Dems are almost as pro-surveillance as Republicans

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

A little bit of legal good news

In a major victory for privacy rights, a federal court in Boston today ruled that the government’s suspicionless searches of international travelers’ smartphones and laptops at airports and other U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment. The ruling came in a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and ACLU of Massachusetts, on behalf of 11 travelers.

[...]

Last year, CBP conducted more than 33,000 searches, almost four times the number from just three years prior.

[...]

The district court order puts an end to CBP and ICE’s asserted authority to search and seize travelers’ devices for purposes far afield from the enforcement of immigration and customs laws. Border officers must now demonstrate individualized suspicion of contraband before they can search a traveler’s device.

  ACLU

I'm sure they can come up with something.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Privacy rights decided by the Supreme Court tomorrow

Carpenter v United States, arises out of the government’s prosecution of Timothy Carpenter for a series of armed robberies carried out in south-eastern Michigan and north-western Ohio several years ago. In the course of its investigation of the crimes, the government ordered Carpenter’s cellphone provider to turn over data it had collected relating to Carpenter’s movements.

[...]

Importantly, it turned over these records even though the government had not obtained a warrant based on probable cause.


[...]

Privacy scholars are watching Carpenter’s case closely because it may require the supreme court to address the scope and continuing relevance of the “third-party-records doctrine”, a judicially developed rule that has sometimes been understood to mean that a person surrenders her constitutional privacy interest in information that she turns over to a third party. The government contends that Carpenter lacks a constitutionally protected privacy interest in his location data because his cellphone was continually sharing that data with his cellphone provider.

Privacy advocates are rightly alarmed by this argument. Much of the digital technology all of us rely on today requires us to share information passively with third parties. Visiting a website, sending an email, buying a book online – all of these things require sharing sensitive data with internet service providers, merchants, banks and others. If this kind of commonplace and unavoidable information-sharing is sufficient to extinguish constitutional privacy rights, the digital-age fourth amendment will soon be a dead letter.

[...]

Journalists and their sources might be at particular risk. Imagine parallel demands for the cell site location information of a journalist who exposed government misconduct and of all the government employees who had access to the information the journalist exposed. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press observes in its own brief filed in the Carpenter case, cell site location information “can reveal the stories a journalist is working on before they are published, where a journalist went to gather information for those stories, and the identity of a journalist’s sources”.

[...]

A defeat for Carpenter would be a defeat for privacy rights, but it would also mean a dramatic curtailment of first amendment freedoms.
  Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What? You Got Something to Hide?

Civil libertarians have long ago lost faith in Barack Obama’s and his continuing expression of support for privacy and individual rights. Just in case anyone is still not convinced, consider the petition this month to the Supreme Court by the Obama Administration. Just last week, Obama waxed poetic about his commitment to privacy. Yesterday however, his Administration took another major swipe at privacy and asked the Supreme Court to reverse the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which held that the police could not conduct warrantless searches of your cellphone when you are arrested.

[...]

The war on privacy is now truly one of the most prominent elements of the Obama legacy. More than any modern president, his Administration has led a full frontal attack on privacy and has largely succeeded as Democratic leaders follow sheepishly in his wake.

This is an important case and the potential loss for civil liberties could be immense. It is the right Court and the right technology for the Obama Administration to add to a growing list of unchecked police powers in the United States.

  Jonathan Turley