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Comment by typenil | Hacker News Reader

> U.S. courts have held that constitutional protections against unreasonable searches do not apply to non-citizens overseas.

In effect it's harder and harder to find cases where the 4th amendment protections apply to US citizens, either.

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I never understood this. If the freedoms outlined in the constitution are universal and inalienable, shouldn't the US also apply them, well, universally?

Like do you believe in them or not?

The Constitution is based on inalienable rights (speech, worship, privacy, etc.), but it's not a list of inalienable rights as such. There's nothing inalienable about presidential succession, bicameral legislatures, or the electoral college, for instance.

The purpose of the US was to protect these rights for their own citizens / residents.

Protecting those rights for the entire world is a bit out-of-scope.

There's a difference between preventing american companies from violating these rights abroad, and actively protecting those rights everywhere in the world. i.e. one is a lot easier to enforce, since the US gov has jurisdiction over US companies.

The constitution applies to the US government in how it interacts with all people. Only where necessary is there an 'if citizen' clause.

Right, but generally the US government is not interacting with all people, it's interacting with Americans.

Very late response but wanted to clarify, I'm not saying it's the duty of the US government to actively protect the rights of the entire population of the world. That's actually quite a radical perspective (I always found the 'bring them freedom' argument for invading Iraq quite an interesting position for conservatives to take).

But what I instead mean is that if the US government interacts with non-citizens outside of its own borders (as it often does), shouldn't it respect the the 'inalienable' rights 'all men' have? That would preclude them from engaging in torture, detention of non-combatants without trial, mass surveillance of foreigners, etc.

What I mean is that it shouldn't matter if a person is a US citizen or not; if the US government is interacting with people, it should respect the rights it believes all people to intrinsically have. Again, that is different than proactively 'bringing' people those freedoms.

It's not a contradiction to say that you have inalienable rights and that it is not the duty of the US government to protect them.

But it is the duty of the US government to not violate them. It’s hypocritical to do otherwise.

Not wrong, but the constitution is meant to be a limit on the US government. They don't have to protect them from others, but surely it shouldn't be willfully trampling those rights through its own conduct either.

So that was never true until after the 14th amendment passed and only later on when it was interpreted by the Supreme Court.

The entire US constitution only applied to the US Federal Government, until the 14th amendment expanded it to state governments and all publicly chartered entities and all entities that accept direct material support from publicly chartered entities which is only noticeable when they interact with the people.

So that would have been over 100 years ago so you might think the point is moot. The reality is that the point is not resolved, never will be completely resolved, and has had less time to be resolved than people may notice.

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