Daily Archives: November 3, 2019

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Two in three Americans live in the "border zone," a 100-mile stretch inland where some constitutional due process and privacy protections are functionally canceled in the name of border security. The zone includes entire states Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, nearly all of New England, and all but a tiny sliver of Michigan as well as about three in four of our 20 largest metro areas. Is the Trump administration trying to make it bigger?

The prospect seems obviously attractive to immigration hawks like White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, known to be the president's chief influence on border policy. Yet the possible suggestion of interest in expanding the border zone comes not from Miller but acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Mark Morgan, who joined President Trump on stage at a law enforcement conference in Chicago this week.

"We will be building 450 miles of big, beautiful wall by the end of 2020," Morgan said, implausibly. "With every mile of wall that's being built, I promise you, it's not just the cities and towns on the border. I always say: Every town, every city, every state is a border town, a border city, and border state."

Is that just a figure of speech? Because it's blatantly untrue unless the border zone goes national.

My suspicion here may seem unfounded, and I hope it is. But I think there are two good reasons to be wary.

The first is the nature of the border zone, which too few Americans realize exists. The Fourth Amendment protects our right "to be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" and requires specific probable cause before search warrants are issued. But at the border, CBP agents are allowed to conduct searches of bags and vehicles without meeting those requirements. And in 1953, the Justice Department issued a regulation saying these relaxed rules apply within a "reasonable distance" from the actual border, a term the DOJ defined as 100 miles.

The 100-mile decision was made by unelected administrators. It wasn't open to public input, nor was it determined by our representatives in Congress. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court upheld the rule in 1976 in U.S. v Martinez-Fuerte, where the 7-2 majority wrote that usually law enforcement must have "individualized suspicion" to breach someone's privacy, but as long as the Border Patrol checkpoints are "reasonably located" (i.e. within the 100-mile range), agents can stop, search, and question motorists without any particular cause.

As the minority opinion noted, there's "no principle in the jurisprudence of fundamental rights which permits constitutional limitations to be dispensed with merely because they cannot be conveniently satisfied." The fact that CBP agents typically won't be able to establish probable cause by looking at a moving vehicle should not mean they get to ignore the Constitution. That's not how rights work, and this "papers, please" style of law enforcement is fundamentally un-American.

Yet even if you agree with the theory of the 100-mile rule, the practice is a disaster and sees CBP authority expanded well past what Martinez-Fuerte permitted. As Cato Institute scholar and former CIA analyst Patrick Eddington has detailed, CBP agents "elect to ignore the court's admonition in the Martinez-Fuerte ruling that 'any further detention ... must be based on consent or probable cause.'" They've "used violence to remove motorists from their vehicles when they decline to answer questions after asserting their rights;" expanded their searches to planes, buses, and trains; and used the checkpoints in service to the wars on drugs and terror. (No terrorists have ever been arrested this way.)

The upshot, as the ACLU has reported in its extensive coverage of the border zone, is CBP "agents are stopping, interrogating, and searching Americans on an everyday basis with absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing, and often in ways that our Constitution does not permit." And in the years since the 100-mile rule was created, Border Patrol agents have grown from a force of 1,100 to around 21,000, with an estimated 170 permanent "interior checkpoints." What may have been relatively innocuous at the start is now a major problem.

That brings us to the second reason to be worried by Morgan's remark: The border zone as it exists today was implemented with remarkably little pushback. The Border Zone Reasonableness Restoration Act of 2019 would reduce the zone to 25 miles, but that would still include most major cities in the current designation and it has no legislative traction anyway.

If neither Congress nor the Supreme Court objects to this status quo, why would we expect them to object to extending the border zone to include the final third of the population? If it's fine to have CBP infringing around 200 million people's Fourth Amendment rights, what's another 100 million?

It's not true that every town, every city, every state is a border town, a border city, and border state. The unchallenged corruption of the border zone gives us good cause to be leery of any talk that suggests they are.

View original post here:
Is Trump trying to unleash the Border Patrol on all of America? - The Week

American whistleblower Edward Snowden is living a life of exile in Russia because he shared thousands of top-secret government documents with journalists. But six years after he exposed how the US government surveils the digital lives of everyday Americans, Snowden is not just worried about the powers of government agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA), hes concerned about big technology companies, too.

In an upcoming interview with Recodes Kara Swisher on the Recode Decode podcast, Snowden said he thinks its a mistake to see the NSA as a bigger threat to privacy than tech companies.

Facebooks internal purpose, whether they state it publicly or not, is to compile perfect records of private lives to the maximum extent of their capability, and then exploit that for their own corporate enrichment. And damn the consequences, Snowden told Swisher. This is actually precisely the same as what the NSA does. Google ... has a very similar model. They go, Oh, were connecting people. They go, Oh, were organizing data. Although, Snowden said, these companies still dont know as much as the government, which can gather information from all of the many tech platforms.

Snowden was talking to Swisher about the publication of his new book, Permanent Record, in which he details his journey from an idealistic young national security contractor, eager to help protect the US from foreign threats in the aftermath of 9/11, to a disillusioned whistleblower. The massive government surveillance effort he revealed in 2013 wouldnt be possible without the data-gathering that tech companies do in the first place, Snowden said.

