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So is the 4th amendment, and look how much that one is abused. In the end the Constitution really is "just a piece of paper", if not the government, not the judges, not the media, and ultimately not even the people respect it, live by it, and try to protect it as soon as it's endangered by people trying to accumulate too much power. Where are all the street protests?!

I also fail to understand people who so viciously defend the 2nd amendment "because of potential tyranny", but don't try to defend the 1st and 4th amendments with the same aggressiveness, when in fact those amendments are the first line of defense against that encroaching tyranny, and if they fail, it's the first clue the country is slipping into tyranny. Would you rather wait until the very last moment, until people can't take it anymore but to rise up against the government with violence and starting a massacre, all just to remove the government? Or would you try to fix things while you still can do it peacefully, by protecting the 1st and 4th amendments, so it doesn't have to come to "using the 2nd amendment right to defend against the government with guns"?

Or maybe it all comes down to who has more money to raise the awareness about it. NRA is a powerful lobby. ACLU and EFF less so.

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> Where are all the street protests?!

I'm going to interpret that question literally. A key thing you have to keep in mind is that in almost all of the US outside of a few very large cities, the "street" is not a useful public place. People don't gather and interact on streets in the US. They are merely channels for cars. Protesting on the streets would be as useful in most cities in the US as wandering around next to a shipping lane on the open ocean. The only people "there" are driving vehicles at full speed.

That of course raises the question of where Americans do congregate together. Churches are the answer for many, although I believe those are dwindling. Some go to bars. Neither of those is a particularly good venue for dissent.

One unfortunate consequence of the US being so car-centric is that we've destroyed public space, and consequently made public assembly much harder.

You bring up a good point. Maybe the best form of protest these days is not to take to the streets but rather take to the highways. Blocking a interstate highway going into/out of a large city might get more attention.

This would be remarkably effective at getting attention, but I'm not sure how beneficial to a cause it would be.

If the purpose is to disrupt travel or commerce, it would most likely achieve it's goal almost immediately. If the purpose is to bring attention to some other issue and the disruption of the highway system is unrelated (or only tangentially related), then the attention would have to be weighed against the negative impression it creates for the many affected.

I don't have the relevant experience in this area to know under what circumstances protests that negatively impact average people succeed in their goals.

This would be a bad idea, tacically and economically. In a protest, at least in the U.S., you can take measures to protect your identity and not carry any documentation, along with the ability to flee on foot in any direction. You also have no tangible assets on you that the government can seize.

In a vehicle protest you forfeit anonymity (lincense plates), ability to split since road-blocks can easily stop you, and most importantly your vehicle might be impounded.

OH it would work. And it's nearly impossible for you to get into trouble. If all the protesters just drove in a circle such as getting on the highway at a specific ramp and getting off at a specific ramp just to get back on. They would create a massive bottle neck not only for those 2 ramps but for the roads that connect to them. There's no law that says you can't joy ride or that you must avoid congested traffic. A group of only 100 people could very easily find a bottle neck on their local highway and exploit it.

In some places, "Disrupting the flow of traffic" is illegal. For example, driving at 55 mph on the highway is legal. However, driving next to someone, both going 55 mpg, would be illegal, as it disrupts the flow of traffic.

Hence the protest signage posted in the fences of bridge overpasses of divided carriageways (I don't want to involve myself in an east coast/west coast debate on terms)

They do this already in SF.

It's the worst. You're not demonstrating anything. You're just pissing off commuters.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't care if you're protesting to support feeding starving kids, if you actually block traffic on a highway I will vote against your pet issue 100% of the time.

You point out an additional problem with protests: the methods that don't piss people off are ineffective at getting attention, and the methods that get attention just piss people off.

I really appreciate this viewpoint, because I was trying to understand the apparent disconnect between my American and European friends on the suggestion of protesting, and now I do think the function of public space has much to do with it (also overall size of the country).

Squares or city centres are a good place, the Times Square being probably the best.

Most cities in the US don't have squares or city centers. Even ones that do exist are often empty, or inhabited more by the homeless than anyone else.

I believe the culture is improving here, but for a long time, cars were such important symbol of wealth that being a pedestrian gained a small but real social stigma. Large cities that were already thriving and had very affluent people who didn't drive bucked the trend, but in your average city in the US, if you're on a street and not driving, you look poor, mentally unstable, or homeless.

