Photographers' Constitutional Challenge Thrown Out

[c6h6o3]

Abidor vs. Napolitano dismissed

 

[polyglot]

Judge Korman says, "Abidor cannot be so naive to expect that when he crosses into Syrian or Lebanese border that the contents of his computer will be immune from searches and seizures at the whim of those who work for Bashar al-Assad or Hassan Nasrallah," referring to the president of Syria and leader of Hezbollah.

The logic being that since Iran and Syria don't have the 4th amendment, the US doesn't anymore either. Charming.

 

[snapguy]

It's about what I expect from the thugs that run our gommerment. (Misspelled on purpose.) I am not talking Dems or GOPers, I'm talking about all of them, every single one of them.
The interesting thing is that nobody mentions we are running an empire here -- the biggest, most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Empires cannot allow the peasant to actually have rights -- those are reserved for the rulers and their lickspittles. But perhaps I am a bit too cynical.

 

[Christopher Walrath]

Yay for progress. Well, at least I can convince DHS that there are some incriminating sheets of film and get them processed for free.

Geez, remember when we did not scare so easily? Now, every shadow will bring about the end of life as we know it in the US. They'll be outlawing sunlight for that very reason before you know it.

 

[doughowk]

I wonder how often CEOs, sports stars and other millionaires receive such degrading human treatment? The upper class & their political minions instills fear and insecurity to manipulate us into willingly give up our freedoms. We're becoming a dystopian society in so many ways.

 

[Christopher Walrath]

Becoming?

 

[removed account4]

this is nothing new, and has been happening to people who aren't " get a sunburn 5mins in the sun" white for a long long long long time.
this outrage thing is kind of funny ...
why weren't people this upset when "people of color" ( and i use that term loosely since it is a melanin thing )
were getting the same treatment 20 years ago or more. it has nothing to do with HLS but human nature ...
and i almost forgot, and invisible amoeba of eeevil

 

[Christopher Walrath]

That damned amobea..

 

[removed account4]

That damned amobea..

yeah it makes everyone's lives "uncomfortable", not just those who can get a sun tan
and the thing i find most pathetic is that most people never even were bothered by it
until recently ...

btw as copakeham said everyone is a person of color that is why i use the term loosely

 

[Pioneer]

We are at "war" with terrorism. As everyone knows, when at war, individual rights are suspended. Just ask the Japanese born American citizens who were "lawfully" detained during World War II. There was a reason that George declared war on terrorism...and it wasn't only because of how it sounded.

I dearly love my country but those that truly believe that this nation has never been paranoid in the past certainly hasn't bothered to really learn our history. As for denying individual's rights...well, I really don't think I need to go there.

 

[ic-racer]

It is a little irrelevant because not many people keep their film and negatives hidden in laptop bags.

 

[ME Super]

Set up a VPN server on your home network and the VPN software on your laptop, but DON'T SAVE THE PASS PHRASE ON THE LAPTOP (you are using a pass phrase, not a password, right? Pass phrases are harder to crack). While you're still out of the country, connect to your home VPN and transfer the files over the internet, then delete them from your laptop. Because of the VPN, the data is encrypted and is brought into the country without getting searched at the border. This doesn't mean it's impossible to decrypt, but let's make the NSA work for it, at least!

Sorry but we shouldn't have to resort to such tactics to protect our personal information from the prying eyes of the gummint (misspelling intentional), IMHO.

 

[Tom1956]

Set up a VPN server on your home network and the VPN software on your laptop, but DON'T SAVE THE PASS PHRASE ON THE LAPTOP (you are using a pass phrase, not a password, right? Pass phrases are harder to crack). While you're still out of the country, connect to your home VPN and transfer the files over the internet, then delete them from your laptop. Because of the VPN, the data is encrypted and is brought into the country without getting searched at the border. This doesn't mean it's impossible to decrypt, but let's make the NSA work for it, at least!

Sorry but we shouldn't have to resort to such tactics to protect our personal information from the prying eyes of the gummint (misspelling intentional), IMHO.

Lum from the Joe 'em Down Store called it the givermint.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well I happened to know some of those Japanese families that were detained during WWII and it had exactly zero to with nat'l security. I was just a kid, but we'd drive down the mountain to help them pick their little orchards, once they got an opportunity to start over after the War. But there was a reason it was just the Japanese from productive farmlands that got interned - a convenient ruse to steal their productive farms
and orchards for pennies on the dollar, by unscrupulous big corporate ag interests and their lobbyists. Take a drive over to Manzanar, if any of you haven't already done so.

 

[pbromaghin]

Drew, it wasn't only the farmers. My in-laws were mostly working stiffs and students when they went. My father-in-law was a gardener with a Berkeley Chemistry degree, his dad a Methodist minister. My mother-in-law was a student at Univ of Washington and her dad a construction worker, her mom a nurse. War hysteria served to make the net real big.

