4th Amendment – LonelyMachines

Civil Liberties? This is 2012…

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is like a Coen Brothers movie sometimes. Just when I’m tempted to laugh at some inane utterance of his, I realize how utterly unfunny and disturbing it really is. Regarding security in the wake of the Boston bombing, he had this to say:

The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry, but we live in a complex word where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.

Oh, hell no.

I don’t care how much he tries to look like the reluctant but resigned guardian. No amount of imagined protection is going to compensate for the rights quashed in its service, and no politician who suggests such a thing deserves to hold office.

Civil Rights Code

Cybersecurity Act of 2009

Some guy yelled at me about this today. People seem to yell a great many political things at me lately. Frankly, it’s all quite tiring. Anyhow, this doofus went of on an unsolicited rant about how President Obama was going to “shut off the internet at will.”

Man, I thought, I gotta know how he can do that. So, I googled (is that a verb now?) “Obama shut down internet,” and I was led to the documents for the Cybersecurity Act of 2009. The actual bills are S. 773 and 778. The first draft is here [pdf].

I skimmed through it and found that it echoed almost everything I’d heard about last year’s CSIS report. Basically, the report acknowledged a few things that should have already been glaringly obvious:

That our government’s computer infrastructure is vulnerable to attack and disruption,
That you can trust Congress, who are experts on these things, to throw tons of money at it if you like, and
It won’t do much good.

Continued...

Civil Rights

One more chip at the 4th Amendment

This week, the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Arizona v. Johnson [pdf]. This case expands on the powers of police to detain and search citizens given only the vague qualifier of “reasonable suspicion.”

Granted, the courts have upheld the idea that our rights to privacy are significantly reduced when in an automobile, but this case expands the rights of arbitrary search and seizure of uninvolved passengers somewhat.

At this point, an officer can order me out of my car and search me on nothing more than a hunch.