This is so sad and true. I've driven all over the US and there's such a lack of community and culture when compared to other places (Canada and other car cultures are the same though). Lots of town without a center, where everyone knows each other but lives a mile away from each other. It' like individuality taken to an extreme.

We were in Union Square at noon today for exactly the reasons this thread exists.

Look up "501(c)3 governmental control" in a search engine other than Google.

The 4th amendment is strong as it has ever been, and the 1st is much stronger.[1] Are police knocking down your door without a warrant? If not that's the 4th amendment working as intended.

What we have here is a system:

1) Clearly designed to pass a 4th amendment analysis;

2) Enabled to to pass such scrutiny be the unprecedented access Americans give corporations to the details of their private lives.

For what its worth I think the NSA programs are bad ideas, in an administration that has had a lot of them.[2] But not every bad idea is unconstitutional, that is to say not every bad idea can be fixed in court rather than in Congress.

[1] In light of this story, who is still mad at the Supreme Court for holding that Congress couldn't shut down the speech of corporations (like the ACLU?)

[2] Menacing over the Supreme Court justices during the state of the union probably being the worst.

>The 4th amendment is strong as it has ever been […] Are police knocking down your door without a warrant?

Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_v._King

Justice Ginsburg , dissenting.

The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment ’s warrant requirement in drug cases. In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, nevermind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant. I dissent from the Court’s reduction of the Fourth Amendment ’s force.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/09-1272.ZD.html

You're haggling over the definition of "reasonable", probably based on your views of the drug laws. Do you think that in 1800, the framers would have considered it an unreasonable search to enter a home they could hear being burglarized? No. That's why the 4th uses the wiggle word "unreasonable."

I'd bet the reason you think Kentucky is different is that you think drugs are a non crime. I do too, but lots of people do. I grew up in "just say no" suburbia. My mom and lots like her (see the reddit meme: scumbag suburban mom) thinks drugs are the worst thing ever.

In any case, Kentucky is an affirmation of the very simple principle that a warrant is not required. For better or worse, the framers did not give us a 4th amendment that admitted no compromises. They gave us one that asked us to analyze whether a search was "reasonable", asking us to reach compromises.

I hate to use the slippery slope argument but once you allow police to enter a residence with evidence as simple as something they might have heard through the door then there's no need to ever worry over warrants at all. How do you even prove what they heard or if they heard something in the first place?

If the officer witnesses someone break into the residence then sure, but just hearing something? That doesn't pass the smell test to me, regardless of whether it was about drugs or not.

What are the sounds of a house being burglarized anyway? The homeowner could just be moving stuff around in the living room when the cops bust down the door without knocking. That's property damage that the homeowner is likely stuck with and in some cases it ends badly with someone getting shot.

This whole no-knock attitude that's been in place for decades is a sad joke.

> I hate to use the slippery slope argument

Slippery slope reasoning is completely incompatible with 4th amendment interpretation, because the 4th amendment is all about what is "reasonable" (or rather, what is "unreasonable.") It's about compromising the legitimate needs of the police with the legitimate privacy interests of the people. You can't make compromises when your retort to everything becomes: "but if we keep going in this direction..."

Consider that the legal definition of "legitimate" is what's changed.

That's the whole point to 'reasonable' though. It allows the effect of the law to change without changing the law itself.

This has worked against the government as often as it's worked for the government. And on the whole it has been instrumental in driving social change for the better.

The same Supreme Court that voted that equality could exist with "sepatate-but-equal" facilities later voted that separate-but-equal was not reasonable and full integration was required instead.

This drives "strict Constitutionalists" batty but I find it's one of the key benefits of our system of government.

Not sure I follow why this is a valid retort... grandparent comment was not arguing against the flexibility of "reasonable," but rather the direction the interpretation is being taken in. I agree that creating future-proofed laws with wiggle room can be beneficial, but that does not mean we have no need to be vigilant against that same wiggle room being used against us.

The problem with "reasonableness" is that there's no single definition of what's reasonable, so you'll get different courts giving different verdicts in similar cases. Instead, couldn't we define things very strictly, but require them to be revised every n years with the current needs and expectations of society?

Dude, I can't even get my computer program to not crash on malformed MP3 files, and the computer program + computer does exactly what I tell it to do.

There's no way to get a legal code that is both very exact and useful in the face of humans who have to implement it.

And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be.

