I'm going to interpret that question literally. A key thing you have to keep in mind is that in almost all of the US outside of a few very large cities, the "street" is not a useful public place. People don't gather and interact on streets in the US. They are merely channels for cars. Protesting on the streets would be as useful in most cities in the US as wandering around next to a shipping lane on the open ocean. The only people "there" are driving vehicles at full speed.
That of course raises the question of where Americans do congregate together. Churches are the answer for many, although I believe those are dwindling. Some go to bars. Neither of those is a particularly good venue for dissent.
One unfortunate consequence of the US being so car-centric is that we've destroyed public space, and consequently made public assembly much harder.
If the purpose is to disrupt travel or commerce, it would most likely achieve it's goal almost immediately. If the purpose is to bring attention to some other issue and the disruption of the highway system is unrelated (or only tangentially related), then the attention would have to be weighed against the negative impression it creates for the many affected.
I don't have the relevant experience in this area to know under what circumstances protests that negatively impact average people succeed in their goals.
In a vehicle protest you forfeit anonymity (lincense plates), ability to split since road-blocks can easily stop you, and most importantly your vehicle might be impounded.
It's the worst. You're not demonstrating anything. You're just pissing off commuters.
I believe the culture is improving here, but for a long time, cars were such important symbol of wealth that being a pedestrian gained a small but real social stigma. Large cities that were already thriving and had very affluent people who didn't drive bucked the trend, but in your average city in the US, if you're on a street and not driving, you look poor, mentally unstable, or homeless.
What we have here is a system:
1) Clearly designed to pass a 4th amendment analysis;
2) Enabled to to pass such scrutiny be the unprecedented access Americans give corporations to the details of their private lives.
For what its worth I think the NSA programs are bad ideas, in an administration that has had a lot of them.[2] But not every bad idea is unconstitutional, that is to say not every bad idea can be fixed in court rather than in Congress.
[1] In light of this story, who is still mad at the Supreme Court for holding that Congress couldn't shut down the speech of corporations (like the ACLU?)
[2] Menacing over the Supreme Court justices during the state of the union probably being the worst.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_v._King
Justice Ginsburg , dissenting.
The Court today arms the police with a way routinely to dishonor the Fourth Amendment ’s warrant requirement in drug cases. In lieu of presenting their evidence to a neutral magistrate, police officers may now knock, listen, then break the door down, nevermind that they had ample time to obtain a warrant. I dissent from the Court’s reduction of the Fourth Amendment ’s force.
I'd bet the reason you think Kentucky is different is that you think drugs are a non crime. I do too, but lots of people do. I grew up in "just say no" suburbia. My mom and lots like her (see the reddit meme: scumbag suburban mom) thinks drugs are the worst thing ever.
In any case, Kentucky is an affirmation of the very simple principle that a warrant is not required. For better or worse, the framers did not give us a 4th amendment that admitted no compromises. They gave us one that asked us to analyze whether a search was "reasonable", asking us to reach compromises.
I'm not haggling over anything. You asked "Are police knocking down your door without a warrant?" I provided the answer, additionally evidencing that the debate over the 4th amendment is not as static as you seemed to be implying.
>Do you think that in 1800, the framers would have considered it an unreasonable search to enter a home they could hear being burglarized? No.
Do you think that in 1800 the framers would have considered hearing the sound of a flushing toilet or people moving to be exigent circumstances?
>I'd bet the reason you think Kentucky is different is that you think drugs are a non crime.
I am not somebody who obsesses over drug law[1]. My reasons for disagreeing with the ruling are better expressed by Ginsburg which is why I provided the link to her dissent, which I recommend you read.
[1] although it's pretty clear that many current drug laws in the US are broken and highly destructive to society. Personally I don't and have never used any illegal drugs so I have no 'skin in the game' so to speak and fear of getting (legitimately) busted by the police over drugs is not a concern I have. So if you are picturing some pothead who spends all day reading the High Times and proselytising about the benefits of weed that isn't me
If the officer witnesses someone break into the residence then sure, but just hearing something? That doesn't pass the smell test to me, regardless of whether it was about drugs or not.
What are the sounds of a house being burglarized anyway? The homeowner could just be moving stuff around in the living room when the cops bust down the door without knocking. That's property damage that the homeowner is likely stuck with and in some cases it ends badly with someone getting shot.
