Posts Tagged fourth amendment

NRA “Good Guys” Campaign

The NRA is using issues other than just guns to encourage membership:

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An Anti-Gun Bill Too Strong For California

From TheRightToBear.com:

According to the authors of the bill, AB 1014 would help to create de-facto gun restraining orders. The bill would let police officers seize a weapon based solely off the testimony of an immediate family member or health care professional and hold it for up to a year without any due process being extended to the gun owner.

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Police Need To Know The Law, Same As Citizens

From The CATO Institute:

To execute any search or seizure, a police officer must reasonably suspect that a crime has been or is being committed based on the facts available to him at the time he executes the search or seizure. Under this standard, searches can be lawful even if the officer is mistaken in his understanding of the facts before him, as long as his understanding led him to reasonably suspect criminal activity. But what if the officer is mistaken about whether a particular activity is actually criminal?

Full post here

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We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrants

From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee police who forced their way into a gun rights advocate’s home without a warrant, took her for an emergency mental evaluation and seized her gun were justified under the circumstances and protected from her civil rights claims, a federal appeals court has ruled.

“The intrusions upon Sutterfield’s privacy were profound,” Judge Ilana Rovner wrote for three-judge panel. “At the core of the privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment is the right to be let alone in one’s home.”

But the court also found, that on the other hand, “There is no suggestion that (police) acted for any reason other than to protect Sutterfield from harm.”

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ATF Is Really After Customer Data Not Gun Parts

From Townhall.com:

Ares Armor CEO Dimitrios Karras, who served his country honorably as a Marine, was more than willing to meet the ATF halfway regarding the EP Armory parts in his possession.

He was willing to provide the ATF with thousands of the EP Armory parts for safekeeping until the company had its day in court. He even segregated them in a locked room and offered the ATF the only set of keys.

Where Karras drew the line was in providing the customer data that proved to be the ATF’s real focus. He filed an injunction to stop the ATF from seizing his customer data.

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Judge Throws Out SAFE Act Violation on 4th Amendment Grounds

From Buffalo News:

“In observing the magazine, I did notice there were at least 10 rounds in the magazine,” Barrancotta testified. He then emptied the magazine.

“I did count rounds just to confirm our reasonable suspicion that there were more than 10,” Piedmont said.

Tresmond said, “Once the magazine is removed from the firearm, the firearm cannot fire. At that point in time, the search of the firearm should have ceased. But the officers went further. … It was a search without a warrant.”

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Secure Mobile Phone: Blackphone

The company Silent Circle which makes encrypted communication apps for mobile phones will soon release its own hardware called the Blackphone on Feb. 24. It is designed from the ground up to be a secure and encrypted method of communication. They are designing the hardware and creating their own secure version of the Andriod OS.

Press release:

Blackphone, powered by a security-oriented Androidâ„¢ build named PrivatOS, is a carrier- and vendor-independent smartphone giving individuals and organizations the ability to make and receive secure phone calls, exchange secure texts, transfer and store files, and video chat without compromising user privacy on the device.

It is the culmination of several careers’ worth of effort from leading figures in the industry, including Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP; Javier Aguera, co-founder of Geeksphone; Jon Callas, co-founder of PGP Inc. and CTO of Silent Circle; Rodrigo Silva-Ramos, co-founder of Geeksphone; and Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle and former US Navy SEAL.

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NRA and ACLU Team Up Against NSA Surveillance

From TribLive:

“Under the government’s reading of Section 215, the government could simply demand the periodic submission of all firearms dealers’ transaction records, then centralize them in a database indexed by the buyers’ names for later searching,” the NRA wrote in an amicus brief supporting the ACLU lawsuit against James Clapper, the director of national intelligence.

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Press Release: Dark Mail Alliance

Today at the Inbox Love conference in Mountain View, CA, Silent Circle along with Ladar Levision, Founder of Lavabit officially announced the creation of the Dark Mail Alliance.

Silent Circle and Lavabit, as privacy innovators have partnered to lead the charge to replace email as we know it today – fundamentally broken from a privacy perspective – we have collaborated in developing a private, next-generation, end-to-end encrypted alternative. Read the rest of this entry »

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Obama Administration Sued By ACLU Over NSA Spying

From New York Times:

The lawsuit could set up an eventual Supreme Court test. It could also focus attention on this disclosure amid the larger heap of top secret surveillance matters revealed by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who came forward Sunday to say he was their source.

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OPSEC For Journalists And Leakers

Wired’s Danger Room has some tips for journalists to protect their identity from subpoenas like the one involving the AP.

We now live in a world where public servants informing the public about government behavior or wrongdoing must practice the tradecraft of drug dealers and spies. Otherwise, these informants could get caught in the web of administrations that view George Orwell’s 1984 as an operations manual.

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Supreme Court to Rule on Drug Dogs

From Threat Level:

The home-sniff case, also arriving from the Florida Supreme Court, tests a decade-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent in which the justices ruled that police need a warrant to use thermal-imaging devices outside a house to detect marijuana-growing operations, saying it amounted to a search. In that case, the high court ruled in 2001 that “rapidly advancing technology” threatens the core of the Fourth Amendment “right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”

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Spy Law Extended For 5 Years

From Threat Level:

The FISA Amendments Act, (.pdf) which is expiring at year’s end, allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and e-mails without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

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6th Circuit: No Warrant Needed to Track Cell Phones

From the EFF:

In what can only be described as a results-oriented opinion, the court found Skinner had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the cell phone location data because “if a tool used to transport contraband gives off a signal that can be tracked for location, certainly the police can track the signal.” Otherwise, “technology would help criminals but not the police.” In other words, because cell phones can be used to commit crimes, there can’t be any Fourth Amendment privacy rights in them. If this sounds like an over-simplistic description of the legal reasoning in an opinion we disagree with, the sad reality is that the court’s conclusion really did boil down to this shallow understanding of the law.

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