Sure, there needs to be a low pass filter of some kind to prevent wild oscillations in the law due to delayed feedback, but we're getting oscillations now in the form of party swapping every 4-8 years. There must be some way to make the law less like a moving average filter and more like an adaptive Kalman filter so it can react quickly when necessary without throwing out the entire USC every election (though I have, in the past, proposed rewriting the entire body of laws from scratch once per generation, with a generational opt-in-based transition from the old set to the new set). Courts should be a last measure, IMO, due to the insane costs of facing one, rather than an integral process of deciding what the law actually is.

I'd like to know what the cops are doing on your curtilage in the first place? Put up an 8ft fence!

An interpretation of the word "reasonable" is literally all discussions of the 4th Amendment have ever come down to, you can't pretend like someone with a narrower scope or "reasonableness" is just haggling over semantics and nitpicking tiny details.

My point is that he's arguing about precisely where the line should be drawn, not offering an example of the police engaging in clearly unreasonable conduct. You can't claim that the 4th amendment has fallen by the wayside just because you disagree about precisely where the courts have drawn the lines in edge cases. You need some stronger evidence than that.

I think, looking at the facts of Kentucky vs. King, that's pretty clearly a concise example of the police engaging in unreasonable conduct.

Actually, I'm not so sure, after reading this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_...

Of course, it all comes down to how reasonable you think our current criminal law policies are.

He's haggling over your objectively incorrect claim that the police are not knocking down doors without warrants. They clearly are.

Whether these cases fits the reasonability test is another matter.

>You're haggling over the definition of "reasonable", probably based on your views of the drug laws.

I'm not haggling over anything. You asked "Are police knocking down your door without a warrant?" I provided the answer, additionally evidencing that the debate over the 4th amendment is not as static as you seemed to be implying.

>Do you think that in 1800, the framers would have considered it an unreasonable search to enter a home they could hear being burglarized? No.

Do you think that in 1800 the framers would have considered hearing the sound of a flushing toilet or people moving to be exigent circumstances?

>I'd bet the reason you think Kentucky is different is that you think drugs are a non crime.

I am not somebody who obsesses over drug law[1]. My reasons for disagreeing with the ruling are better expressed by Ginsburg which is why I provided the link to her dissent, which I recommend you read.

[1] although it's pretty clear that many current drug laws in the US are broken and highly destructive to society. Personally I don't and have never used any illegal drugs so I have no 'skin in the game' so to speak and fear of getting (legitimately) busted by the police over drugs is not a concern I have. So if you are picturing some pothead who spends all day reading the High Times and proselytising about the benefits of weed that isn't me

"anything but google" this: "indiana no knock search without warrant"

I'm serious about "anything but google" "anything but google" this too if you don't believe me: "google search providing different results to different people"

> Are police knocking down your door without a warrant? If not that's the 4th amendment working as intended.

Damn right they are. Exigent circumstances. [1]

Police routinely coerce people into consenting to searches during traffic stops when there is no RAS. If there's a K9 unit around it's even easier; look at how often they just happen to trigger when there's no contraband at all [2]. Does a 56% false positive rate sound reasonable?

And, once they've gained access they've got wide leeway to seize whatever they want in the name of the war on drugs. At that point the owner must pay a bond to contest the seizure, and then has the burden of proving that they were not party to the crime. Note that no warrant is required for property seizure, merely probable cause [3].

[1] http://themoderatevoice.com/110361/supreme-court-expands-war... [2] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/06/false-positives-police... [3] BJA publication NCJ-137994 – CIVIL FORFEITURE FOR THE NON-LAWYER

Yes, because the house is guilty until proven innocent!

Where are all the street protests?!

The people who went to the streets protesting in 2011 got arrested. You're looking at the maturation of a tyrannical, authoritarian neoliberal regime.

There were groups who have protested who had no serious arrests to report. There were some groups that had a heavy amount of arrests. If one were to look at all the groups protesting recently with an objective eye I'm sure examples can be found that show why one group had such results.

Could you clarify that?

I wish I could but it would likely turn into an argument over partisan politics and name-calling. I'd rather not to do that.

What I would suggest is look into major political protests over the past few years and draw your own conclusions from their outcomes.

If I were to bet on the most significant predictor of arrests during a protest, my money would be on size. The fewer people present in a protest, the more likely that it will be left alone and no arrests will be made. The more people there are, the more likely that those in charge will try to "contain it" through actions that lead to altercations and arrests. I'd say that it's pretty much impossible to have a Tiananmen Square size protest in the US (or any other country with sufficiently advanced surveillance systems for that matter)

That may be in the case in some situations, but I can recall several major, i.e. large, protests that resulted in very few arrests or problems with the police. In fact, some of them were a quite pleasant crowd if the reports were to be believed.

