The Founding Fathers Would Have Protected Your Smartphone

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Photo Credit: Politico Privacy is a core American value. For 235 years, the Fourth Amendment has protected us from unwarranted searches of our personal belongings. All the while, technology has been changing where and how we keep those belongings. On April 29, the Supreme Court held oral arguments in two cases, Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie. At question is whether the police can search the contents of a phone without a warrant during an arrest. At stake is whether technological advancements have rendered one of our most treasured civil liberties obsolete.

Today, many Americans keep their entire lives on their phones: family photos, emails, calendar appointments, Internet searches and even location history. Considered separately, each of these categories can reveal very private information. Taken together, they can present a pretty good picture of who you are, what you do, where you go, what you read and what you write. What protection does the Constitution offer them from suspicionless search by the government?

The Fourth Amendment grants to the people the right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” It did not find its way into the Constitution by accident. It was, rather, a specific response to a principal grievance of colonial Americans under British rule — namely, the use of the “general warrant” whereby the crown gave officials almost unfettered authority to search colonial homes, rifle through papers and scour personal belongings.

As the Constitutional Accountability Center explains in its friend-of-the-court brief in Riley and Wurie, “Stated simply, the Framers wanted to strip the government of the arbitrary power to rifle through a person’s belongings in the hope of finding something incriminating.”

There can be little doubt that the modern smartphone is today’s equivalent of our Founders’ “papers and effects.”

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U.S. Marine ‘Left Behind’ in Mexico (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP / U-T San Diego, Alejandro TamayoMarines learn in boot camp that you always take care of a buddy, and you “never leave a Marine behind.” This is something a commander in chief who never wore his country’s colors apparently does not understand, so Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi goes on trial Wednesday in Mexico, subjected to the “justice” he can expect in a Tijuana courtroom.

Sgt. Tahmooressi, a veteran of three combat tours of duty in Afghanistan, has been in a Mexican prison since March 31 because he made a wrong turn near the border south of San Diego. He became confused in unfamiliar traffic and turned into a lane that forced him to enter a Mexican border checkpoint with no way to turn back. He told border agents that he was trying to make a U-turn and had no intention of entering Mexico. He told them that he had three legally owned weapons with him, stowed with the personal items packed in his pickup truck. He was looking for a place to live in San Diego, having just moved from Florida.

Mexican police arrested him and threw him into a cell with a dozen thugs in a jail 40 miles from Tijuana. He faces the prospect of sweating for the next two decades behind bars.

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Is America Starting To Target Thought Crime?

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller Last week, Michelle Obama made headlines when she exhorted graduating high schoolers in a commencement address to monitor their families for politically incorrect thoughts and behaviors.

To one journalist, this was more than an off-hand comment made by the first lady. In the opinion of Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times and the author of “Police State USA,” Michelle Obama’s remark reflects a growing trend in America to target and attack individuals for committing “thought crime.”

“Michelle Obama’s push for kids around the nation to monitor their family members for perceived racist comments is just another way the government seeks to inject itself into an area it doesn’t really belong — the American home,” Chumley told The Daily Caller Monday.

“Having the first lady wag her finger at us and send America’s youth on some sort of quest to scour the homes and backyards of our nation’s families for any mention of a racist joke, slur or slight is nanny-governance run amok — something that belongs in a George Orwell novel, not the White House, Chumley said.”

Chumley sees a troubling growth of America’s most powerful political figures now singling out private individuals for their beliefs, and using government agencies and public denunciations to intimidate opponents into silence.

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The Anti-Science Left Keeps On Keeping On

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Photo Credit: RedStateThe left often calls conservatives “anti-science.” This is simply a demonstration of the psychological phenomenon of transference when a person attributes their own feelings to another. A great example of this, also from the left, is their insistence on accusing their opponents of racism while being utterly racist themselves. It is the left that does not believe life begins at conception. The left continually harangues against GMO crops which prevent massive starvation. The left seems to think that electric cars are environmentally sound despite the fact that electricity has to be generated and the batteries used in these cars creates toxic by products. The left still buys into Rachel Carlson’s fradulent “Silent Spring” even though their campaign against pesticides has killed millions of people via malaria.

There is perhaps no subject shows the left’s aversion to science than the continual public presence of Paul Ehrlich, left wing professor and unrepentant crank.

Ehrlich burst into the public consciousness in 1968 with the Population Bomb, a book that quickly became the left’s equivalent of the Apocalypse of Saint John. The book is little more than a crudely worked modernization of the theories of Thomas Malthus. For instance:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..

