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The 9th Circuit determined that forcibly mashing a suspect's thumb into his phone to unlock it was akin to fingerprinting him at the police station. JOE LANCASTER | 4.19.2024 12:50 PM As we keep more and more personal data on our phones, iPhone and Android devices now have some of the most advanced encryption technology in existence to keep that information safe from prying eyes. The easiest way around that, of course, is for someone to gain access to your phone. This week, a federal court decided that police officers can make you unlock your phone, even by physically forcing...

As soon as the news broke last week that the FBI was unable to gain access to the phone belonging to the Sutherland Springs, Texas killer, you could hear the indignant feet-stomping of security hawks on Capitol Hill. It did not matter that the killer was not a member of ISIS, and acted alone. It did not matter that the motive was a domestic dispute, not the result of some broader terrorist plot. And, it did not matter that it was the government’s clerical error in the first place, which allowed for this tragedy to occur.There was data to be...

What if the government doesn't really deliver for us? What if its failures to protect our lives, liberties and property are glaring? What if nothing changes after these failures? What if the National Security Agency -- the federal government's domestic spying apparatus -- has convinced Congress that it needs to cut constitutional corners in order to spy on as many people in America as possible? What if Congress has bought that argument and passed a statute that put a secret court between the NSA and its appetite for all electronically transmitted data in America? What if that secret court --...

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – A Bay Area woman said she was attacked for wearing the Google Glass wearable computer at a bar in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Tech writer Sarah Slocum wrote on her Facebook page that she was at Molotov’s on Haight Street Friday night. Slocum said she was showing someone at the bar how the high-tech glasses work, when two women confronted her. Then, a man ripped the Google Glass off of her face. “OMG so you’ll never believe this but… I got verbally and physically assaulted and robbed last night in the city, had things thrown at...

Once you blow up a societal consensus it cannot be easily reconstructed to protect only those practices or beliefs you like while still banning those you think ought to be kept beyond the pale. That’s the upshot of a case decided late on Friday in a Federal District Court in Salt Lake City, Utah that essentially decriminalized polygamy. The case, Brown v. Buhman, which was brought by the stars of Sister Wives, a TLC cable channel reality show depicting the life of a man with four wives and 17 children, who challenged the Utah statute that not only prohibited marriage...

As part of our “Next 10 Amendments” debate series, we’re asking our readers if it’s time for a constitutional amendment to protect their privacy. The furor in the past two weeks over government eavesdropping on the media and citizens has raised a lot of questions related to the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment.

A federal judge ruled that California's new human-trafficking law imposes unconstitutional penalties on sex offenders(UPI) -- A federal judge ruled that California's new human-trafficking law imposes unconstitutional penalties on sex offenders, officials said. The law requires that registered sex offenders provide police with a complete list of their user names, screen names, email addresses and Internet service providers. Violators of the law face a possible three years in prison. Courthouse News Service said after the law passed in November, two sex offenders challenged it, arguing it impeded free speech. U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson issued a preliminary injunction Friday and...

There is a fundamental incoherence in federal policy, which limits the rights of the states to regulate or even influence norms of sexual behavior while at the same time assigns to itself the right to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to influence those norms at the state, local, and individual lev...

Just a few days before the busy holiday travel period, the Transportation Security Administration has decided to change the rules of flying - again. At the beginning of this month, the agency began enforcing its name-matching requirements for airline tickets. Passengers must now provide their full names as they appear on a government-issued ID, their date of birth and their gender when they book a flight. After a terrorism scare involving explosive devices shipped by cargo, the government banned printer cartridges from luggage. And the TSA started implementing several new screening measures, including an enhanced "pat-down" protocol for air travelers...

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements. That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government...

More important, the public's issue focus has changed. And while the issue of whether to criminalize abortion tended to favor Democrats, the political issues that now raise constitutional questions tend to favor Republicans. Those are issues raised by the big government programs of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders, in particular by the health care legislation they jammed through Congress despite huge public opposition last month.

