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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Their comparison to airport security is apt. The US considers airports “constitution free zones”, and apparently they think the same of phones now too.

Cutting through the excuses, this is just another step in converting the US from a democracy to a fascist dictatorship.

Want to write software?

Papers please.

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Yeah, it's like we've given up. Between third-party doctrine, border enforcement being excluded from 4th amendment protections, and 100-mile zones around international airports being considered "the border", it's like there's no place left where the constitution applies. How did we forget why we made these rules in the first place? It's not like the risks are smaller today than they were 250 years ago...

I'm not sure it's so much that we forgot why we made them, it's that we forgot we need to maintain and enforce them and they won't somehow automatically prevent oppression just by being written down on a piece of paper in the national archives.

  The US considers airports “constitution free zones”

And the rest of the country as well now. The highest authority is threatening municipalities with military takeover.

Corporations are reading the room and pulling out any hostile tactic they've kept in their back pocket waiting for an occasion like this.

This is only the beginning with digital IDs. It's absolutely going to get worse and all of human history is available as evidence to what occurs with unchecked power.

USA was a democratic country just less than a year ago. Are there constitutional ways to remove a bad actor or a traitor from the power?

It looks like pattern there is that a some powerful guy or company just removes rights and freedoms we had by small pieces. Those small pieces are not worth to fight for, until frog is boiled alive.

Narrowly filtering the erosion of civil liberties through partisanship misses the larger picture. Both goal posts consistently trample civil rights. The purported motives vary, as do the demonized classes. Regardless of how valid those motives may be, the results consistently erode civil liberties.

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