As I mentioned previously, there is precious little separating this nation from beign a police state. Don’t want your calls surveiled? Better use Skype, yo. I wouldn’t be surprised if the NSA is collecting and archiving blog posts and comments, franky. Do you value the Fourth Amendment’s ban of unreasonable searches? I do. That protection was weakend siginifigantly today with the strike of a Supreme Court gavel, as Bush appointee Alito has swung the balance of the court and – unsurprisingly – granted police squads more leeway in excercising search warrants: they no longer are required to announce their presence, they can just bust your door down.
What does this really mean? Justice Breyer says that “It weakens, perhaps destroys, much of the practical value of the Constitution’s knock-and-announce protection.” Former Justice O’connor asks, “Is there no policy of protecting the home owner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?”
Cheerleaders of this decision will, you can bet, tell us that if we are innocent, we have nothing to fear and pronounce that in this day of terrorist threats, giving terrorists warning of searches is a luxury we just can’t afford. This latest stripping of our once-sacred civil liberties follows in lockstep with the new totalitarian movement – granting ever-widening authority to government over individual rights. All in the name of “freedom”, I might add.
As Hume’s Ghost neatly summarized in his piece on Democratic totalitarianism, “The possibility than any citizen might be a terrorist provides the rationale for making every citizen the target of surveillance.” And with it, the rationale for limiting our protections from unreasonable searches.
[Update] And now, courtesty of Bill in Portland Maine, the lighter side of the story:
The Supreme Court has ruled that with a warrant, police no longer have to knock before kicking your door in. Unless, of course, you’re the Vice President of the United States and we’re talking about shooting a man in the face. Then you can come back tomorrow.
—Jay Leno