The democrat's Supreme Court ruled abortion was legal throughout the United States despite state laws regulating individually by "inventing" (re-defining) a patient's "right to privacy" in medical terms. That is, by re-defining the natural "right to privacy" for matters between a doctor and patient as a reason for REMOVING a specific specially-selected form of medical treatment (abortion) from state regulation in Roe vs Wade by a narrow 5-4 vote on ideological lines, the socialists/democrats on the Supreme Court moved medicine from state control to national control. Well, more accurately, they moved it from state control into national "illegal to control"...

Now, I did a little bit of digging, and here's what I came up with. According to our president: Obama Statement on 35th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Decision =========="Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, it's never been more important to protect a woman's right to choose. Last year, the Supreme Court decided by a vote of 5-4 to uphold the Federal Abortion Ban, and in doing so undermined an important principle of Roe v. Wade: that we must always protect women's health. With one more vacancy on the Supreme Court, we could be looking at...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You've gotta hear this sound bite from Henry Waxman this afternoon with Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, on MSNBC.  She said, "Republican leader John Boehner, in explaining why he was reading the bill on the floor," meaning the cap-and-trade fiasco, "told The Hill newspaper, 'People deserve to know what's in this pile of [expletive.]'  Does that indicate what kind of relationship has now developed between the Democrat majority and the Republican opposition right now?" WAXMAN:  Since Obama has become president, the Republicans have said no to an economic stimulus bill, are saying no to the global warming...

Just in: The Toledo Police Department confirms that one of its records clerks has been charged with performing an unlawful search of Joe The Plumber’s records. That makes two Ohio government employees identified in the snooping case. (Obama donor Helen Jones-Kelly, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, approved a separate search. More are being investigated.) snip...

Amid a severe kidney-donor shortage, an idea long considered anathema in the medical community is gaining new currency: payments for people willing to give up a kidney. One of the most outspoken voices on the topic isn't a free-market libertarian, but a prominent transplant surgeon named Arthur Matas. Dr. Matas, 59 years old, is a Canadian-born physician best known for his research at the University of Minnesota. Lately, he's been traveling the country trying to make the case that barring kidney sales is tantamount to sentencing some patients to death. "There's one clear argument for sales," Dr. Matas told a...

The Patriot Post, Founders' Quote Daily "The invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents." Copyright (c) 1996-2006 Publius Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

The Fourth Amendment to our Constitution protects Americans against "unreasonable searches and seizures" and against warrants being issued without "probable cause" that they have done something wrong. While most Americans who might be familiar with this portion of our Bill of Rights probably consider its protections to apply only to criminals and therefore of little consequence to them, the Fourth Amendment actually provides vital protection to all Americans, not just "criminals." In fact, its prefatory language makes this clear, explicitly providing that its goal is to assure that the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,...

  PATENT OFFENDING In October 1976, an Alaska pipeline engineer named John Moore became seriously, mysteriously ill. Eventually, he found himself at the UCLA Medical Center, where he was diagnosed with a rare, progressive form of blood cancer called hairy cell leukemia.To slow the disease and perhaps save his life, Moore's physician - Dr. David Golde - recommended removing Moore's spleen. The surgery was successful. Moore recovered and eventually returned to Alaska, with instructions to visit Golde for annual checkups.  Over the next eight years, Moore did so. During each visit, Golde would extract samples of Moore's blood, skin,...

Librarian Ensnared in Privacy Conflict Saturday, July 1, 2006 By MERRY FIRSCHEIN STAFF WRITER Can a librarian withhold information from the police and claim the public's right to privacy trumps catching a potential criminal? That question is at the center of a debate raging in Hasbrouck Heights and is one that constitutional law and privacy experts, librarians and law enforcement authorities nationwide are struggling to answer. In May, Hasbrouck Heights library director Michele Reutty refused to turn over circulation records to local police seeking a man who had allegedly made sexually threatening comments to a 12-year-old girl outside the library....