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The Land Of The Brave And The Free Is Now The Land Of The Corrupt And The Serf

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Photo Credit: shoebatA week after the re-election of Barrack Obama I wrote a column entitled Weeping for our Nation. Here is my follow-up.

Only eighteen months into the second term of President Obama’s presidency and its termination is required for America to survive. The endless scandals, lies, cover-ups, incompetence and an attitude of carelessness by the man the people of America foolishly re-elected is breathtaking by any standard of any president who has served this nation. If a Republican acted like this, he would have been shown the door within the first two years of a first term. The excuses and lies that he is “madder than hell” and he is “going to get to the bottom of it,” have worn out with anyone who is even slightly informed about politics. These platitudes are an insult to even the most ill-informed member of the public.

The president has played 170 rounds of golf so far (George Bush only played 24 in 8 years), which takes about five to six hours to play and probably longer for the president as his golf stroke is as lousy as his presidency. In a basic calculation this means the president has spent the equivalent of 128 (eight hours) workdays out of 1946 days the president has “served” the people of America so far. This does not include the vacations in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard, nor the hundreds of fundraisers, or the celebrity parties the President likes to have while hanging out with his good friends like George Cooney, Jay Z and others who are super “cool”. I understand the president does not come into his Oval office until around 10 a.m. Not sure if he actually does any work when he gets to the office. Obama promised to fix the VA but he was so interested in the issue, he rarely met with Shinseki, his VA secretary, which means there was no focus on fixing the VA at all. On the night of the Benghazi attacks, no one knows where the president was. I do not know for sure but I bet he had an early night and was making whoopee with Michelle before his early flight the next day to Las Vegas for his fundraiser.

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Primary Season 2014: Grassroots America is Here to Stay

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Photo Credit: APBy Matt Kibbe.

Politics is a lagging indicator of real social change. To understand what is really going on, you have to take a step back to see the trend line.

So I’m not that surprised that so many political reporters got last night’s results so wrong. Too many analysts don’t understand what’s really happening; others aren’t even willing to try, settling for the easy and simplistic “Establishment Wins, Tea Party Loses” narrative instead. But that narrative misses what actually happened.

I would like to win every political battle we engage in, even as we try to topple well-funded establishment Goliaths. We always fight to win, but we won’t win them all.

We saw some real wins for the freedom movement last night. In Georgia’s 11th District, Barry Loudermilk came in first in his primary with 39 percent of the vote, and is headed to the July 22 runoff. Loudermilk is a true champion of limited government, and will advocate for freedom in health care and education in Congress. Also, Dr. Bob Johnson made his way to the July runoff in his primary in Georgia’s 1st District.

In addition to expanding the Freedom Caucus, we also saw the return of some old favorites from our previous electoral battles.

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsHow Conservatives Can Defeat the Media

By J.R. Dunn.

One unavoidable truth that must be faced regarding the media and 2014 is this: the American media has the conservatives’ number. They know exactly where the blind spots are, which are the most sensitive points, and how to do the most damage. And they have absolutely no compunction about taking advantage of it.

The relationship between conservatives and the media recalls the old skit by Monty Python concerning “the advantages of not being seen.” A plummy voice calls out, “Will Christine please stand up?” Christine rises from behind a bush, there’s an explosion, and down again she goes. “Will Todd stand up?” Here’s Todd, here’s the explosion, no more Todd. “Cliven, please…”

A simple formula, and one that always seems to work, no matter how often it’s attempted. Christine, after all, was blown up repeatedly by Bill Maher throughout the late 1990s before she even ran for office. Todd was vaporized in 2012, and Cliven, well, that was only last month. A movement made up of people who simply will not learn from experience would appear to be uneducable. But we’re going to try anyway.

Sensing easy prey in people who so avidly cooperate in their own destruction, the media has relentlessly expanded its strategy for portraying conservatives as gibbering idiots for whom no sane voter would press the lever. For decades the media has collaborated with Democrats and the liberal elites in creating a superstructure that exists for the sole purpose of humiliating conservative candidates and spokesmen. It is proactive, universal, and often quite successful. It has also been virtually ignored by the conservative establishment, which consistently behaves as if American politics is a gentleman’s pastime operating by the same rules that it did in the late 19th century.

It can be said without exaggeration that the major public uproars of the 2012 campaign were either media-generated or immediately exploited by the media/liberal superstructure.

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Rise of the ‘Obama Republicans’

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Photo Credit: AP…By 1972, many conservative Democrats supported Nixon over George McGovern so at least in presidential campaigns, culturally conservative Democrats were already moving away from their historic home. Only the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, a southern populist reformer–and Watergate–and Betty Ford’s liberalism–forestalled the inevitable.

