemes? Maybe only people waking up while there is something left to fight back with.

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