It’s been a slow week in the Emerald City. No off-duty police officers have shot anyone. No plain-clothes County Cops have beat up bicyclists our Seattle Police had dibs on. So I’d like to take this time to breathe deeply and to reflect on a general trend I see establishing itself here.
I think what epitomizes the trend is the Supreme Court decision last month which excluded the exclusionary rule from the ways civil libertarians could hope to enforce the knock-and-announce rule.
Just a little more than a decade earlier a differently constituted Supreme Court told us that our Founding Fathers, writing the 4th Amendment, considered the common law principle that the police knock and announce themselves before breaking into your home a key ingredient of a reasonable search.
Not that they didn’t have other ways in mind that searches should be reasonable. Madison may have been the anonymous author of a tract railing against searches that required house owners to say Please and Thank You. Ben Franklin is believed to have thought searches dressed in clown or chicken costumes were unreasonable. Tom Paine more than likely thought it was unreasonable to search for intangibles, like the color purple, shrugs and sighs, affection, etc.
But not knocking and letting the people inside know you were the police was considered by our Founding Fathers the height of unreasonable. Why do I know that? Because it IS the height of unreasonable! It was unreasonable in the Middle Ages, it was unreasonable in 1776, it’s unreasonable now!
If they don’t let me know that they are the police, how do I know criminals aren’t invading my house? How do I know the people breaking in aren’t going to rape my kids and then kill them and kill me for being a witness? I’ll tell you how I know that. I know that ‘cause I’m going to use my Second Amendment guaranteed arms to shoot them all when they come in. Hey, even if they say they’re police, if they don’t show me badges and a warrant, maybe I should shoot them anyway. How do I know they aren’t lying?
The point is, knock-and-announce, and warrants, and badges, and uniforms, are all reasonable because without them the police are indistinguishable from a criminal mob, AND PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND THEMSELVES.
I really think the average American, and I’m including Supreme Court justices in the average for the purposes of this sentence, don’t understand these principles because they’ve all been too privileged and too empowered and too ensconced in a majority of their own mental making to even imagine what it’s like to have total strangers, dressed in chicken suits, breaking into your home without warning, pointing guns at you, and screaming in your and your family’s faces. Hint: it looks just like terrorism, when it happens to you without cause. And it does happen without cause often enough to be safeguarded against. The Founding Fathers safeguarded against it with a mass insurrection.
We could safeguard against it by applying the exclusionary rule against evidence procured by unreasonable means, but the Supreme Court just complicated all our lives by preventing that. Thank you Supreme Court! We are now all officially living in interesting times!
Anyway, the trend is: you never know who’s going to beat you up under the color of authority next. They don’t have to tell you they’re coming in. They don’t have to be wearing uniforms to demand that you bend your knees to them. They only have to say, “You’re under arrest,” and that is supposed to justify any force they use, and constitute proof that they are entitled to use it.
And, who needs a secret police when you’ve got a whole army of off-duty cops to do the work of one?
And, what good is a democratic society if any clown in a chicken suit, or whatever, riding a motorcycle, or not, can shoot a bystander at 2am and get away with it because they happen to be cops 9am-5pm?
Showing posts with label searches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label searches. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Suspected Drug Use
George Bush has just admitted that he’s authorized eavesdropping of Americans without search warrants at least thirty times since September 11, 2001, each time for 45 days. Now Democrats want an investigation.
OK, let’s see if this makes a stitch of sense!
Let’s say once upon a time there was a country, we’ll call it Democratia, where it was against the law for people to eavesdrop on citizens but the country’s leaders wanted to know what the people were saying all the time anyway. So what they did was something very very clever. It was so clever that if Stalin were alive to see it, he would say, in Russian, “Damn, these guys are good!”
First, they arranged for the wiretapping of all their citizens’ phone calls, or at least all of their phones that in any way involved international transmissions. Those included not only phone calls meant to be received in other countries, but also phone calls that use satellites, because “space is international territory.” How did they arrange to do this, since routine wiretapping was illegal in Democratia? Easy! They asked their friends to do it for them, in return for them doing it for their friends. By “friends” I mean “other allied countries.” “We aren’t wiretapping our own citizens,” they said. “Our friends are!” “We’re just wiretapping our friends’ citizens. What’s wrong with that?”
To be even safer from criticism the leaders of Democratia made sure their friends didn’t actually listen in to their own citizens’ conversations – that would be wrong. Instead they had their friends use super computers to do the listening.
