Posts Tagged searches

Gun Rights and Police Raids Are Incompatible

From Open Source Defense:

As more people become able exercise their gun rights, an ever-bigger percentage of people are going to have a gun on them or nearby when encountering police. And that means that in a raid (which are often indistinguishable from home invasions), or when there’s a strange knock on the door at night, people are going to use their gun for its purpose. That’s just a description of reality in a world of robust gun rights. So either that can be a death sentence for ≥1 of the people involved in the encounter, or police tactics can change.

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Patriot Act Reform Fails By One Vote

From Ars Technica:

A majority of senators—59 out of 100—supported the amendment. But under the Senate’s dysfunctional rules, it takes a 60-vote supermajority to end debate on a proposal like this and move to a vote. So even though a majority of senators supported the amendment, it did not become part of the reauthorization bill.
Four senators—Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) missed the vote. The amendment would have passed if any of them had voted “yes.”

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Searches Of Travelers’ Devices Unconstitutional

From Electronic Frontier Foundation:

In a major victory for privacy rights at the border, a federal court in Boston ruled today that suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices by federal agents at airports and other U.S. ports of entry are unconstitutional.

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Houston PD To Stop No-Knock Raids

This is a positive for everyone. No-knock raids put police in more danger as well as the suspects and bystanders, especially in states where gun ownership is common. More police departments should consider this kind of reform.

From NPR:

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo says his department will stop serving “no knock” search warrants, weeks after a raid on a house left two married suspects dead and five officers injured. Acevedo also reiterated that the officer who led that raid may face criminal charges.
“The no-knock warrant’s going to go away, kind of like leaded gasoline in our city,” Acevedo said. He added that raids that stem from those warrants would only be used in very limited cases — and that they would not be used to nab people suspected of dealing small amounts of drugs.

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Police Can’t Use Biometrics To Unlock Phones

From Reason:

In an opinion published January 10, a federal magistrate judge in Oakland, California, ruled that the Fifth Amendment’s protections against self-incrimination extend to phones equipped with biometric locks. Federal police can search a residence, the court ruled, but may not force anyone present during a search to hold their finger, thumb, iris, or other body part up against a phone to try to unlock it.

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Homeland Security Stops Reporter, Asks To Search Phone

From Motherboard:

On Thursday, a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reporter claimed that the Department of Homeland Security demanded access to her mobile phones when she was crossing the border at the Los Angeles airport.

“I wanted to share a troubling experience I had with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the hopes it may help you protect your private information,” Maria Abi-Habib, a WSJ journalist focused on ISIS and Al Qaeda wrote in a post on Facebook. (Abi-Habib confirmed to Motherboard that the Facebook account was hers, but declined to comment further.)

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Laura Poitras Sues U.S. Government

From EFF:

Washington, D.C. ­– Academy and Pulitzer Prize Award-winning documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras sued the Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. transportation security agencies today demanding they release records documenting a six-year period in which she was searched, questioned, and often subjected to hours-long security screenings at U.S. and overseas airports on more than 50 occasions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing Poitras in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, DOJ, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

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