The Gipper’s massive victory in 1980 was fueled by more that 30 percent of Democrats nationwide, who took a powder on Carter after he moved to the left. Reagan received the same amount in the 1984 election in part because he’d done nothing to disappoint them and the liberal establishment nominated Walter Mondale, a good man who was trapped in a New Deal past.

Reagan ran again as the anti-establishment candidate of the future and swamped the lifetime Democrat, ironically with the help of Democrats. Yet the Establishment Republicans simply could not abide by the realigning elections of 1980, 1984, and 1994.

By the final years of the last century, some inside the GOP wanted the Reagan Revolution to be over, thus the phrase “compassionate conservative.” George W. Bush ran and lost the popular vote in 2000 without once ever calling for a spending cut or the elimination of one single wasteful federal program. After that, the GOP would continue to embrace the persona of Reagan–they had little choice–but no longer would they embrace the American conservative philosophy of the Gipper.

Hence, the stirrings of the Obama Republicans.

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Obama Says Americans are Better Off Now than When He Came into Office

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Photo Credit: Irish Government – Pool/Getty ImagesSure, he can say that. After all, isn’t it better to kick back and relax at home rather than have to go to work? Daytime TV can be quite stimulating.

And with wages stagnant over his terms of office, you might ask who needs more money? Not I.

National debt? Who cares? Medicare and Social Security ready to implode? Not my problem.

All in all, helluva job, Barry.

The Hill:

President Obama said Americans were “better off now than when I came into office,” during a fundraiser Monday night outside of Washington.

Obama also slammed congressional Republicans for their focus on the terror attack in Benghazi and the implementation of ObamaCare.

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Espionage in a Post-Privacy Society

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Photo Credit: ShutterstockWe will soon have to live in a world with no such thing as privacy and no such thing as secrecy, says Richard Aldrich, speaking at PINC 15 in Amsterdam. “We will be living in a transparent society, it will be a bit like living in a nudist colony.”

Aldrich is a historian specialising in espionage and has recently published a book about GCHQ, but it is the future of espionage that he is interested in right now. We’re used to the idea that secret intelligence agencies spy on us, but over the last ten years the big intelligence gatherers have become airlines, banks, internet providers and Tesco — all of which have more information about us than GCHQ and the NSA put together.

“These organisations are becoming cleverer and cleverer. Cleverer than the CIA; cleverer than the KGB.” By studying everything he has bought over the last five years, a company could predict with about 90 percent accuracy how Aldrich will vote in the upcoming European elections — something he claims he doesn’t even know himself. He claims he has about 11 percent of his supposedly secret vote left.

Citizens too though are increasingly becoming intelligence gatherers. By studying the reaction of the blogosphere to the Boston Marathon bombings — which led to a mob forming outside the house of someone wrongly identified as the bomber from crowdsourced photos posted on Reddit– we can understand how dangerous this can be. “Espionage is even scarier when it’s controlled by you guys,” Aldrich tells the audience.

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Lessons of the VA Scandal

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Photo Credit: National Review If our government has any obligation to fulfill its many promises on health care, it should be first and foremost to the men and women who served in our armed forces. But the scandal over hidden waiting lists at a growing number of veterans’ hospitals (seven so far) — wherein dozens of veterans died while waiting months for vital treatment, and the VA covered up the lengthy wait times — should make everyone wonder whether we can place our trust in a government-managed health-care system. The Dayton Daily News reported on Sunday that its investigation of a database of claims paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that the words “delay in treatment” were used 167 times. The VA paid out a total of $36.4 million to settle the claims. There could well be many more cases of “death by delay” at the VA that never came to light.

Are there lessons in the VA scandal for the rest of us if Obamacare survives and even expands?

You betcha. The first lesson is that as government expands taxpayer subsidies for health care, the demand will always outstrip supply. Here is President Obama in a speech to disabled veterans in August 2013:

The last time I was with you, I pledged to cut the backlog, slash those wait times, deliver your benefits sooner. And I’m going to be honest with you; it has not moved as fast as I wanted. Part of it is all these new veterans in the system who came in — Agent Orange, PTSD. It means a lot more claims, and despite additional resources, it’s resulted in longer waits. And that’s been unacceptable — unacceptable to me, unacceptable to [Department of Veterans Affairs] Secretary [Eric] Shinseki.

A few weeks later, President Obama had to admit that he found the fiasco of the HealthCare.gov website also “unacceptable.” Last week, his aides told reporters he was “madder than hell” over the veteran waiting-list scandal.

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