The Appeals Court removed Judge Scheindlein.

She said the Fourth Amendment bans a policy that resulted in every black man in New York City being frisked, and the Appeals Court removed her. It reprimanded her in extremely strong language, accusing her of major ethical violations (they've changed their tune on this). Then they said the Stop-and-frisk program can continue until a new trial is held under a Judge who hasn't said that stopping all black people is racist and against the Fourth Amendment.

Don't get me wrong. But that's not the ruling you issue if you think the Fourth Amendment is something more thena technicality to be reasoned away.

BTW, if any word you were saying was tue, the Federal Appeals Court would not have upheld stop-and-frisk.

You got an example of a case like this?

Ideally with someone using a public defender.

You are claiming something is a universal right. I am claiming, that regardless of the high-faluting legal principles you're talking about, the Courts will not respect the right. If you prove somebody who is rich enough to drop $50k fighting his kids weed conviction, and you haven;t proven a universal right. You;ve proven that Judges will be really nice to rich people.

And if you find such a slip-up I'll at least acknowledge I was unclear.

Considering the pathetic nature of the one attempt you make in this post I'm not holding my breathe.

You know what else right's groups were up in arms about? Reconstruction. Their attempt to increase freedom by decreasing the authority of the Feds ended up turning most of the South into a dystopian hellscape for nearly a century, during which the anti-authoritarian state governments use anti-authoritarian rhetoric to allow private citizens to ethnically cleanse their territory of black people. Note that in a couple of states (SC and either AL or MS) the majority of voters were black during Reconstruction, so it was not easy for the white minority to take over.

That's the thing that makes protecting freedom very complicated in the US, the number one biggest threat to freedom in these united states is not the official authority of the Feds, it's the totally unofficial authority of your next door neighbor, his Gatt, and his 15 best friends.

So you're demanding that everyone assume a paean to anarchy isn't a paean to anarchy because anarchists don't exist, but a simplification of a complex database topic, which you brought up without explaining which mass surveillance you were trying to oppose, is complete BS.

Whatever you say. I shouldn't have said that it's a database of trivial tweets, I should have assumed that you meant all electronic monitoring of anyone, including the Russian Air Force.

Now, since you've made which database we're talking about a key part of your argument, precisely which database are we talking about.

You realize most American Jews put their ethnicity on the Census in some form -- it isn't asked directly, but quite a few people will write in Israeli, Hebrew, Yiddish, etc. on their census forms when it asks for ethnic background. It's also got income information, social security numbers, all kinds of sensitive information. The Census list is actually the only Federal mass database that's ever been abused -- it was used to find Japanese folks to round up in '42. That took a special act of Congress, an Executive Order from the President, and special orders written by the Army's West Coast commander.

Note that to my knowledge, no authoritarian regime has ever been able to abuse any database of communications. It's much easier for them to go around asking people whether their neighbors are Jewish, then set up a Jew-list in the capital based on an algorithm. After all, if you're actually going to expel/murder/etc. all the Jews you'll need an actual human being in their neighborhood anyway, and if your algorithm gets something wrong (ie: it doesn't realize that a prominent vegetarian Adventist does not eat pork and never works on Saturday) you've got a huge political problem.

I've read it. Probably a lot closer then you have.

The problem with using the "spirit" of a document in a legal setting is that nobody agrees on the spirit. You're convinced the Fourth was intended to establish a very strong right to personal privacy. I'm convinced it wasn't.

Therefore to break the impasse we have to go to the text. And in the text it says you're free from unreasonable searches and seizures on your person or property (extended by the Courts, reasonably IMO, to electronic properties), unless they get a warrant. It does not apply to the President's Commander-in-Chief powers, probably because those powers are limited by custom to certain extreme circumstances. It doesn't put any explicit limits on their non Search//Seizure data-gathering (ie: if Congress had the money they could have hired somebody to stand on every street-corner recording illicit affairs) at all.

If you want people to interpret you precisely, you have to be precise.

So they set up a totally new level of government, specifically giving it the power to create the very first massive database of every American (aka: the Census), while failing to put any particularly meaningful checks on data gathering, and you're 100% positive their response to a massive database of trivial tweets would be to freak the fuck out?

Read the actual Amendment. And don't do that thing Americans always do where they read it specifically to find out everyone who has ever disagreed with you is a fucking moron. There are multiple ways the Founders could find everything the NSA does is perfectly legal.

They could declare it "reasonable." They could say the warrant issued by the FISA Court is fine. They could declaim at length on how the Fourth Amendment does not apply because it is restricted to the President's Law Enforcement powers of Search and Seizure, and a Military Signals Intelligence Agency (the NSA) is authorized under his Commander-in-Chief powers, in which case the problem with the program isn't that it exists, it's that the President is wasting everyone's time by getting it repeatedly authorized (and re-authorized) by the FISA Court.

