Fourth Amendment rights for all?
Not likely.
Matt Taibbi writes on Seth Rosenfeld's story and ordeal in attaining the state's documentation of what would be judged illegal FBI surveillance and harassment were the Fourth Amendment actually a working barrier against the lawless and often idiotic infringements against liberty our citizens have endured over the past several decades, continuing today.
Rosenfeld began his quest to get the University of California F.B.I. files in 1981, a full 30 years before the Occupy movement. He had no way of knowing that his epic fight to use the Freedom of Information law to release these documents — which succeeded only after four lengthy, exasperating lawsuits — would conclude just as America seemed to be entering another period of ’60s-style street tumult and divisiveness. ...
Rosenfeld’s decades of hard-fought research into the romanticized, rapidly receding past of the ’60s era produce a relevant warning. Domestic intelligence forces will tend to use all the powers they’re given (and even some that they’re not) to spy on people who are politically defenseless, irrelevant from a security standpoint and targeted for all the wrong reasons. And policemen who abuse their powers don’t just ruin innocent lives and undermine our faith in the law. They miss the real threats
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