For as long as the notion of individual rights has existed, one of them has been the sanctity one’s home. As of Thursday, that’s no longer true in Indiana.

The Obama administration wants the FBI to be able to look at your Internet records without the inconvenience of respecting your 4th Amendment rights.

Arizona’s ill conceived illegal alien crackdown, which is so obviously overbroad as to have drawn concern from Tom Tancredo, Marco Rubio, Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and Joe Scarborough, has drawn one unlikely defender: George Will. It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal [...]

Bob Dylan was on the pavement, thinking about the government. And they arrested him. Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood. Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New [...]

Glenn Greenwald rebuts those who think his strident attacks on Presidents Bush and Obama for abusing their power make his blog “an ideological wind tunnel” and that he is “oblivious to the practical considerations policymakers must contend with.” By the design of the Founders, most American political issues are driven by the vicissitudes of political realities, [...]

The Clear Card program whereby pre-screened passengers are expedited through airport security is no more.  I received this email overnight: Ensuring that this wasn’t some sort of odd email fraud scheme, I did a quick news search and, sure enough, it’s true: Clear began in 2005 with the potential to make airport security quicker and [...]

Scott Johnson contrasts the NYT’s silence on the David Rohde kidnapping to protect the safety of their reporter with “the Times’s illegal exposure of the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program in December 2005, as well as its exposure of the Treasury Department’s terrorist-finance tracking program in June 2006. Whereas the reporting of Rohde’s apprehension may have [...]

Apparently, the Supreme Court is leaning towards letting school administrators do just that. The case in question is a about a girl who was strip searched by school officials when she was 13 years old in eighth grade. The school officials were acting on a tip from another girl who had been caught with prescription [...]

Andrew Sullivan is soliciting right-of-center comments on a report by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen that has mostly attracted left-of-center commenters thus far. Here’s the lede: The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress [...]

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to hear the case of Savana Redding, who, as “a 13-year-old honor student who was subjected to a strip search by school officials in Arizona looking for prescription-strength ibuprofen.” The gist of the dispute, as described by Adam Liptak for NYT: The strip-search case was brought by the mother of [...]

A while back, I asked for reader suggestions on posts but, alas, have published no posts in response to said suggestions.  Most of the suggestions were for posts and post series requiring research.  Three of my colleagues have volunteered to write something in response to suggested topics and I have underway a post on General [...]

The Senate easily invoked cloture yesterday, ending a threatened filibuster of a major overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The revised bill is expected to pass today. This may be the most important bill we pass this year,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), an architect of the [...]

Those who wish to fly without ID cards have but a few more days. Beginning Saturday, June 21, 2008 passengers that willfully refuse to provide identification at security checkpoint will be denied access to the secure area of airports. This change will apply exclusively to individuals that simply refuse to provide any identification or assist [...]

Today’s WaPo has a short feature on Clear Cards, whereby travelers get to bypass TSA security lines at select airports for a small fee. Fast-pass security lanes officially opened at Reagan National and Dulles airports Wednesday for travelers with special clearance. Heres how it works: Fliers undergo a Transportation Security Administration background check and have [...]

Mike Huckabee wants to overturn the 14th Amendment, the Washington Times reports. Mike Huckabee wants to amend the Constitution to prevent children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens from automatically becoming American citizens, according to his top immigration surrogate — a radical step no other major presidential candidate has embraced. Mr. Huckabee, who won [...]

Over at The Glittering Eye, Dave Schuler extends the argument he’s made in the comments of my tongue-in-cheek post on the fact that the media continues to ignore the ethnic-religious component of the rioting in France. He argues that the problem goes beyond religion and is ultimately about assimilation and “giving the descendants of immigrants [...]

A championship womens’ bridge team went Dixie Chick and are now facing possible sanctions. In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team [...]

In an incredibly hyperbolic piece with the over-the-top headline “The Coup at Home,” NYT columnist Frank Rich draws an equivalence between the coup in Pakistan and the incremental decline of freedom in the United States in the name of counter-terrorism. The gist of the piece: The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page [...]

A Utah judge has ordered a reporter to produce a story to his specifications or face contempt charges. A judge ordered a TV news reporter Wednesday to produce a public-service story as a consequence for airing an interview with a potential juror before the recent trial of a polygamous-sect leader. Fifth District Judge James Shumate [...]

Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education and author of Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action, argues in a recent Boston Globe op-ed that more whites than minorities who don’t make the grade are admitted to elite schools. Researchers with access to closely [...]

Tennessee revenuers are waiting at the borders to arrest people with cigarettes. Starting [Thursday], state Department of Revenue agents will begin stopping Tennessee motorists spotted buying large quantities of cigarettes in border states, then charging them with a crime and, in some cases, seizing their cars. Critics say the new “cigarette surveillance program” amounts to [...]

