Via Jonathan
“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.