The super computers had voice recognition capabilities far in advance of anything you can get for a PC, and they could record all the millions of calls being made at any instant and transcribe them to computer text-files in real-time, 24/7. Then the computers could scan the texts for keywords that would indicate whether or not people were saying things that the Democratian leaders might want to know about, and all those calls could be flagged for later listening.
Computers would do the transcriptions and scanning, not people. So the Democratia leaders could honestly say that “no one,” “not anybody,” was eavesdropping on their citizens, not even their foreign friends.
Of course, if the computers flagged a call as having suspicious content, like say, if it was made by a member of Greenpeace, or mentioned the president of Democratia, or if the words “drug” and “buy” were used in the same sentence, as in “I have to go out to the DRUGstore to BUY deodorant for my smelly Dad, so I’ll call you back later,” then the proper authorities could be notified. And then actual legal warrants could be obtained from on-call, easy, slutty, judges. Often this could be done within minutes, even before the calls in question had ended.
It’s like this. Suppose the police come to your door and say, “We’d like to search your house, but we don’t have a search warrant.” So you, fearing they’d find your stash of politically incorrect midget-on-stuffed-animal porn, say, “No.” So they say, “OK, then, step aside while this robot here rolls through your front door and through your entire house, and transmits images of everything in digitized form to a remote super computer which could spot the real Spock at a Star Trek convention. Then if the computer reports back that any white powder is visible anywhere in your house, like flour, or talcum, we can have a warrant faxed by satellite to our van waiting at the curb over here, and THEN we will search you.”
Would that seem like a fair way to sidestep your Constitutional rights? Well, that’s essentially what the ECHELON system, set up by Democratia (these United States, duh!) has done routinely with your phone calls at least since the Clinton administration, and the Democrats knew it at the time.
We should impeach everybody in both parties, simultaneously.
OK, let’s see if this makes a stitch of sense!
Let’s say once upon a time there was a country, we’ll call it Democratia, where it was against the law for people to eavesdrop on citizens but the country’s leaders wanted to know what the people were saying all the time anyway. So what they did was something very very clever. It was so clever that if Stalin were alive to see it, he would say, in Russian, “Damn, these guys are good!”
First, they arranged for the wiretapping of all their citizens’ phone calls, or at least all of their phones that in any way involved international transmissions. Those included not only phone calls meant to be received in other countries, but also phone calls that use satellites, because “space is international territory.” How did they arrange to do this, since routine wiretapping was illegal in Democratia? Easy! They asked their friends to do it for them, in return for them doing it for their friends. By “friends” I mean “other allied countries.” “We aren’t wiretapping our own citizens,” they said. “Our friends are!” “We’re just wiretapping our friends’ citizens. What’s wrong with that?”
To be even safer from criticism the leaders of Democratia made sure their friends didn’t actually listen in to their own citizens’ conversations – that would be wrong. Instead they had their friends use super computers to do the listening.
The super computers had voice recognition capabilities far in advance of anything you can get for a PC, and they could record all the millions of calls being made at any instant and transcribe them to computer text-files in real-time, 24/7. Then the computers could scan the texts for keywords that would indicate whether or not people were saying things that the Democratian leaders might want to know about, and all those calls could be flagged for later listening.
Computers would do the transcriptions and scanning, not people. So the Democratia leaders could honestly say that “no one,” “not anybody,” was eavesdropping on their citizens, not even their foreign friends.
Of course, if the computers flagged a call as having suspicious content, like say, if it was made by a member of Greenpeace, or mentioned the president of Democratia, or if the words “drug” and “buy” were used in the same sentence, as in “I have to go out to the DRUGstore to BUY deodorant for my smelly Dad, so I’ll call you back later,” then the proper authorities could be notified. And then actual legal warrants could be obtained from on-call, easy, slutty, judges. Often this could be done within minutes, even before the calls in question had ended.
It’s like this. Suppose the police come to your door and say, “We’d like to search your house, but we don’t have a search warrant.” So you, fearing they’d find your stash of politically incorrect midget-on-stuffed-animal porn, say, “No.” So they say, “OK, then, step aside while this robot here rolls through your front door and through your entire house, and transmits images of everything in digitized form to a remote super computer which could spot the real Spock at a Star Trek convention. Then if the computer reports back that any white powder is visible anywhere in your house, like flour, or talcum, we can have a warrant faxed by satellite to our van waiting at the curb over here, and THEN we will search you.”
Would that seem like a fair way to sidestep your Constitutional rights? Well, that’s essentially what the ECHELON system, set up by Democratia (these United States, duh!) has done routinely with your phone calls at least since the Clinton administration, and the Democrats knew it at the time.
We should impeach everybody in both parties, simultaneously.
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