About a year ago, I bitched and moaned about a routine traffic stop made on our tollway system. Some here claimed that my ideas were simply too far-fetched, and that I take a break. Pshaw.
Illinois has iPass, which permits you to buy a gadget and drive through the gateless tolls. Illinois is also forgiving. If you miss a toll, you can, within one calendar week, go online, and pay the toll without penalty.
A year ago, a huge drug bust was made. The police claimed that a truck carrying several millions in drugs failed to pay a toll, so they stopped it and accidently found the drugs, after the drivers permitted a search.
There are a couple of things wrong with this story. Even if you miss a toll, you can pay up to a week later. Next, if you are a professional driver of that large a quantity, you know that no cop can search your care without your permission. Even our supreme robes have so held. No permiso, no búsqueda. No búsqueda, no problema.
"Sure thing, officer, and would you like the trunk key?" R i i i i i i i g h t .
FROM THE CHURCH OF INEFFABLE STUPIDITY:
A story that makes the warrantless, unconstitutional, disgusting, and utterly fascist, NSA domestic surveillance suddenly make sense. Our DEA makes shit up. Under orders of the Attorney General.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
There is a concept in law, "
fruit of the poisonous tree," which has been black letter law far longer than I have been practicing. (black letter law means that the courts really, really, REALLY,
R E A L L Y mean it. Simply put, if you use illegal or warrantless means to gather information, every bit of data you received is barred at trial. You, as the prosecution, must play by the rules, or the courts emboss a big "F" (not in the Cheney style, but in how the case's result will adversely impact a prosecutor's future political career.) on your forehead.
The shit that the DEA is pulling is unimaginably unconstitutional. The idea that Obama's AG supports and promotes this makes me wonder what other unconstitutional crap this administration is pulling.
Yesterday, I diarrhea'd about the NSA and secrets. A few folks here took offense, and one even denied the facts that are easily available online. Today, all those questions should be put to rest.
We now live in a police state, like it or not. Police are arming up, and even defend the deadly tasering of 6 yr olds or 80 year old men. Their SWAT teams resemble folks going on a little IraqNami invasion force, far more than a safety conscious domestic police entity. We have gangs of heavily armed troops attacking a nature refuge, just to assassinate an innocent fawn, because it was being saved after losing its mom. We have police shoot unarmed folks in a car - over 127 times - for a traffic violation. Or shoot an unarmed man ON HIS DRIVEWAY, because he needed a smoke and was searching mom's car for a cigarette.
There is something horribly, terribly and immeasurably wrong with this country, and a lot of it has to do with our government. You would think that a constitutional scholar like Obama would put an end to it. Yet, the strongest statement he has made was long the lines of:
"Perhaps we should consider the possibility, of weighing whether or not it might be inappropriate to potentially let the thought cross our minds, as to making a choice about whether to decide to think about the potential of determining whether we could or might, in the future, at some undisclosed time and place, meeting head on a virtual fork in the road, raise the issue of whether we might wonder about a potential determination of the topic of whether we should discuss our national domestic surveillance systems. Or not."
Heh, and then we have the sequester - a program (pogrom?) that no sane politician ever intended to have as a law in farce. And yet, here it is, destroying the lives of millions around the country. And what do the GOP worry about most? The adverse impact on our military, NSA, and domestic goon squads. Their solution is to cut more aid to the destitute, and pay up for even more warrantless surveillance and domestic control.
This is NOT the America that I was proud to be born in, to grow up in, to study, and to service as a lawyer. We used to be the social lubricant that made our system work, from suing and being sued, to fixing horrendous injustices. No longer. We cannot even see secret FISA court rulings that tell us that our lying NSA directors are deliberately and with malice aforethought, destroying our constitutional rights. Even when the FISA court wants to publish their findings.
Mr. Obama. There is one person that can put a stop to this crap. Take a good long look in the mirror, and thing about it. Then get back to us. Right now, not only is the tarnish growing on your presidency, it is rabidly and rapidly turning to rust.