If I’m reading this Daniel Heninger piece correctly, he’s saying that because the Supreme Court recently ruled that police may enter a home without a warrant if they have reason to believe there is iminent danger inside, and because terrorism puts all of us in iminent danger, federal authorities should be able to enter any home at any time without a warrant, so long as they’re doing so under a terrorism investigation.

If that weren’t enough, get a load of Heninger’s explanation:

In a helpful June 2002 essay on all this for the Yale Law Journal, “Local Policing after the Terror,” William J. Stuntz, a Fourth Amendment specialist at Harvard Law School, argued that increasing legal authority for the police was appropriate in the post-9/11 world. The problem with Big Brotherism, he says, is not the surveillance itself but that they might use the information to “punish you for ordinary behavior.” To avoid tying the war on terror in legalistic knots, he proposes that we forbid public disclosure of any information gathered in anti-terror searches “where the search tactic is secret and potentially invasive.” Then restrict use of that information only for prosecutions of the most serious crimes.

This sounds like 9/11 policy for adults, in contrast to Washington’s “shocked” reaction to the anti-terror surveillance programs.

So disregarding the Fourth Amendment is okay in terrorism cases, so long as the investigation, search, and evidence are all kept secret.

“Adults” I’d think would recognize that “keeping everything secret” wouldn’t protect against abuses, it would guarantee them. “Adults” might also note that it took just months for the PATRIOT Act powers passed to fight terrorism to be used by federal officials in cases completely unrelated to terrorism. Think that won’t happen if we suspend the friggin’ Fourth Amendment, too?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 9:15 am 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.