Category: Fourth Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights privacy too much government

What Does the FBI Do?

FBI, surveillance, censorship, religion, church

“The FBI began surveilling a Catholic priest in 2023,” wrote James Lynch last week, “after the clergyman refused to divulge details about a recently arrested parishioner who was converting to Catholicism and seeking spiritual guidance.”

The agency’s Richmond Field Office “tracked the priest’s movements and coordinated with several other FBI offices and a foreign law enforcement agency to gather intelligence on the clergyman and his priestly organization,” Lynch summarizes.

This is all based on a new House Judiciary Committee report entitled “How the Biden-​Wray FBI Manufactured a False Narrative of Catholic Americans as Violent Extremists.” *

“The FBI attempted to violate the priest-​penitent privilege,” the report continues, “on the faulty reasoning that the Richmond subject under investigation seeking spiritual guidance had not been baptized or completed catechism.”

You may be asking yourself, is the FBI out of its mind?

Certainly, out of this hemisphere. Consider that FBI agents have also extended their reach way beyond U.S. borders to focus on wrongthink elsewhere.

According to investigative journalist David Ágape, “the FBI has helped Brazil censor its citizens,” working with the Soros’ Open Society Foundation to promote censorship in Brazil and a secret judicial police force targeting “people deemed to be spreading false information.”

Was the FBI nurturing censorship in foreign lands to later re-​import them here?

From its beginning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had trouble staying within constitutional limits. I guess we should not be shocked that it doesn’t obey jurisdictional limits, either. 

Hopefully, Director Kash Patel will rein in the agency. It won’t be easy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* According to the committee, “The report reveals that contrary to testimony from former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, the 2023 Richmond memorandum that derisively labeled traditional Catholics as ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ was not an isolated incident. Under the new leadership of Director Kash Patel, the FBI has cooperated considerably with the Committee’s subpoena, and has produced over 1,300 pages of additional documents related to the Richmond memorandum that the Biden-​Wray FBI did not disclose.”
Note: You can also mouse-​over the asterisk in the main text to see the footnote.

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crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights

Precogs in the Machine

pre-crime, Philip K. Dick, police, justice

Whether “predictive policing” is good or bad depends on what it means.

If it means using crime patterns to determine which neighborhoods should get more police patrols, that’s reasonable enough. 

But what if it means assuming that certain individuals may commit a crime if left to themselves? And then “preventatively” harassing them?

The Institute for Justice has just won an important victory against predictive policing as practiced by the sheriff’s office of Pasco County, Florida.

The office’s idea was to predict which residents were most likely to commit future crimes. Algorithms — or what IJ attorney Rob Johnson calls a “glorified Excel sheet” — were supposed to perform a function comparable to that of “precogs,” the psychics in the movie Minority Report, who envision future crimes.

To counter the precrime, the sheriff’s office made frequent visits to the homes and haunts of pre-​guilty individuals to interrogate them and their families, “sometimes multiple times a week.” Families who objected would get slapped with citations for bogus code violations.

All that’s over with now, we hope. 

In response to IJ’s litigation, the sheriff’s office has admitted violating the due process rights and Fourth Amendment rights of the people they harassed, and it has dropped the program.

Scott Bullock observes that if the policy of harassing people based solely on guesses about what they or associates “might” do had been allowed to stand, such a program could easily have spread to other locales. 

This is much less likely now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights media and media people property rights

The Realism of ‘Rebel Ridge’

Rebel Ridge, Civil Asset Forfeiture, law, police, abuse, corruption

Some viewers of the popular Netflix film Rebel Ridge say that it’s unrealistic. But a certain crucial assumption of the story is very realistic indeed.

The movie assumes that some cops are bad cops. More specifically, it assumes that bad cops often have arbitrary legal authority to do bad things. In the movie, what gets the ball rolling is the arbitrary authority conferred by America’s civil forfeiture laws.

These laws permit officers to confiscate cash on your person if they merely have a suspicion, or pretend to, that the cash is ill-​gotten. They needn’t have evidence that it’s drug money or bank-​robbery proceeds. 

The suspicion is enough.

And even if you can show that the money was acquired by your own hard work and withdrawn from your bank account in pursuit of a legitimate end — buying a truck, bailing a cousin out of jail (the reason that the protagonist carries cash in Rebel Ridge) — that’s typically not the end of it. It’s rare that the law-​empowered thugs who violated your property rights just say “Oops!” and hand your property right back.

J. Justin Wilson of the Institute for Justice observes another realistic portrayal of injustice in the movie, “over-​detaining defendants to keep them quiet.” In real life, though, such over-​detention may have as much to do with bureaucratic sloth as with malice directed toward a particular prisoner.

