BATCOTE: 4th Amendment Further Crumbles

Mike at Born at the Crest of the Empire gives some sad details: "This is important. The protections offered under the fourth amendment are on their last legs. Two stories.

First, the whitehouse has issued a white paper explaining why their black program, NSA spying, is legal. I haven't gone through it yet or read the reviews, but this is really good news because now the legal arguments will be out there. And even if the Bush admin has the greatest lawyers in the world, which they don't, their legal argument will now be picked apart by literally tens of thousands of lawyers across the country.

I see this release as desperate by the Whitehouse, coming as it does the day before the first Dem hearings on the matter in the house. If they felt they were winning, they would have stuck to the 'protecting you from terror' stonewall.

Second, the Justice Dept has issued a subpoena for a massive amount of data which may contain the searches of literally millions of people, 'including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.' Google has refused to comply.

The Justice Dept's rationale is that it wants to see how often pornography turns up in searches. (It depends on what you search for, you idiots.) This subpoena was issued last year, and with Google failing to respond, this sudden publication of the subpoenas sounds to me like an effort by Justice to limit Google's customer's behavior by threat of future subpoenas."