141–150 of 155 posts
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I would start with the question of why is it that people need visas. We live on the same earth. We should be allowed to travel wherever we want. It's ridiculous.
Time for another exciting round of "Let's Relitigate Civilization!"
"DHS lawyers claimed that international travel provides, in and of itself, sufficient Constitutional basis for detention and search of international travellers and the search, seizure and copying of the digital contents of their belongings." Really? Fucking hell.. With every month that goes by, I am less and less inclined to travel to, or do business in, the US.. edit: I'm aware that later in the article they say the…
Show me a country that does not reserve to itself the right to carry out border inspections (and if you're going to mention the EU, that change is only recent and by treaty, effectively making Europe into a single country of multiple states). As long as there have been borders there have been smugglers, and as long as there have been smugglers there have been customs agents. This is especially true of the US, because…
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Considering the border search exception dates back to legislation by the First Congress in 1789, I don't think they'd have much of a problem with the current interpretation.
I hope they would have some pause over the border zone attached to constricted friendly borders (For example, I don't see much reason to consider Michigan a border zone...). And I do see CPB vehicles dozens of miles from the bridges, apparently working hard enforcing that open border (or buying Subway).
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Read this and tell me what you think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts . Remember, this is less than decade after ratification.
It is worth noting two things about the Alien and Sedition Acts. 1. A lot of the Founders really didn't like them. Both Madison and Jefferson spoke out against the laws and argued they were unconstitutional for various reasons. 2. They were allowed to expire around the same time Marbury v. Madison was decided so it isn't clear what the early court thought of the laws.
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Canada is part of the "Five Eyes" but enjoy your placebo.
Most (all?) Canadian airports do not use neutron scanners, and have a traditional security layout. There is a lot less hassle.
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I hope they would have some pause over the border zone attached to constricted friendly borders (For example, I don't see much reason to consider Michigan a border zone...). And I do see CPB vehicles dozens of miles from the bridges, apparently working hard enforcing that open border (or buying Subway).
"Michigan" isn't a border zone. You might be referring to what I think is probably an urban myth about the "100 mile Constitution free zone stretching inward from every border", which is not a fact of law (and was in fact explicitly refuted by SCOTUS in the '70s).
"TECS was the first pre-DHS database of Federal government logs of international travel. Several other “systems of records” (a term of art used in the Privacy Act) about travelers, including the Automated Targeting System (ATS) and DHS copies of PNR data (airline reservations) were originally considered part of TECS. The TECS file for an individual traveler typically includes a log of their border crossings (with rec…
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"Michigan" isn't a border zone. You might be referring to what I think is probably an urban myth about the "100 mile Constitution free zone stretching inward from every border", which is not a fact of law (and was in fact explicitly refuted by SCOTUS in the '70s).
Yeah. I can't figure what business they have in St. Ignace though.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vo...
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I think that many of the founders would probably be more upset by our reflexive resort to suppositions about what the founders would think in discussions of public policy than they would be upset (or supportive) of any particular policy that we find controversial.
They would be too appaled at general policy to worry about particulars for a while. "When we decided at least one congressman per 30,000 persons we were imagining, you know, one per 40,000. How can you possibly have a representative democracy like this? Wait, did you start a two-party system as well?"
Yeah, see, this kind of thing is mostly just a way of projecting modern preferences on to the founders. If you look at the founders as a whole, you see very little consensus on general policy.
Hamilton and Jefferson, for example, didn't agree on much (and certainly not on what government of the United States should look like beyond "more like the Constitution than the Articles of Confederation".) To the extent that "the founders" would be shocked by (or even "opposed to" -- they had familiarity with enough extremes in government that they probably wouldn't be shocked by much) features of our present government, they wouldn't be the same features for different founders, and the features some of the founders opposed, others would probably find the most desirable.
Hamilton -- who wanted Presidents and Senators to serve, like members of the Supreme Court, for life, would probably be generally pleased with the way the power of incumbency works out so that short of major scandal, turnover is not all that common (and be displeased with Presidential term limits being written into the Constitution.)
Jefferson, OTOH, might well see things 180-degrees the opposite, given his keen focus on the need for periodic renewal.
> Wait, did you start a two-party system as well?
The two-party system was well in place by Washington's second election, most of the founders were still alive and active in politics -- and, for that matter, provided the leadership for both factions.
So, no, I don't think they'd ask that question, except perhaps as a result of senility. They started a two-party system.
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Seems like a good plan, but if the laptop leaves your sight you don't know how the hardware has been tampered with.
I've heard of companies that consider any electronics thats ever been taken to China to be no longer useable on the company network. Their approach is to consider those devices "disposable". If ou take a laptop to China, buy a replacement when you get home and give the old one away - its never to be connected to the internal network again.
Exactly.
At a previous job (.edu), we discovered a compromised host and shortly thereafter found that it was the laptop of a professor who had just returned from China.