Jim Bovard discusses the way the American surveillance state has slowly dismantled the fourth amendment, especially thanks to the FISA courts and the way they've enabled legal loopholes for spying on nearly any American citizen. Bovard cites interventions by the NSA and FBI as major factors in Trump's failure to win re-election in November, and says similar activity has most likely compromised dozens of high-profile politicians in the past. All Americans should be able to agree that the intelligence apparatus is an obstacle to liberty and flourishing in this country. Discussed on the...
Fourth Amendment
Police Mistakenly Raid Home of Great-Grandfather, Permanently Injure Him
Despite police and their apologists constantly reminding us that “if we do nothing wrong, we have nothing to worry about,” innocent people continue to be arrested, beaten, and even killed by police carrying out deadly mistakes. Willard J. King, a Great-Grandfather from Sequatchie County, Tennessee found this out the hard way when he was beaten bloody by police in his own home during a wrongful raid, according to a lawsuit. King filed a lawsuit this month for the incident which unfolded in October of 2019 when police raided his home and attacked him in front of his granddaughter and her...
No Warrant, No Problem; How Government Buys Its Way Around the 4th Amendment
When the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that law enforcement agencies need warrants before they can request geolocation data from cell phone companies, civil liberties advocates touted the judgment as a major win for privacy. But since then, government agencies have devised a new surveillance method: instead of getting warrants to force companies to provide data, they simply purchase the information from brokers. Call it entrepreneurial innovation in the market for tyranny. The scope of this activity has been slowly revealed over the last year, beginning with a February 2020 Wall Street...
Prepare: The Supreme Court Might Legalize Warrantless Gun Seizures
Last week, the Free Thought Project reported on HR 127, the most tyrannical gun bill ever proposed. The bill would target the poor by forcing citizens to pay $800 per year to possess firearms that they are required to register. It also bans multiple legal guns and ammo types, turning tens of millions of Americans into felons over night. While this bill is, without a doubt, the worst gun bill in history, it didn’t lay out any guidelines for violating a citizen’s Fourth Amendment right. Next month, however, the Supreme Court will be considering exactly that—can cops enter a home to seize...
Federal Police Beat Veteran, Supreme Court May Hear Case
José Oliva survived the bloodiest year in Vietnam, but he most feared for his life when he was brutally beaten in an unprovoked attack by federal officers in a Veterans Affairs hospital in his hometown of El Paso, Texas that left him with several injuries, two of which required surgery. On January 29, 2021, the Institute for Justice filed an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to reverse the 5th Circuit decision that ruled federal officers—such as those in a VA hospital—may act with impunity and not be held accountable for their actions, no matter how unconstitutional. “I feared...
How Privatizing the Roads Would Help Stop Police Brutality
Advocates of a free society so frequently field the objection “Who will build the roads?” or some variation thereof that it’s become a meme. Much effort has been put into answering this question, including books on the privatization of roads and highways. What has received relatively little attention is what effect road privatization would have on the role of government police, which is surprising given the existing relationship between roads, police, and drivers. Indeed, most of what police do is related to the road. According to the US Department of Justice’s most recent report on...
The Police Lie All The Time. Can Anything Stop Them?
Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. The bureaucratic state passes laws that make it easy for cops to stop anyone at anytime for minor offences. The system incentives cops to lie and protects them from scrutiny. It is so bad that DA offices are keeping secret databases of unreliable police officers that they won't allow to testify in court cases. This tendency to lie pervades all police work, not just high-profile violence, and it has the power to ruin lives. Law enforcement officers lie so frequently—in affidavits, on post-incident paperwork, on the witness stand—that officers have coined a word...
Qualified Immunity: An Invention of Judicial Activism
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that shields cops from liability for actions taken in the line of duty unless they violate rights “clearly established” by existing judicial precedent. No statute exists granting qualified immunity. It evolved over time based on a series of Supreme Court cases. In practice, qualified immunity makes it extremely difficult to prosecute police officers for using excessive force or committing other acts of misconduct. As Supreme Court Justice Byron White wrote in the 1986 case Malley v. Briggs, qualified immunity protects “all but the plainly incompetent...
Her Name Was Breonna Taylor: The Deadly Consequences of No-Knock Warrants
mid the nationwide focus on the death of George Floyd, another tragedy has unfortunately fallen by the wayside. We should not forget the death of Breonna Taylor—or the dire need to abolish the “no-knock” warrants that caused her death, trample property rights, and routinely endanger Americans. Here’s the sad story of Taylor’s death. On March 13, police officers broke into the Louisville, Kentucky home of Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, unannounced. The police were executing a “no-knock” warrant, which allows them to conduct a search without identifying themselves as law...
Supreme Court Rules Against Fourth Amendment
The Supreme Court handed down another opinion eroding the Fourth Amendment in a case that should have never gone to the federal court. Kansas v. Glover revolves around a traffic stop by Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputy Mark Mehrer. He pulled Charles Glover over after running his license plate and finding that Glover had a suspended driver’s license. Glover entered a motion to suppresses evidence gathered during the stop, arguing there was no reasonable suspicion of an actual crime. The deputy stopped the car based on the assumption that the registered owner was probably driving. The...
News
Blog
The Scott Horton Show
Conflicts of Interest
Don't Tread on Anyone
Liberty Weekly Podcast
Year Zero
Shop Our Books
Voluntaryist Handbook
Hotter Than The Sun: Time To Abolish Nuclear Weapons
[playlist artists="false" images="false"...
