4th Amendment

A video surfaced this weekend showing fast-talking, southern Georgia cop arresting a college student, just for being the passenger in a car with a broken tail light, after refusing to participate in the cop’s sham “investigation” of a minor traffic infraction.
It would spiral of control in under three minutes.
The cop started the traffic stop by saying, “You’d better step out of the vehicle, ma’am,” to ‘Kaylin’, the properly seat-belted driver – whose name we learned from the video you can see below.

Fourteen cops from the Baltimore City Police vice squad were caught on camera this past February 6th, raiding a local bar, then abruptly shutting it down for business at midnight on a Friday night, after finding an alleged code violation, and all without any warrant, notice or apparent authority of any sort from the police officers.
Nicolas Ramos owns the 40-seat local bar “La Rumba”, and had the presence of mind to capture video of the probably unlawful raid, and to give the cops a big piece of his mind in the 4 minute recording below.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Inc. turned down the FBI’s demand using a 1789 federal ordinance to build a “backdoor” into iPhones allowing law enforcement to defeat encryption as he explained in a “Customer Letter” this morning posted to the company’s website.
Apple’s letter kicks off the highest profile defense of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment we are likely to see in our lifetimes.

In an odd turn of events, a 16-year-old was charged with a DUI in Washington after a Spokane police officer ran a red light, crashed into the teenager and then blamed him for the accident.
Officer Seth Killian, who has been awarded countless accolades throughout his law enforcement career, was distracted and ran a red light on December 8 crashing into the teenager’s vehicle.
He even admitted to being at fault in the moments after the crash.
“I screwed up, man,” a distraught Killian is heard telling another officer in a conversation captured on his body cam.

"It’s clear that the director of the FBI committed perjury of Congress."The post Surveillance Planes With Thermal Imaging Used to Spy on American People appeared first on The Anti-Media.

Hercules starting to clean a 1,000-cattle stable that hadn't been emptied in 30 years. Like the U.S. government, says Gary Hart.

Checkpoint Refusal Activism & the CBP Backlash
In my last column, I laid out the history of the area near the border of the United States known as the “constitution-free zone” (CFZ). This policy, rooted in xenophobia and stemming from restrictions on immigration, prohibitions on substances associated with immigrants, and the all out “war on drugs,” has made casualties out of freedom of movement, rights to privacy, and human dignity at border crossings.

Misconceptions and Lack of Historical Context Undermine Gravity of the Issue
By Guillermo Jimenez

Ken and I-- along with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer-- went to James Madison High School in Brooklyn. Maybe that's why the 5 of us are all committed to the 4th Amendment to the Constitution, a crucial part of the Bill of Rights. It was Madison, who was later elected president, who wrote and proposed the simple one-sentence amendment:

David Kravets put the vote on the Amash-Conyers amendment to end warrantless domestic spying into a sensible perspective for Wired Last week: Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash. And, appropriately enough, the photo in his piece-- Congress' most corrupt Military Industrial Complex shill, Buck McKeon (R-CA).