Sadly, you just generally don't hear much of them in the news.

> tyrannical, authoritarian neoliberal

One of those adjectives has an almost oposite meaning to the other two.

Please, don't just throw "bad" words in a setence if you are trying to make a point. Understand what you are saying, and if you don't completely grasp the meaning of a word, either look it up, or not use it.

The way you wrote it, you sound like a South America neofacist (and yes, I just made up a label). And I'm quite sure you are not proposing creating a facist government hidden behind populist policiy, thus you should not speack like one.

It only sounds contradictory. In actual fact, neoliberal regimes everywhere have been "libertarian" only in their business laws, and authoritarian in nearly everything else. The US is becoming rather like Pinochet's Chile: money can do what it wants, everyone else has orders to follow.

I don't disagree with you on the importance of the 1st and 4th amendments.

I think the ACLU and EFF will indeed become stronger. I don't know of any 2nd amendment supporters who are also not strong 1st and 4th supporters, the issue comes down to how their voice is heard. Also I don't know any of them who who wouldn't rather change things peacefully, it is a much better solution.

> I don't know of any 2nd amendment supporters who are also not strong 1st and 4th supporters

Are you sure? For instance, on cultural grounds, I'd guess that there are plenty of 2nd amendment supporters who would be happy to ban flag-burning...

Unfortunately, there are significant amounts of people on both sides of any debate, much less this one, with either blinders on or have selective vision.

As a strict constructionist, I affirm the right of anyone to burn any flag, anyone to "protest" at a funeral, as well as PRISM being unconstitutional. Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy. Them's my blinders!

Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy.

So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right? If that's what you mean, then how the heck does a "strict constructionist" get that to jibe with the 9th Amendment?

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people

Yeah, that's the funny thing about the Ninth. It pretty much says, you shall not construe the other amendments strictly.

Kinda puts strict constructionists in a bind -- which was clearly its purpose.

Not really; strict constitutionalists can still say that the government should never infringe on amendments 1...8,10, and if it can intrude even less (ie. add more rights) then that's great. In fact, I think that was the whole point of writing the constitution that way.

>So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right?

This is why Madison thought the Bill of Rights was a mistake. The rest of the document was written as a list of delineated powers - "this is what the federal government can do". That's much, much more restrictive than "this is what the federal government can't do". He thought the BoR would lead people into thinking the federal government is allowed to do anything it isn't prohibited from doing.

I think history has born him out, too. I'd much rather see courts asking the question "is this on the list of things the federal government can do?" rather than "does it pass muster on 2A or 4A grounds?" Of course if that were the case 2/3 the federal government would go away. Not a bad thing, IMO.

I'd guess there are plenty of 2nd amendment supporters, on cultural grounds, would have no problem with flag-burning. They may not like it and publicly disagree with it, but they wouldn't stop it.

What's your point?

I'd guess that there are plenty of 2nd amendment supporters who would be happy to ban flag-burning...

There are indeed, and I know more than a few of them. They post on the same gun forums I do. What you see among the "pro gun" crowd is a pretty clearly ideological divide between Libertarians and traditional Conservatives. The Libertarians take the 1A, 4A, 5A, etc. just as seriously as the 2A, whereas the more traditional Conservatives tend - in my experience - to be a bit more narrowly focused. It's unfortunate, but real.

That said, I take it as encouraging that I feel like I'm seeing more libertarian thought and less of the "yee-haw, let's kill that fag" kind of stuff on one of the NC centric gun forums I post on. And lots of people take a fairly moderate approach, offering up strong defenses of the 2A, without doing the full-on "captain redneck" thing.

On a semi-related note... it's kinda sad how prevalent stereotyping - and making broad assumptions based on those stereotypes - is. For example, many people seem to assume that most active 2A advocates are, indeed, "redneck" types: from the South, with CSA flag stickers on their trucks, a Bible in their hip pocket, and a mouthful of chewing tobacco. But, while those people exist, most of the pro gun folks I know are actually well educated, level-headed, reasonable and rational.

