Seize the Rojo
This is a short film project for one of my cousin #39;s Finals for school. The film is based on the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Hope everyone had fun with this project! I did! Nice...
By: Kevin Medrano
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Seize the Rojo - Video
The consequences of eliminating Fourth Amendment protections for all international communication with foreigners
Reuters
The U.S. government concedes that it needs a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls between Americans, or to read the body of their emails to one another. Everyone agrees that these communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment. But the government also argues that Fourth Amendment protections don't apply when an American calls or writes to a foreigner in another country.
Let's say, for example, that the head of the NAACP writes an email to a veteran of the South African civil-rights struggle asking for advice about an anti-racism campaign; or that Hillary Clinton fields a call from a friend in Australia whose daughter was raped; or that Jeb Bush uses Skype to discuss with David Cameron whether he should seek the 2016 presidential nomination for the Republican Party. Under the Obama administration's logic, these Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to these conversations, and it is lawful and legitimate for the NSA to eavesdrop on, record, and store everything that is said.
The arguments Team Obama uses to justify these conclusions are sweeping and worrisome, as the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer capturesin his analysis of the relevant legal briefs:
... the government contends that Americans who make phone calls or send emails to people abroad have a diminished expectation of privacy because the people with whom they are communicatingnon-Americans abroad, that isare not protected by the Constitution. The government also argues that Americans' privacy rights are further diminished in this context because the NSA has a "paramount" interest in examining information that crosses international borders.
... the government even argues that Americans can't reasonably expect that their international communications will be private from the NSA when the intelligence services of so many other countries ... might be monitoring those communications, too. The government's argument is not simply that the NSA has broad authority to monitor Americans' international communications. The US government is arguing that the NSA's authority is unlimited in this respect. If the government is right, nothing in the Constitution bars the NSA from monitoring a phone call between a journalist in New York City and his source in London. For that matter, nothing bars the NSA from monitoring every call and email between Americans in the United States and their non-American friends, relatives, and colleagues overseas.
All I'd add is that the Obama administration's encroachments on the Fourth Amendment disparately affect naturalized citizens of the United States, almost all of whom still have friends or family members living in their countries of origin. When I call my parents, email my sister, or text my best friend, my private communications are theoretically protected by the Bill of Rights. In contrast, immigrants contacting loved ones often do so with the expectation that every word they say or write can be legally recorded and stored forever on a server somewhere.
Xenophobia is one factor driving this double-standard. It does real harm to immigrants whose speech is chilled, as is clear to anyone who has made an effort to speak with them.
Yet there has been little backlash against the Obama administration for affording zero constitutional protections to Americans engaged in speech with foreigners, and little sympathy for the innocent Americans, many of them immigrants, who are hurt by the approach Obama and many in Congress endorse.
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NSA Spying Has a Disproportionate Effect on Immigrants
Jaikumar Vijayan | May 15, 2014
A federal appeals court this week ruled that a woman's Fourth Amendment rights may have been violated when San Francisco police arrested her after an automated license plate reader mistakenly identified her car as stolen.
A federal appeals court this week ruled that a woman's Fourth Amendment rights may have been violated when San Francisco police arrested her after an automated license plate reader mistakenly identified her car as stolen. The decision provides fodder to privacy advocates calling for restrictions on the use of the technology.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth District Tuesday reversed a district court ruling saying the police made the arrest in good faith. A three-judge panel at the appellate court held that a reasonable jury could indeed find that the woman's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure had been violated. The case was remanded back to the district court.
The case involves Denise Green, 47, who was stopped, handcuffed and detained briefly by multiple police officers with drawn guns, on a March night in 2009.
The incident was triggered when Green's car passed a police cruiser whose ALPR mistakenly determined that the vehicle was stolen. According to the appellate court's description of the incident, the photograph taken by the ALPR was blurry and illegible because of darkness.
The police officer operating the license plate reader radioed in a description of Green's vehicle and provided the incorrect license plate number from the ALPR read to dispatch. He did not confirm the tag number visually.
Dispatch quickly identified the plate as belonging to a stolen vehicle prompting a sequence of events that ended with Green being stopped by multiple police cars, handcuffed at gunpoint and detained while officers searched her car and person before letting her go.
Green filed a lawsuit against San Francisco Police Department, the city, county and the police officer in charge of the incident contending Fourth Amendment violations as well as unreasonable use of force and other charges. She asked the court for a summary judgment on her claims.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California rejected Green's motion and agreed with the SFPD's assertion that they had acted under reasonable suspicion.
More here:
License reader lawsuit can be heard, appeals court rules
A federal magistrate in San Jose has rejected a bid by prosecutors to search an unidentified target's Google e-mail account, criticizing the "seize first, search second" request as overbroad and unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
U.S. Magistrate Paul Grewal could have simply denied the request in a stark order without preamble or explanation.
Instead, Grewal waxed poetic, beginning his seven-page ruling Friday by painting a portrait of how each day he "joins the teeming masses of the Bay Area on Highway 101 or 280," marked by "lengthy queues" at exits in Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino. "The Technorati are, in short, everywhere" in Silicon Valley, from the "humble downtown San Jose taqueria" to the "overpriced Palo Alto cafe," he said.
Grewal said he was hammering home a point, that "too few understand, or even suspect, the essential role played by many of these workers and their employers in facilitating most government access to private citizens' data."
The magistrate said he had reviewed an application by the government to search the Gmail account of a person suspected of stealing government funds.
The judge noted that "no defendant yet exists, as no case has yet been filed. There are no hearings, no witnesses, no briefs and no debate. Instead, a magistrate judge is left to predict what would or would not be reasonable in executing the warrant without any hard, ripe facts. This is hardly a recipe for success."
Although Grewal said he did find probable cause to believe that the Gmail account in question in fact contained evidence of theft, "what of all the data associated with the account which supplies no such evidence whatsoever?"
Grewal blasted the request as overreaching under the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches. He said federal officials failed to provide any date restriction, other than to say the alleged crimes began in 2010.
"Nor has the government made any kind of commitment to return or destroy evidence that is not relevant to its investigation," Grewal wrote.
"This unrestricted right to retain and use every bit Google coughs up undermines the entire effort the application otherwise makes to limit the obvious impact under the plain view doctrine of providing such unfettered government access," he wrote.
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Magistrate waxes poetic while rejecting Gmail search request
The Fourth Amendment
Gov 2.
By: Michael Sovers
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The Fourth Amendment - Video