To Whom the 4th Amendment Doesn’t Apply | Hacker News Reader

To Whom the 4th Amendment Doesn’t Apply

policeledintelligence.com

50 pointscpswan10 comments

The DHS also claims that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to anyone within 100 miles of an international border - which includes a majority of the entire US population.

http://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-constitution-free-zone-...

Edit: I appear to be misinformed about this.

That's a blatant overstatement of the situation, and is one of the worst bits of misrepresentation ever published by the ACLU (which is usually pretty contentious about this sort of thing).

The "100 miles" rule applies to searches at inland border checkpoints: http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2013/02/does-a-constituti.... DHS is not claiming that the 4th amendment "doesn't apply to anyone within 100 miles of an international border." It claims that:

"The DHS ruling from last Friday said its 'warrantless searches' applied to the U.S. “border and its functional equivalent,” with no mention of the extended 100-mile border."

The claim is that DHS doesn't need a warrant to search at border checkpoints or checkpoints which are the functional equivalent of border checkpoints. All the claim means is that searches don't have to be at the literal border (which might be in the middle of the desert), but can be slightly inland on major thoroughfares that host a lot of cross-border traffic. But it still has to be of the nature of a border search.

It is a totally common-sense policy--nobody ever conceived that the warrant requirement would apply to border searches. Searchers at the border were authorized by the very first Congress (which was full of framers who probably would have known if they had intended the 4th amendment to prevent border searches!) See: http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Border_search_exception#cite_not....

As a past ACLU donor, this is the one bit of agita they sponsor that drives me nuts. There are cases, from decades ago, that establish that the USG cannot conduct warrantless searches under the border search exemption simply because the search occurs within 100 miles of a border.

Half the country (well, half the part of the country that pays attention to this stuff) really believes that they're in a "4th Amendment Free Zone" so long as they're 100 miles of Canada, or an ocean. One worries that some of these people will therefore decide not to refuse searches.

Interesting theory about helping recipients of large numbers of subpoena's streamline their responses / minimize workloads. Personally I think that's giving the government too much credit as if they cared about the burdensome nature of generating such large numbers of overreaching requests.

Good article, though I'd argue that the U.S. has considered foreign citizens not to be fully covered by Constitutional rights since way before 1990.

Still, this must be very disturbing for H1B workers and other legal non-citizen residents.

And hugely disappointing.

Actually they fall under Constitutional protections while on U.S. soil, at least. At least as far as I understand the background of the NSA stuff in this scenario.

In fact that's one of the reasons the 'enemy combatant' prisons were at Gitmo in the first place, is that the Naval base is technically leased from Cuba and not actually U.S. soil, which meant (according to the legal theory) that some Constitutional protections didn't apply.

Really? For example, the 15th amendment of the US constitution doesn't apply to non-citizens (voting rights).

The US actually does a pretty good job of protecting non-citizens. Unless there is evidence that providing a right to a non-citizen is required for the proper functioning of the country, it has to be provided.

I can understand why voting rights would be limited to citizens, but protection against government abuse shouldn't be.

Go to page 10.

http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/crcl-bor...

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