This comes from Yale Kamisar at the University of Michigan Law School:

“Throughout American history, the government has said we’re in an unprecedented crisis and that we must live without civil liberties until the crisis is over. It’s a hoax.”

The punchline is that Kamisar isn’t talking about wiretapping or search engine snooping — or anything post 9/11. I pulled the quote from a 1990 Newsweek article about new “get tough” tactics in the war on drugs. Specficially, the article mentions the increasingly popular tactic of sending SWAT teams crashing into homes to serve drug warrants, and how disturbingly frequently it is that SWAT teams come crashing into the wrong home.

Glad we cleared that problem up!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2006 at 2:16 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.