 

[DREW WILEY]

But it was distinctly a West Coast thing targeted primarily at Calif Central Valley and the Hood River Valley along the Columbia. Some spillover
was inevitable, but the motive seems pretty obvious. Yes, part of the "war effort" was to stir up selective ethnic hatred using widely publicized stereotypes, but the economic rewards for doing so do seem to point a particular direction. By comparison, properties of people of German descent were never seized, nor were they interred, though a degree of abuse was inevitable. Our Calif history is one of epic ag and
water wars, and this seems to factor into it. Ironically, the Chinese and Filippinos got widespread acceptance in this country for the first time due to the same War. Previously, they were the ones being vilified. I suspect there a quite a few historic ideas capable of revision. I simply have to go over to the Golden Gate area and note the dates on the big gun bunkers pointing toward the Pacific, which tells me our military was paranoid about a Japanese war long before Pearl Harbor (and which are, incidentally, wonderfully photogenic).

 

[Truzi]

I thought there was some Italian and German interment, though in much smaller numbers.

 

[removed account4]

truzi,
there were italians on an island in boston harbour, im sure there were pther places too ...

it stinks that they were detained, and had their land taken, it could have been worse
humans have a long history of treating other humans badly in time of war ( or peace )
at least the civilians weren' t marched around a desert / death valley to a made up location
until they died, or ask all the males of "xyz" ethnic group to dig their own graves and firing squad them ..

 

[DREW WILEY]

There were lots of German farmers, but in places where they often constituted the majority and not a susceptible minority, and an acre of
Calif orchard land was far more valuable than an acre of wheat out on the plains. In fact, the Central Valley was on the verge of becoming the
most productive farmland on earth; and associated with this general fact were events which have inspired not only numerous famous movies, but the works of Steinbeck, and wonderful modern documentaries like those of Ken Burns. I was really surprised to see about ten seconds of
old black and white footage of my dad inspecting a canal in a recent documentary about Calif. water wars - he was a key inspector during the construction of the Central Valley project, which was completed around the time I was born. Most of us are familiar of AA's documentary shots at Manzanar (even though he completely misidentified the background peak in his most famous picture of all there). The dusty ruins
here and there are in themselves reminders of the lust for water. I photographed a ghost trailer park nearby not long ago, analogously with
dead trees silhouetted against the great eastern Sierra uplift.

 

[gleaf]

Evidently the judge doesnt have any constitutionally based understanding. He dases his decision on the lowest expectations ... he has been around politician's too long.

 

[Pioneer]

There were certainly wrongs done then, and wrongs committed today, under the auspices of war. None of what has happened, and will likely happen in the future, is in any way excusable. But it is probably a bit more useful to compare how other countries have handled these types of issues as opposed to the US. Are we perfect? Heck no! Fortunately we can still complain about it and take legal steps to try and continue to improve things.

I feel it is very unlikely that any one of us fully understand all the nuances in this story, no less the legal issues involved, from this one small news clip. None the less we should keep in mind that there are still appeal options open in this situation.

 

[kintatsu]

From what I've read, this isn't an isolated case. Apparently, the DHS has determined that within 100 miles of an international border, your rights are abridged. After an extensive review by their own emplyees/agents, it was determined constitutional, although no court ever reviewed the findings of the department's own lawyers. BTW, this includes pretty much the entire states of Florida, Hawaii, and several smaller states. Even the ACLU challenged it!

Check out https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/fact-sheet-us-constitution-free-zone or Dead Link Removed

 

[Tom1956]

If the ACLU challenged it, it was for an agenda--to further the existence of the ACLU, which is just another lunatic-fringe group, fighting for the same tiresome cause of "diversity and equity", which is an elusive, esoteric cause that grows quite tiresome. The Constitution doesn't need activist judges, money-grubbing barristers, and malcontent clients tearing it apart in a tug of war to "interpret" what it says.
For corn's sake.

 

[kintatsu]

If the ACLU challenged it, it was for an agenda--to further the existence of the ACLU, which is just another lunatic-fringe group, fighting for the same tiresome cause of "diversity and equity", which is an elusive, esoteric cause that grows quite tiresome. The Constitution doesn't need activist judges, money-grubbing barristers, and malcontent clients tearing it apart in a tug of war to "interpret" what it says.
For corn's sake.

You're right about it all. As much as I hate to admit this, though, this seems to be the one case the ACLU seems to have gotten it right.

Given that the largest percentage of our population lives in these zones, it's quite scary.

 

[Tom1956]

Thanks, but even a blind squirrel manages to gather a few nuts. But I suppose the reason I even followed this thread was because of the mention of Big Sis early on. Yeah, we have to watch out for little old ladies and girl scouts coming in from Canada, while the other border leaks EBT recipients like a sieve. Or was that the Dec. of Ind. that said something about "they send their swarms hitherto, to eat out our substance"?