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Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
In a victory for privacy rights at the border, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit today ruled that forensic searches of electronic devices carried out by border agents without any suspicion that the traveler has committed a crime violate the U.S. Constitution.
The ruling in U.S. v. Kolsuz is the first federal appellate case after the Supreme Court's seminal decision in Riley v. California (2014) to hold that certain border device searches require individualized suspicion that the traveler is involved in criminal wrongdoing. Two other federal appellate opinions this year—from the Fifth Circuit and Eleventh Circuit—included strong analyses by judges who similarly questioned suspicionless border device searches.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Monday May 14 2018, @06:37PM
For another aspect of this, see: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvkgnp/law-professor-police-interrogation-law-constitution-survival [vice.com]
"In 2008, Duane, a professor at Virginia's Regent Law School, gave a lecture about the risks of talking to police that was filmed and posted to YouTube. It's since been viewed millions of times, enjoying a new viral boost after the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer spurred interest in false confessions. His argument, which he's since expanded into a new book called You Have the Right to Remain Innocent, is that even if you haven't committed a crime, it's dangerous to tell the police any information. You might make mistakes when explaining where you were at the time of a crime that the police interpret as lies; the officer talking to you could misremember what you say much later; you may be tricked into saying the wrong things by cops under no obligation to tell you the truth; and your statements to police could, in combination with faulty eyewitness accounts, shoddy "expert" testimony, and sheer bad luck, lead to you being convicted of a serious crime. Duane's book details several outrageous incidents just like that around the country, clearly showing the many ways the system is stacked against suspects. These include a proliferation of poorly written laws that make nearly anything a potential crime, rules that allow prosecutors to cherry-pick only the most damning parts of police interrogations at trials, and a little-known 2013 Supreme Court ruling allowing prosecutors to tell juries that defendants had invoked the Fifth Amendment—in other words, telling an officer you are making use of your right to remain silent could wind up being used as evidence against you. For that reason, Duane thinks that you shouldn't even tell the police that you are refusing to talk. Your safest course, he says, is to ask in no uncertain terms for a lawyer, and keep on asking until the police stop talking to you."
He also gives an example where a boy was interrogated for hours, and all the time his parents were outside the room with a lawyer -- but because the boy did not say those four words, the interrogation went on and on. Sometimes suspects are emotionally beaten down after many hours and then confess to a crime they did not commit just to get the police to stop the interrogation. Imagine having that happen when all the time there is a lawyer right outside the door and you could stop the interrogation of the moment with those four words "I want a lawyer" -- but you don't know to say them. And they can't be said in a wishy-wash "maybe I want to talk to a lawyer" or "my dad says I should ask for a lawyer" or such. Obviously, the investigation will likely still proceed afterwards, but at a different pace and in a different way.
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.