This whole no-knock attitude that's been in place for decades is a sad joke.
Slippery slope reasoning is completely incompatible with 4th amendment interpretation, because the 4th amendment is all about what is "reasonable" (or rather, what is "unreasonable.") It's about compromising the legitimate needs of the police with the legitimate privacy interests of the people. You can't make compromises when your retort to everything becomes: "but if we keep going in this direction..."
This has worked against the government as often as it's worked for the government. And on the whole it has been instrumental in driving social change for the better.
The same Supreme Court that voted that equality could exist with "sepatate-but-equal" facilities later voted that separate-but-equal was not reasonable and full integration was required instead.
This drives "strict Constitutionalists" batty but I find it's one of the key benefits of our system of government.
There's no way to get a legal code that is both very exact and useful in the face of humans who have to implement it.
And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be.
Sure, there needs to be a low pass filter of some kind to prevent wild oscillations in the law due to delayed feedback, but we're getting oscillations now in the form of party swapping every 4-8 years. There must be some way to make the law less like a moving average filter and more like an adaptive Kalman filter so it can react quickly when necessary without throwing out the entire USC every election (though I have, in the past, proposed rewriting the entire body of laws from scratch once per generation, with a generational opt-in-based transition from the old set to the new set). Courts should be a last measure, IMO, due to the insane costs of facing one, rather than an integral process of deciding what the law actually is.
Whether these cases fits the reasonability test is another matter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstance_in_United_...
Of course, it all comes down to how reasonable you think our current criminal law policies are.
I'm serious about "anything but google" "anything but google" this too if you don't believe me: "google search providing different results to different people"
Damn right they are. Exigent circumstances. [1]
Police routinely coerce people into consenting to searches during traffic stops when there is no RAS. If there's a K9 unit around it's even easier; look at how often they just happen to trigger when there's no contraband at all [2]. Does a 56% false positive rate sound reasonable?
And, once they've gained access they've got wide leeway to seize whatever they want in the name of the war on drugs. At that point the owner must pay a bond to contest the seizure, and then has the burden of proving that they were not party to the crime. Note that no warrant is required for property seizure, merely probable cause [3].
[1] http://themoderatevoice.com/110361/supreme-court-expands-war... [2] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/06/false-positives-police... [3] BJA publication NCJ-137994 – CIVIL FORFEITURE FOR THE NON-LAWYER
I think the ACLU and EFF will indeed become stronger. I don't know of any 2nd amendment supporters who are also not strong 1st and 4th supporters, the issue comes down to how their voice is heard. Also I don't know any of them who who wouldn't rather change things peacefully, it is a much better solution.
Are you sure? For instance, on cultural grounds, I'd guess that there are plenty of 2nd amendment supporters who would be happy to ban flag-burning...
There are indeed, and I know more than a few of them. They post on the same gun forums I do. What you see among the "pro gun" crowd is a pretty clearly ideological divide between Libertarians and traditional Conservatives. The Libertarians take the 1A, 4A, 5A, etc. just as seriously as the 2A, whereas the more traditional Conservatives tend - in my experience - to be a bit more narrowly focused. It's unfortunate, but real.
That said, I take it as encouraging that I feel like I'm seeing more libertarian thought and less of the "yee-haw, let's kill that fag" kind of stuff on one of the NC centric gun forums I post on. And lots of people take a fairly moderate approach, offering up strong defenses of the 2A, without doing the full-on "captain redneck" thing.
On a semi-related note... it's kinda sad how prevalent stereotyping - and making broad assumptions based on those stereotypes - is. For example, many people seem to assume that most active 2A advocates are, indeed, "redneck" types: from the South, with CSA flag stickers on their trucks, a Bible in their hip pocket, and a mouthful of chewing tobacco. But, while those people exist, most of the pro gun folks I know are actually well educated, level-headed, reasonable and rational.
What's a 2A advocate? I don't think there's any substantial opposition to the 2nd amendment itself. The main discussion surrounding 2A tends to come up any time any sort of restrictions surrounding gun control are raised. Then the crowd of people who view any sort of gun control (background checks!!) as an attack on the 2nd amendment start coming out of the woodwork.
I believe that's the crowd that gets stereotyped and I don't believe they're representative of the majority of gun owners.