Judge Victor Marrero has again struck down a portion of the USA Patriot Act. A federal judge struck down a key part of the USA Patriot Act on Thursday in a ruling that defended the need for judicial oversight of laws and bashed Congress for passing a law that makes possible “far-reaching invasions of liberty.” [...]

The Supreme Court, in yet another 5-4 ruling, has decided that discriminating on the basis of race is not a Constitutionally permissible solution to race discrimination. Lyle Denniston: Concluding its current Term with a historic ruling on race in public policy, the Supreme Court divided 5-4 on Thursday in striking down voluntary integration plans in [...]

A federal judge has ruled that parolees and homeless people have 4th Amendment rights. A federal judge has ruled that some Los Angeles police tactics in patrolling downtown are unconstitutional, raising questions about the city’s successful campaign to dramatically reduce the number of crimes and homeless people. U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson found that [...]

WaPo fronts news that there’s a “New Drive Afoot to Pass Equal Rights Amendment. Those of us over a certain age recall the ERA, which was the gender equivalent to the 14th Amendment. The key language: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any [...]

After spending more than a year arguing that it had the legal authority to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to authorize NSA surveillance of suspected terrorists–and that doing so was crucial to our national security–the Bush administration announced yesterday that it has reversed course. AP’s Lara Jakes Jordan: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told [...]

Vivek Krishnamurthy live blogged Justice Antonin Scalia’s visit to Yale Law, including the Q&A. I found this especially interesting: Criterion for following stare decisis should not be whether you think the decision is mistaken or not. The criteria should be how wrong it was. Scalia uses three criteria in determining whether to overturn precedents: 1) [...]

In a decision that may have nationwide implications, the Supreme Court has vacated a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals injunction that stopped Arizona from enforcing its new voter ID provision–a decision at odds with recent court decisions regarding other states’ voter ID laws, including Missouri’s, which is not likely to be affected directly by this [...]

ElectoralVote.com looks at the time-honored practice of Gerrymandering congressional districts for maximum partisan advantage. To make the concept clearer, consider a state with 8 million people and 12 congressional districts, for simplicity. If half the people are Democrats and half the people are Republicans, you might get 12 CDs, each with, say, 300,000 Democrats and [...]

The United States Senate has confirmed Gen. Michael Haden as CIA Director, by a vote of 78-15. Hayden, a four-star general, currently is the top deputy to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte. Hayden, 61, would be the first active-duty or retired military officer to run the spy agency in 25 years. He was approved by [...]

The Senate Intelligence Committee easily approved Gen. Michael Hayden’s nomination for CIA Director, despite controversy over his involvement in the NSA eavesdropping/datamining operations. CNN reports the vote at 12-3. Update: Reuters has details. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden’s nomination as CIA director won the endorsement of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday in a vote [...]

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 yesterday that police don’t need a warrant to enter a home and arrest people when then violent conflict is in progress. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that the police do not need a warrant to enter a private home to break up a fight in which injuries have [...]

Via, Radley Balko and Reason Online’s Hit and Run comes this rather disturbing transcript of Lt. General Hayden, Bush’s rumored nominee for the CIA, insists that “probable cause” is not in the Fourth Amendment. Tim Cavanaugh has a short transcript, QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and [...]

Lyle Denniston has an informative roundup of the opinions in today’s ruling in Georgia v. Randolph wherein, “The Supreme Court ruled 5-3 . . . that it is unconstitutional for police without a warrant to search a home, if two occupants are present at the time and one consents but the other objects. The search [...]

Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus report on yesterday’s speeches defending the administration’s controversial surveillance program. Former NSA director General Michael Hayden’s was the more informative of the two. A senior U.S. intelligence official offered a wide-ranging and detailed defense of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program yesterday, kicking off a White House campaign aimed [...]

Andrew McCarthy asks an interesting question: What if President Bush had secured FISA warrants and then run the exact same surveillance program? Would that FISA compliance have made it all okay? Do you really think there would have been no scandal? Or, in this climate that it has so tirelessly labored to create, do you [...]

Congress is set to debate whether children of illegal immigrants should be U.S. citizens. A proposal to change long-standing federal policy and deny citizenship to babies born to illegal immigrants on U.S. soil ran aground this month in Congress, but it is sure to resurface — kindling bitter debate even if it fails to become [...]

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy provides a list of 28 exceptions to the 4th Amendment’s requirement that a warrant be issued prior to a search. The list is a bit exaggerated by multiple listing of public safety exceptions but his point is nonetheless a good one. Of course, “electronic surveillance of Americans suspected of [...]

Walid Phares is outraged that the administration is not doing enough electronic surveillance within U.S. borders and believes the press is missing the boat in its coverage. . . . I was surprised as I continued reading the AP report that it did not criticize the administration for not doing enough surveillance of terror-related activities [...]

A judge in my county has ruled that Virginia’s drunk driving laws which, like most states’, operates under the presumption that defendants who have been tested above the legal limit for blood alcohol are guilty, violates the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (presumably, as applied via the 14th Amendment to the states). Maverick N.Va. [...]