Title | Could the Third Amendment be Used to Fight the Surveillance State? | |
Date | Monday November 30 2015, @12:31PM | |
Author | cmn32480 | |
Topic | ||
from the fight-back dept. |
The NSA can't capture everything that crosses the Internet—but doesn't need to.
Amongst very nerdy constitutional law circles, the Third Amendment is practically a joke. It's never been the primary basis of a Supreme Court decision, and it only turns up rarely in legal cases. The reality is that the federal government isn't going to be sending American soldiers to individual homes anytime soon. Even The Onion tackled the issue in 2007: "Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year."
But in a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times , one California state lawmaker, Assemblyman Mike Gatto, has proposed a novel legal theory that could allow this amendment to fuel a major legal challenge to the American surveillance state:
Let's examine whether a case may be made. The National Security Agency is part of the Department of Defense and therefore of our nation's military. By law, the NSA director must be a commissioned military officer, and per its mission statement, the NSA gathers information for military purposes. That's strong evidence that NSA personnel would qualify as soldiers under the 3rd Amendment.
And why did the framers prohibit the government lodging soldiers in private homes? Besides a general distaste for standing armies, quartering was costly for homeowners; it was also an annoyance that completely extinguished a family's sense of privacy and made them feel violated. Sound familiar?
Just like many cases before him, Elliott Schuchardt could not prove standing.
"I think they need to start taking other tools from the toolbox," Gatto told Ars. "It's definitely a long shot argument and is definitely one that has certain deficiencies, but what got me going on that line of reasoning is that when it has been cited in privacy cases it's been big landmark privacy cases—you get a sense that our Founding Fathers valued privacy. There's a clear message that privacy is something."
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printed from SoylentNews, Could the Third Amendment be Used to Fight the Surveillance State? on 2024-03-29 02:07:55