Thursday, February 26, 2015

Forced Blood Draws, DNA Collection And Biometric Scans: What Country Is This?

Via Jonathan

http://a6.typepad.com/6a00e54ee06170883401bb07f7a496970d-500wi
The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation
Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases—these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Worse, on a daily basis, Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are all guilty until proven innocent.

Thus far, the courts have done little to preserve our Fourth Amendment rights, let alone what shreds of bodily integrity remain to us.

2 comments:

  1. Some of what is described in this article is sexual assault, rape, and sodomy. So where are the protests by serving police officers against this disgusting abuse of power by their brother officers? And if they are not protesting, why should I treat them as anything other than quislings and collaborators? You can't have it both ways, demanding respect and then acting as a toady for an antiConstitutional government.

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    Replies
    1. You can't have it both ways, demanding respect and then acting as a toady for an antiConstitutional government.

      Quite true, Sir.

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