The solution, says Wilson, is not revenge, but the kinds of legal reform IJ fights for. The movie, on the other hand, leaned more on revenge.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights judiciary property rights

Against Government Invasion

property, rights, invasion, civil rights

Unconstitutional searches of private property by a renegade Tennessee government agency may be coming to an end.

Unanimously upholding an earlier decision, a Tennessee Court of Appeals has ruled that no, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency employees have no right to ignore No Trespassing signs on private land — not even to enter it, let alone install cameras there in search of a crime.

The court ruled in a case brought by the Institute for Justice on behalf of Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth.

“TWRA claimed unfettered power to put on full camouflage, invade people’s land, roam around as it pleases, take photos, record videos, sift through ponds, spy on people … all without consent, a warrant, or any meaningful limits on their power,” says IJ attorney Joshua Windham.

“This decision confirms that granting state officials unfettered power to invade private land is anathema to Tennesseans’ most basic constitutional rights.”

The ruling cites the observation of legal scholar John Orth that “‘general warrants’ and ‘writs of assistance,’ authorizing officers to search anyone, anytime, for evidence of any crime” were among the abuses leading to adoption of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibiting “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

“The various state constitutions adopted after the Revolution almost invariably forbade the practices,” Orth notes.

According to the new ruling, Tennessee’s constitution does too. But we may not be quite done. The TWRA can appeal, which means that the case may end up in the Tennessee Supreme Court.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights general freedom privacy

GOP Fails on FISA

FISA, surveillance, privacy

“The House appears ready to reauthorize FISA 702 — which has been abused literally hundreds of thousands of times to spy on Americans without a warrant — without requiring the government to get a warrant,” tweeted Sen. Mike Lee (R – Utah) on X last weekend.

“The U.S. government uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Americans without a warrant,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R – Ky.) seconded, also on X. “This week, the House will vote to require the Feds to get a warrant to snoop on Americans. Sadly this vote is likely to fail. I will demand a recorded vote & post results.”

The “sadly” indicates that the Republicans in Congress are split, despite years of complaining about how the FISA courts treated Trump … and us. (A common complaint has been that the courts almost never say No to a FISA request from the Deep State.) 

The Electronic Freedom Foundation explains the nitty-​gritty of Section 702: “As the law is written, the intelligence community cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications.”

So while de jure the Deep State is disallowed from peering into our digital data, de facto our paid government snoops do it all the time. 

Rep. Massie seeks to add a warrant process to FISA requests, but it looks like his amendment will fail. In that case, Massie urges Republicans not to re-​authorize the whole FISA program.

But that effort will probably fail, too.

Our representatives are just not that into the Fourth Amendment.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fourth Amendment rights Update

Update: The FBI Stole

Government agencies that “fight crime” too often engage in criminal behavior to do so. 

In June of 2021, Common Sense with Paul Jacob reported on an FBI operation that raided safe deposit boxes.

In March, the federal government conducted a raid of a safe deposit box company called U.S. Privacy Vaults. The government accuses the company of abetting drug dealers.

The government accuses the box renters of … nothing. But DOJ is trying to use civil forfeiture laws to retain most of what it seized during the raid: some $85 million in cash and valuables.

In August of 2022 Paul returned to the case, wondering whether FBI agents would themselves see justice:

The plot’s been foiled, it appears, but will the culprits within the FBI be prosecuted?

Seems unlikely.

Truth is, the culture at the FBI has never been good. Barring defunding (which would be politically difficult) perhaps FBI agents should be restricted to just investigation, stripped of their weaponry, forced to rely on state and local lawmen — and perhaps the U.S. Marshals — to make any searches and arrests at all. 

In October, the courts failed to back up the Constitution regarding searches and seizures in this case.

Now, according to The Epoch Times, a federal court has indeed found cause to reprimand the FBI and the lawyers that defended the agents who had — without cause — searched all of the safety deposit boxes: 

“We note that it is particularly troubling that the government has failed to provide a limiting principle to how far a hypothetical ‘inventory search’ conducted pursuant to customized instructions can go,” Judge Smith said.

Many of the plaintiffs have already had their belongings returned by the FBI but pressed forward with the case for an opinion in their favor.

The ruling remanded the case back to U.S. District Judge Robert Klausner, who previously dismissed the case, for a ruling that directs the FBI to destroy records the bureau collected on the box renters who are members of the class-​action case.

The opinion “draws a line in the sand, to ensure something like this never happens again,” Rob Johnson, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, which was representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “If this had come out the other way, the government could have exported this raid as a model across the country. Now, the government is on notice its actions violated the Fourth Amendment.”

It took several years, but apparently justice in this case is finally approaching, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations has been reminded that its powers are limited. By our rights.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

The Citizen Threat

surveillance, government

“The Republicans,” said Tucker Carlson — speaking of elected Republicans — “who really do hate their own voters in a way that’s pathological, are just re-​upping the spy laws to allow the Biden Administration to spy on their voters.”