> many people seem to assume that most active 2A advocates

What's a 2A advocate? I don't think there's any substantial opposition to the 2nd amendment itself. The main discussion surrounding 2A tends to come up any time any sort of restrictions surrounding gun control are raised. Then the crowd of people who view any sort of gun control (background checks!!) as an attack on the 2nd amendment start coming out of the woodwork.

I believe that's the crowd that gets stereotyped and I don't believe they're representative of the majority of gun owners.

Well, it is an attack to restrict firearms ownership. Remember the original purpose of the 2ed was to arm the citizenry against tyrrany. So if government can restrict your access or avaiability of firearms (especially those said government actively uses in its military) they are restricting your ability to arm yourselves against them.

It doesn't hurt that the framers didn't conceptualize nuclear weapons or ICBMs, though. Back in 1800, it was perfectly reasonable to expect if the US military could have a mortar, a citizen could. Though I'm more of the opinion if you wouldn't trust your neighbor with some destructive tool than you shouldn't trust the US military with it.

Most of your stereotyped gun owners do not have a categorical opposition to gun control laws. For example, most are not particularly upset with the ban on new machine guns that has been in place for many years. Rather most of the opposition that you see is against pointless laws that target particular cosmetic features of some guns ("assault weapon" laws) or actually overreaching gun laws that pop up in particular cities in particular states.

There is little focus on the national laws that are already in place, laws that particular states have or are trying to have are what get the attention of the gun lobbyists.

Can you explain to me why it makes sense to ban machine guns? If I take a rifle that can shoot as rapidly as I can pull the trigger, and modify it to waste bullets as fast as possible, is it in any significant way more dangerous? Why is the second banned solely based on firing mechanism?

> Can you explain to me why it makes sense to ban machine guns?

No.

I don't think there's any substantial opposition to the 2nd amendment itself.

Your experiences may differ from mine, but when I get into debates about gun-control / 2A issues, I find it to be very commonplace for people to insist that the 2A is useless, outdated, and state that it should be repealed. Believe it or not, there is a not-insignificant number of people out there who are for total civilian disarmament.

And then there are the bulk of people who seem to be more or less ambivalent, or apathetic about it all. They aren't out to attack the 2A, but they aren't interested in going to any great length to fight for it either.

What's a 2A advocate?

In my book, somebody who identifies "gun rights" as an issue of specific importance to them, and takes some specific action: donating to the NRA/GOA/2AF/JPFO/etc., voting, campaigning, running for office, or something of that nature, with an intent to defend gun rights.

I don't think this is true. There are many on the right who detest the ACLU as liberals trying to undermine the country.

No doubt. That reminds me of the old joke "If you get stuff in the mail from the ACLU and the NRA, you're probably a libertarian".

As somebody who is an NRA member and who has donated to the ACLU, that rings true to me. :-)

Many as in raw # or as in percentage? To be honest I haven't met many of those, all the ones I know are more libertarians then conservatives so they don't take strong issue with the ACLU or EFF.

I just did some searching to try to find what percentage of the Republican Party identifies as libertarian as opposed to conservative, and I didn't have much luck. But, considering the party's platforms on gay marriage and immigration, I think the percentage of libertarians is small.

Threatening to take up arms is a way to pressure for political concessions as an end-run around representative democracy, when you aren't getting what you want (for example, when the populace elects the 'wrong' President).

I would suppose it's possible for the populace to threaten to take up arms when the representative democracy isn't so representative anymore. An opposing viewpoint doesn't always fit so cleanly within a partisan view.

You have the order wrong. Voting is an end run around war. An election is a civilized war, meant to get the same outcome as war without bloodshed.

Where are all the street protests?!

Over the digital privacy / 4A issue specifically? I don't know. But protests in general are still quite alive, here in North Carolina.[1][2][3]

[1]: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/05/13/2890544/nc-moral-mond...

[2]: http://www.wral.com/-mega-moral-monday-protests-heat-up-outs...

[3]: http://www.thenation.com/article/174679/protesters-shake-nor...

It takes awhile for a protest movement to actually mobilize, particularly if you're trying to bring in more than the professional protest group everyone ignores without a second thought.

We won't know for a month or two whether this has legs or not.

>> I also fail to understand people who so viciously defend the 2nd amendment

The definition of "viciously" at: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/viciously

"Having the nature of vice; evil, immoral, or depraved."

What was vicious about newbie12's comment which was a direct quote from an American President?

http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fea...

He was clearly using sense 6, meaning "forcefully"

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