Every Step You Take…Every Move You Make…

Picture yourself sitting on the veranda of your beautiful summer home in St. Tropez over looking the ocean, hands behind your head, smoking a cigar… When all of a sudden you’re surrounded by men dressed in black, faces covered, magnums pointed in your direction from every angle, and someone shouting at you to get on the ground… While you’re on the ground, the big brute whose knee is jutting into your back yells into the back of your head that you are under arrest by the U.S. Government. Your eyes peer in through your sliding glass doors and find a sleuth of officers tearing apart the inside of your house, dumping drawers and their contents on the floor… They haven’t read me my rights! They haven’t served me with a search warrant! Isn’t this illegal?!... Actually. It’s not.



One of 3 judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan wrote “The 4th Amendment’s requirement of reasonableness…applies to extraterritorial searches and seizures of U.S citizens”. So, what does this mean? It means that if the government can come with a reason (a “reasonable” reason), they can tap your phones, search your property and not have to Mirandize you when they bring you into custody. Reasonableness… Seems quite vague to me.



My question here is, “What constitutes ‘reason enough’ to ‘trump a United State’s citizens rights”?



This is one of those “issues” that I’m sitting on the fence about. Why? Well, I want the government to catch suspected terrorists before they’re able to carry out any attacks that could kill an innumerable amount of victims. My fear is… Are we opening up Pandora’s Box? If they can do this to suspected terrorists with U.S citizenship/ U.S. naturalization who are living outside the U.S., what’s stopping them from expanding their reach to other ‘reasonable’ crimes? Of course, the old saying goes “If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide”. Which I believe it true to some extent… But isn’t this taking away our “option” of being able to retain some measure of secrecy? Aren’t the definitions of ‘privacy’ and ‘secrecy’ very similar?



I just decided to write about this article , because I feel like its one more step that’s being taken (right under our noses) to living in a global “Big Brother” world, where everything we do can always be monitored in the name of some unnamable social benefit…