From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204)
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 94 17:03:27 PDT
To: jktaber@netcom.com
Subject: Re:  NYT article "traditional", my ass.
Message-ID: <9406060002.AA20606@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


John Taber writes:
> IMO, police wiretapping usurped a power forbidden to it by the Fourth. 

> To call usurped power "traditional" is pretty smarmy.

The Fourth Amendment is a good start, but it's by no means complete
protection - after all, it forbids "unreasonable" searches and seizures,
leaving only the police and the courts to decide what is "reasonable".
The police definition, before the Exclusionary Rule was "sounded useful",
and the courts have often let them get away with it - not surprising
from an organization with a tradition of upholding convictions of people
who dared publish pamphlets against the draft when the politicians were
trying to get into a war (Schenck ~1916), or of people who publish books
and magazines with non-nice descriptions of sex or support for Commie-nism.

Courts have generally been improving, and the Exclusionary Rule has
led to changes like New York City police getting search warrants
when they want to search places (they didn't bother getting any the year
before that rule was made!)  And while the 9th  and 10th Amendments
are largely gone and forgotten, courts do at least acknowledge that
there are some rights of privacy.


		Bill

# Bill Stewart       AT&T Global Information Solutions (new name for NCR!)
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KH: "A good friend, good lover, good neighbor"
Q:  "That's all there is to being an anarchist?"
KH: "What did you expect, a lot of rules?"

		Karl Hess, 1923-1994 - R.I.P.