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Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

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Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#381

Post by dheera »

umvi wrote: post #32
Fellshard wrote: post #12

Open question, here: Doesn't this backfire and make TSA more likely to operate on the basis of profiling alone? What makes a traveler suspect? This reminds me of Sowell's distinction between 'Type I' and 'Type II' discrimination: when all other information is forbidden from you, you'll end up using the only information you have as your heuristic, however noisy and biased that information might be compared to a more c…

Unpopular opinion: why is profiling bad in context of airplane security? If 100% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people of X country (Xians), and 0% of airplane terrorist attacks are carried out by people from Y country (Yians), it seems like a pointless charade of political correctness to check Xians and Yians with equal frequency. I say profile the heck out of Xians. Stop and frisk 100% of Xians an…

For the same reason you try to avoid machine learning models from overfitting. If you train a cats vs. dogs machine learning model but all your cat pictures are indoors and all dog pictures are outdoors, the model may inadvertently learn to recognise indoors vs. outdoors instead of learning cat vs. dog features, and will fail miserably on an image of a cat outdoors.

In your case, first of all, it's not 100%. Suppose 90% of attacks are by Xians and 10% are Yians.

Profiling Xians over Yians might mean that you catch 90% of attacks. Maybe 95% if you search some Yians.

On the other hand, learning to properly identify threats, independent of Xian vs. Yian, might allow you to catch 99.9% of attacks.

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#382

Post by mike00632 »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #345
wan23 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulations are the means by which you make something be regulated. The relationship between these words hasn't changed. https://www.etymonline.com/word/regulate

The phrase "well-regulated" is an idiom that means something like "working as expected, calibrated correctly, normal, regular". You can't interpret an idiom literally based solely on the words that it's made from - idioms have their own independent meaning. The following source gives examples from the Oxford English Dictionary of how the idiom was used from 1709 through 1894, demonstrating how the idiom 'well-regulat…

If it really is the case that the law is written in the form of an idiom then maybe we shouldn't be taking it as gospel and let it grant people right to individually own a weapon capable of murdering numerous people. I mean, if we really are going to say that the second amendment grants such rights then it's not too much to ask that it be explicit. The fact that it's not explicit is a good basis to interpret the phrase loosely and assume that the founding fathers did not envision the gun madness of today.

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#383

Post by mike00632 »

droithomme wrote: post #223
Spooky23 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The well regulated militia is subject to regulation.

In colonial era English language, well regulated refers to something being properly functioning, ie in working order. It has nothing to do with regulations.

I think we can all agree that a teenager with an AR-15 is not a "well regulated militia".

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#384

Post by golemotron »

Spooky23 wrote: post #140
Rebelgecko wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about the legal justification, but I don't think that is true in practice. For example a tourist or someone on an expired visa (edit: or an unexpired but non-immigrant visa) doesn't have the same 2A rights as a US citizen or permanent resident.

The well regulated militia is subject to regulation.

In the 1700s, the word "regulated" meant "in good working order." It did not have the association with law that we have now. You can look into the history, but if you don't care to, consider that "regulations" (as we've described them over the past few centuries) are a form of law found in modern bureaucracies.

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#385

Post by quickthrower2 »

taurath wrote: post #346
gamblor956 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if a warrant is obtained using illegal evidence, then you poison the warrant and all the evidence arising from it. Parallel construction happens way less frequently than people think it does, since it requires that there be an actual parallel path to the evidence that would have been available at the time the evidence was improperly obtained. It's basically only upheld when evidence was collected improperly throu…

I don’t think you have to be mirandized to give a confession, no?

I think you would to use that in court - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_v._Arizona - IANAL.

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#386

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

waterheater wrote: post #375
_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK was a tyranny at that time? How would you define tyranny then?

A general definition is "oppressive power." A tyranny must be recognized. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution "The Continental Congress declared King George a tyrant who trampled the colonists' rights as Englishmen..." If you recognize a tyranny but do nothing, you stand to receive further oppression. Consider the case of the PRC. The CCP is tyrannical toward those they rule; we plainly see this re…

So what you say the main thing is, when I declare you a tyrant you are a tyrant.

And because they suppressed (non voting, poor) people in the UK didn't declare their king a tyrant it wasn't one for them.

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#387

Post by quickthrower2 »

bdowling wrote: post #224
landryraccoon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the law is that even if law enforcement finds evidence of guilt via illegal search, they cannot use that evidence in court. This is a crucial protection for citizens. The point of the ruling isn't that it prevents the search, it prevents the result of that search from being used against you. If law enforcement wishes to establish the guilt of a suspect in court, it has to use only evidence it obtained th…

> if law enforcement finds evidence of guilt via illegal search, they cannot use that evidence in court. This is not strictly correct. If law enforcement violates your rights via an illegal search, they cannot use that evidence against you . However, they may be able to use the evidence against others . For example, suppose the police illegally search your house and find drugs and a list of customers. You may be able…

Interesting, so there is an incentive to do an illegal search especially for drugs where you might find a higher up.

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#388

Post by yqx »

cies wrote: post #376

So a govt agency does something illegal. To be honest, im not thrilled. They seem to be acting against the laws they claim to uphold all the time. Do they get punished? Are they put under extra monitoring now? This is not a democracy people, this is not "trias politica". Police brutality rampant, this merely being one more case. These court rulings seem rather useless, when the same govt keeps illegal torture prisons…

I didn't study law, but as far as I understand, illegal is not the right word here. They (govt) do things for which there is no legal precedence all the time. The court could also have found no problem with these searches. Now that they did take issue with it if the searches would continue then yes, that would be illegal.

Re: Court: Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional

#390

Post by sokoloff »

mike00632 wrote: post #383
droithomme wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In colonial era English language, well regulated refers to something being properly functioning, ie in working order. It has nothing to do with regulations.

I think we can all agree that a teenager with an AR-15 is not a "well regulated militia".

I was trained, by the Army, on the M16 as a teenager. We send teenagers to war zones right now.

There’s a very real possibility that a teenager with an AR15 is literally part of a well-regulated military group protecting the county.

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