There is little focus on the national laws that are already in place, laws that particular states have or are trying to have are what get the attention of the gun lobbyists.
No.
Your experiences may differ from mine, but when I get into debates about gun-control / 2A issues, I find it to be very commonplace for people to insist that the 2A is useless, outdated, and state that it should be repealed. Believe it or not, there is a not-insignificant number of people out there who are for total civilian disarmament.
And then there are the bulk of people who seem to be more or less ambivalent, or apathetic about it all. They aren't out to attack the 2A, but they aren't interested in going to any great length to fight for it either.
What's a 2A advocate?
In my book, somebody who identifies "gun rights" as an issue of specific importance to them, and takes some specific action: donating to the NRA/GOA/2AF/JPFO/etc., voting, campaigning, running for office, or something of that nature, with an intent to defend gun rights.
It doesn't hurt that the framers didn't conceptualize nuclear weapons or ICBMs, though. Back in 1800, it was perfectly reasonable to expect if the US military could have a mortar, a citizen could. Though I'm more of the opinion if you wouldn't trust your neighbor with some destructive tool than you shouldn't trust the US military with it.
As a strict constructionist, I affirm the right of anyone to burn any flag, anyone to "protest" at a funeral, as well as PRISM being unconstitutional. Further, I believe that there is not an explicit "right to privacy" and therefore there is not a right to privacy. Them's my blinders!
So are you saying that a "right" has to be explicitly spelled out in the BoR in order to be a right? If that's what you mean, then how the heck does a "strict constructionist" get that to jibe with the 9th Amendment?
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people
This is why Madison thought the Bill of Rights was a mistake. The rest of the document was written as a list of delineated powers - "this is what the federal government can do". That's much, much more restrictive than "this is what the federal government can't do". He thought the BoR would lead people into thinking the federal government is allowed to do anything it isn't prohibited from doing.
I think history has born him out, too. I'd much rather see courts asking the question "is this on the list of things the federal government can do?" rather than "does it pass muster on 2A or 4A grounds?" Of course if that were the case 2/3 the federal government would go away. Not a bad thing, IMO.
Kinda puts strict constructionists in a bind -- which was clearly its purpose.
What's your point?
As somebody who is an NRA member and who has donated to the ACLU, that rings true to me. :-)
The people who went to the streets protesting in 2011 got arrested. You're looking at the maturation of a tyrannical, authoritarian neoliberal regime.
Sadly, you just generally don't hear much of them in the news.
What I would suggest is look into major political protests over the past few years and draw your own conclusions from their outcomes.
One of those adjectives has an almost oposite meaning to the other two.
Please, don't just throw "bad" words in a setence if you are trying to make a point. Understand what you are saying, and if you don't completely grasp the meaning of a word, either look it up, or not use it.
The way you wrote it, you sound like a South America neofacist (and yes, I just made up a label). And I'm quite sure you are not proposing creating a facist government hidden behind populist policiy, thus you should not speack like one.
Over the digital privacy / 4A issue specifically? I don't know. But protests in general are still quite alive, here in North Carolina.[1][2][3]
[1]: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/05/13/2890544/nc-moral-mond...
[2]: http://www.wral.com/-mega-moral-monday-protests-heat-up-outs...
[3]: http://www.thenation.com/article/174679/protesters-shake-nor...
We won't know for a month or two whether this has legs or not.
The definition of "viciously" at: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/viciously
"Having the nature of vice; evil, immoral, or depraved."
What was vicious about newbie12's comment which was a direct quote from an American President?
http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fea...
I also fail to understand people who so viciously defend the 2nd amendment "because of potential tyranny", but don't try to defend the 1st and 4th amendments with the same aggressiveness, when in fact those amendments are the first line of defense against that encroaching tyranny, and if they fail, it's the first clue the country is slipping into tyranny. Would you rather wait until the very last moment, until people can't take it anymore but to rise up against the government with violence and starting a massacre, all just to remove the government? Or would you try to fix things while you still can do it peacefully, by protecting the 1st and 4th amendments, so it doesn't have to come to "using the 2nd amendment right to defend against the government with guns"?
Or maybe it all comes down to who has more money to raise the awareness about it. NRA is a powerful lobby. ACLU and EFF less so.