The more Google knows about you, the more Facebook knows about you, the more they are able ... to create permanent records of private lives, the more influence and power they have over us, Snowden told Swisher. There is no good reason why Google should be able to read your email. There is no good reason why Google should know the messages that youre sending to your friend. Facebook shouldnt be able to see what youre saying when youre writing to your mother.

Snowden also pointed out that the Fourth Amendment which protects citizens from searches unless law enforcement has a warrant or probable cause only applies to government, not to companies. So while the FBI might need a warrant to probe your inbox, theres no constitutional barrier to a company like Facebook searching and retrieving peoples private information without a judges approval.

The former NSA systems engineer said to better protect people from being exploited by the data collection of major tech companies, the US should have software liability laws. These would be similar to consumer product liability regulations that can hold companies and executives responsible for selling physical goods that harm people.

We have serious liability laws in every other sector, said Snowden. If you produce medicine and put it on the shelves and your baby aspirin kills babies, you get sued. You go to jail, right? If you build a car and it catches on fire and kills people, you get sued, your company might get shut down, you might go to jail. We have no software liability laws in the United States.

Recently, companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon have come under fire by regulators for their perceived negative effects on society from alleged monopolistic practices to data breaches.

When you look at technologists as a class, were at a fork in the road, said Snowden. There is a class led by Mark Zuckerberg that is moving toward the maximization of technological power and influence that can be applied to society because they believe they can profit by it or, rightly or wrongly, they can better use the influence that their systems provide to direct the world into a better direction. ... And then you have this other fork in the road where there are people ... [who] go, The advance of technology is inevitable and technology can do very good things for the world, but we need to understand that there must be limits on how that technological power and influence can be applied.

Snowden also pushed back on the idea that people dont care about their data privacy because they still use services like Facebook that have notoriously failed to steward user data.

People actually care. They care very much. But they feel powerless to change it, said Snowden, so they adopt a position of laissez-faire, I dont care, as a psychological coping mechanism, because otherwise you are being victimized, and thats a difficult thing to deal with.

Read this article:
Edward Snowden says Facebook is just as untrustworthy as the NSA - Vox.com

One of the largest gun collections in Cumberland County belongs to the sheriffs office, and thanks to a recent change to the state Protection From Abuse law, that collection is growing.

The sheriffs office has long been responsible for collecting weapons required to be surrendered because of PFA orders. However, a new law designed to better protect victims of domestic violence contained two provisions that increase the number of guns the office needs to store.

First, the law which was signed by Gov. Tom Wolf in October 2018 and became effective in April 2019 mandates that all, rather than some, defendants who receive a final PFA order relinquish their firearms while the order is active. Second, it greatly restricts the third-party safekeeping option to firearms dealers and attorneys, banning the practice of giving them to friends and relatives.

Those changes were recommended by advocates for victims of domestic violence, who cite a study showing that domestic violence victims are five times more likely to be killed if their abuser possesses a firearm.

Some counties have received so many more guns thanks to the law that they have encountered storage issues. That isnt a problem in Cumberland County, both because the county has ample storage space available and because the sheriffs office anticipated the laws passage, according to Sgt. Bryan Ward of the Cumberland County Sheriffs Office.

I was fortunate enough to be included in various capacities before the law ever came out, so we knew it was coming, Ward said.

All weapons are stored in an undisclosed location but on county property, he said. He had little difficulty finding storage space that could be altered to meet security requirements for housing firearms, but Cumberland County is absolutely the minority in that regard.

The county is storing about 350-375 guns, a number that has risen in the past three to four years even before the changes to the PFA law, he said. Hes seen about a 25 percent increase in the rate at which guns are turned into the sheriffs office since that law passed earlier this year.

When a defendant is served with a final PFA order, he or she has 24 hours to turn firearms and other weapons over to law enforcement or invoke the narrow third-party safekeeping exception. Weapons can be turned over to the sheriffs office, state police or a municipal police station.

Almost all PFA defendants at least make an appearance of complying with the law, Ward said, providing a list of firearms they possess and surrendering those guns. A defendant who does not turn over all firearms is guilty of a second-degree misdemeanor.

Im sure were lied to a lot, but the (weapons) are not in plain view, and I cant search the house, Ward said.

Pennsylvania does not typically permit the sheriffs office to perform a search of the defendants house and seize weapons because of Fourth Amendment privacy concerns. A 2016 Joint State Government Report said that can nonetheless create compliance problems.

Once the sheriffs office has possession of the weapons, they must be physically kept in storage by the sheriffs office and cannot be used for any purpose, Ward said. The law holds the sheriffs office responsible if anything happens to those weapons.

When a PFA expires, Ward searches the Pennsylvania Instant Check System database to ensure the person can lawfully possess a firearm. He will then contact the defendant and schedule a time for the person to regain possession of their gun.

Daniel Walmer covers public safety for The Sentinel. You can reach him by email at dwalmer@cumberlink.com or by phone at 717-218-0021.

See original here:
Strengthened PFA law means more guns turned in to Cumberland County sheriff's office - The Courier-Express