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Some more good news on the Fourth Amendment front, even if it's somewhat jurisdictionally limited: the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has (sort of) decided [PDF] the Supreme Court's Riley decision isn't just for cellphones. (via FourthAmendment.com)
In this case, the search of a robbery suspect's backpack while he was being questioned yielded a ring, a digital camera, and other items. The police warrantlessly searched the digital phone1, discovering a photo of the suspect next to a firearm later determined to have been stolen. This led to two convictions: one for the stolen property and one for carrying a firearm without a license.
The defendant challenged all of the evidence resulting from the warrantless search of the backpack, but the state got to keep most of what it found, along with the conviction for theft. But it didn't get to keep the firearm conviction, as the court here sees digital cameras to be almost no different than cellphones when it comes to warrantless searches and the Riley decision. From the opinion:
The Commonwealth counters that Riley does not apply because digital cameras, lacking the ability to function as computers, are not analogous to cell phones for Fourth Amendment purposes. We decline to address the constitutionality of the search of the digital camera on Fourth Amendment grounds, but we apply the reasoning in Riley in holding that the search of the camera violated art. 14 [of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights].
[1] [I suspect the author meant digital camera, not digital phone - Ed]
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(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday August 29 2017, @04:46PM (1 child)
No, Fascism ISN'T government and industry "working hand in hand". Fascism and Communism are exact opposites. In communism, government controls industry. In Fascism, industry controls the government.
With that terrible SCOTUS opinion that said that money is speech, our country is headed towards Fascism, but is nowhere near there yet.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 29 2017, @10:53PM
That's not what Mussolini thought when he defined the term. Mussolini thought it referred to a combination of government doing what powerful companies wanted and those powerful companies doing what the government wanted. That's why he chose the symbol of a bundle of sticks bound together with an axe at the center. The axe represents the power of the state, and the bundle of sticks represents how much stronger things are when they are bound together.
Please note that Mussolini's main purpose was to make Italy a strong country, as it had been during the days of the Romans. So he picked a Roman symbol. You might consider Mussolini's fascism a nation-building exercise, even though, as most such exercises, it miscarried. But also consider that today Italy is much stronger and more unified than it was during the period of Mussolini's rise to power. So it wasn't a total failure. (How much of the improvement is due to the episode of fascism, and how much to improved communication and transport, is a separate question, and one I have questions about, but it's worth remembering that prior to Mussolini Italians emigrating to the US used to identify with the cities that they came from rather than the country...and IIRC Italy was home to three or four separatist movements during that period. I also remember the area around Naples and south as being a separate country, but a brief search seems to show that this was a mistake. Possibly a bit earlier.
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