Mr. Carlson is not wrong, at least about Republican leaders aiding Democrats in spying on conservatives and others who sometimes vote GOP.

Yes, the federal government’s surveillance and criminal “justice” apparatus has been directed by Democrats — the Biden Administration specifically, and whoever runs that — to target, as The Enemy, conservatives and others associated with (or merely adjacent to) the Republican Party.

This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Democratic thought leaders pushed this new anti-​terrorism paradigm from the first moments of the Biden Administration, in public. 

Or at least on MSNBC, where John Brennan clearly reconceived opposition to his Democratic Party as a movement looking “very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.” 

“Even libertarians,” he said, constituted “an insidious threat” to, not the Democratic Party, but “our Democracy.”

This perspectival shift, of seeing policy and political opposition as “insurgency,” is key to the new anti-​democratic mindset.

And very real. It could end our small‑r republican experiment.

Which brings us back to Republican politicians and their willingness to let Democrats institute a permanent pogrom against all who oppose Democrats’ big government programs.

Why do this? Out of hatred? Disdain? Fear?

Let’s not ignore the age-​old impulse of politicians to squelch the speech of opponents. The longer in office, the more these careerists tend to view their own constituents as threats. After all, anyone might freely offer a complaint that emboldens or comforts the opposition. This is a bipartisan principle.

Better an enforced silence about the dictates of Washington, sadly, if you are a Washingtonian delivering dictates.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Fifth Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights national politics & policies

Time to Slap Grabby Hands

Civil Asset Forfeiture, theft, law enforcement, crime

Is the House of Representatives readying itself to do something to limit civil asset forfeiture initiated by federal agencies?

The legislation has emerged from the Judiciary Committee, so there is hope.

The Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR) would impose substantial limits on federal civil asset forfeiture — on the power of officers to grab someone’s cash or other belongings on the unsupported suspicion that it was involved in a crime.

Currently, this power to steal based on zero evidence and zero due process remains untrammeled. And forfeited funds thus grabbed can then be spent by the agencies that did the asset-grabbing. 

Victims must spend years in the courts to get their stuff back, if they ever do.

FAIR would require “clear and convincing evidence” of wrongdoing. It would also prohibit law-​enforcement agencies from being able to spend forfeited funds, eliminating a perverse incentive to rob people naïve enough to be carrying “too much” cash for whatever reason.

At National Review Online, Jill Jacobson says that the bill is “a step in the right direction” but doesn’t go far enough. Arguing on the premise of innocent until proven guilty, she insists “there is no reason why federal law enforcement should be seizing personal property from everyday citizens on tenuous suspicion.” 

Or even non-​tenuous suspicion, I would add, for not everyone strongly suspected of doing wrong can be proven to have done wrong. And citizens caught on the wrong end of a government official’s steely gaze should not be regarded as a public resource. 

The reform isn’t finished until civil asset forfeiture is abolished altogether.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Can They Do That?

Zion, Illinois, apartment, inspection, civil liberty

Residential tenants in Zion — and their landlords — can breathe a sigh of relief.

The Zion, Illinois, government can no longer send officials to barge into rented homes at will to conduct obnoxious inspections.

The inspection regime was instituted in 2015 by a mayor who blamed an excess of renters for the town’s financial troubles. The motive for the searches, then, may have been to make it more uncomfortable to rent in Zion. Seriously. As dumb and thuggish as that.

Robert and Dorice Pierce and their landlord were among the victims of this regime.

When an inspector showed up at the Pierces’ door, they told him to get a warrant. But judges don’t generally accept “important to harass tenants” as a reason for issuing warrants. In any case, any respect for constitutional constraints was incompatible with the very nature of these intrusive practices.

So Zion’s response was to threaten the landlord, Josefina Lozano, with daily and mounting fines until she compelled the Pierces to capitulate. That’s when the trio turned to the Institute for Justice and decided to go to court.

This was familiar territory for IJ, which in the 1990s had successfully fought a similar inspection regime in Park Forest, Illinois.

And now, after three years of judicial proceedings, IJ and its clients have secured a consent decree prohibiting the warrantless inspections and prohibiting the fines.

But those who enacted this outrageous regime deserve a reprimand more stern than merely a loss in court. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability Fourth Amendment rights international affairs media and media people

Freedom Isn’t the Danger

Justin Trudeau, freedom, authoritarianism

After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.

Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.” 

I’m going to quote an anarchist. 

For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you have a taste for freedom.

Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-​tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”

Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-​protest, anti-​free-​speech, anti-​due-​process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”

But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order. 

It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.

Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.

“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*

When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

freedom,order, morn

* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-​pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-​type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.

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