Note that the absolute best bet is that they'd disagree. The Founders were not supermen with intellects millions of times greater then those of modern men, able to easily interpret the Constitution. They were ideological assholes just like us. The Federalists (like Washington and Adams) would almost certainly claim you were a fool for even bringing up the Fourth, because to them the Commander-in-Chief power was second only to God. Jefferson was not quite that enamored of the Commander-in-Chiefship, so he'd probably agree with you, but on the other hand he could easily agree with the current US Court system and say that warrants issued by the FISA Court are perfectly valid.

So the cop says "I knew he was a criminal because I could smell the weed, there was a gun-like bulge in his pants, and he looked at me funny." The wee-dsmelling client goes to fucking jail.

Lawyers obsession technicalities of the legal precedent that never mean anything in the real world would be endearing if they didn't get so self-righteous about said technicalities.

So you are claiming I totally misinterpreted you, and it's all my fault because you are a beacon of clarity in an otherwise unclear world?

Dude, you ain't that good.

So you don't tell us anything about the Fourth Amendment, except that it's anti-authoritarian and anti-mass-surveillance in spirit? Anti-Authoritarianism does not gain credibility from Appeals to Authority.

Has it ever occurred to you that a) you should probably read the Fourth Amendment before making claims about it, and b) if the Founders included multiple 'buts' in the Amendment explicitly precluding it from being used the way you think it should be used, then it follows that you probably don't understand the spirit of the Amendment.

Why not?

Under the Constitution states have the power to regulate anything within their borders that isn't expressly forbidden them by one of the Amendments. 10th Amendment. If they choose to ban possession of weed, then possession of weed is a crime, and their police officers are supposed to enforce the law.

I'm not arguing that anti-drug laws are a particularly good idea, but they are legally valid.

COMPLETELY free of unreasonable searches implies that you are not completely free of reasonable searches. That's why the cop can frisk you if he smells weed.

And why a business would be very smart to agree to a search in these circumstances.

You said "Without freedom, we are nothing, even if we had money. I don't care how 'prosperous' a certain country is; if it's not free, then it's worthless to me."

That's not the kind of thing you say if you're gonna agree to any restriction on freedom.

If you were unclear that's one thing, but the following sentence actually does not clarify things very much:

Great idea in theory.

In practice nobody agrees on what the damn thing means. Seriously, a very large proportion of the US population is absolutely convinced that the government is supposed to be Judeo-Christian despite the a) Establishment clause, b) Free Exercise clause, and c) a near-total lack of the first half of the Judeo-Christian equation from US Government prior to the late 19th century. The Second Amendment inspires passionate debates about whether it creates a right for states to have a militia, a personal right to own firearms for self-defense, which firearms are covered, etc. The Fourth Amendment, which you seem to be advocating for, has at least three buts in it.

So the early 19th-century Cherokee, with absolutely no government to restrict any of their freedoms, were better off then the Georgians?

If you don't accept that some restrictions on your freedom are necessary for your government to function you;ll end up in the same situation they did: completely at the mercy of another government that does restrict some freedoms. It's a very tricky balance.

It doesn't need to be in the contract.

If the police have video of your dumb ass dragging a chick into your car by her hair they can probably don't need a warrant. They only need a warrant for searches a hypothetical "reasonable man" would describe as "unreasonable," and reasonable men tend to frown on dragging chicks around by their hair.

Pricing across continents always gets tricky. The basic problem is that it's really far from where you built all your distribution centers, because it's an island in the middle of the fucking ocean, so shipping is hell. Hawaii is one of the most expensive states to live in mostly because of shipping, and it's closer to a Cali-based warehouse then Adelaide is.

Foreign currency fluctuations are also a huge pain in the ass. In my lifetime, for example, a Canadian dollar has bought between $0.65US and $1.05US. This year the difference between peak and trough is about 5 cents. And it's going down. Which means if you didn't charge Canadians 105% of a reasonable price back at peak (in June, IIRC), then you're gonna have to jack up prices today because you're losing money.

There's also the issue of who actually operates in Australia. If you use your own subsidiary, then your Aussie customers are paying for two CEOs: one down under and the other up-top. If you use a local distributor, then those guys will a) have their own CEO to pay, b) shipping/exchanging currency/etc. also applies to them, and c) know exactly the amount the can force their countrymen to pay.

The thing you have to keep in mind is that the Courts try to act more like a computer then a programmer. They look at the law as code they are honor-bound to execute. If the actual programmers (mostly Congress, bu in practical terms the President has a lot of influence on the precise wording that makes it into the law) fuck up and apply their financial services fraud statute to some idiot fisherman who was asked to preserve 72 fish and only showed up at dock with 69, then that's their fault. The Court's role is to simply run the code.

Now if there's some ridiculous fuck-up in the law, then they'll try to fix it; but generally fixing fuck-ups is not the legal system's job. It's Congress's job.

And a 30-day jail sentence is very low on the totem pole of Congressional fuck-ups the Supremes are likely to fix.

His actual sentence was 30 days, followed by three years supervised release.

Depending on the severity of the fine he was dodging, that could either be a lot or a little. This is a commercial fishing boat, and it was a Federal fine, so it probably wasn't a $20 slap on the wrist.