I think that, after today, we as citizens will lose some rights guaranteed to us by the 4th amendment. The easy answer is “Yes, I’d give up my right to keep my bags private to insure that my plane doesn’t crash into a building.” That seems simple, doesn’t it?
But I think we seriously need to think about how far we are willing to allow our rights become eroded. What search is too much?
This seems callous to even bring up. Hell, I’ve been watching the news all day. I know what happens when security is too lax. But I’ve also been wondering how far we should allow the pendulum to swing the other way.
David Horowitz on Salon is now calling for profiling all Middle Easterners, Bill of Rights and equal protection under the law be damned. He also used the cliche “wakeup call” twice in as many paragraphs and advocated the completely irrelevant missile defense thing.
be prepared for them to say the reason we didn’t know this was going to happen was because of Bin Laden’s use of data encryption. Get ready for a new call to ban PGP…
I don’t think the 4th Amendment needs to be called into question. I don’t consider it unreasonable at all to have your luggage and belongings thoroughly searched before boarding an aircraft.
The Fourth Amendment doesn’t stop luggage searches now. It is a voluntary, consent, search, and as such doesn’t implicate the Fourth Amendment. You are free to refuse to have your bag searched. Of course, the airline is under no obligation to board you in that event.
This is not the way. Certainly, there are things which could have been done that may have prevented this. However, re-defining the fourth ammendment ex-post-facto is not the solution.
Ender, your proposition assumes that what is needed is More Of The Same: MORE security checkpoints for passengers, MORE searching of passengers and their baggage, MORE restrictions about who or what will be let onto the plane. I submit that we should not, as you say, allow the pendulum to swing the other way, but look for solutions along a different path.
I do not agree to “give up my right to keep my bags private to insure that my plane doesn’t crash into a building.” Rather I submit that complacency will eventually cause these measures to be inadequate. Security must be established such that complacency will not enter the picture. I assume those measures are the topic for another discussion, which is why they are not included in this thread.
Following up on what Bricker pointed out, it’s not clear that the Fourth Amendment is implicated in airport security searches. You consent to the “search” as a condition of boarding a plane, or of having your luggage board the plane. In the same way, you consent to having your car “searched” in some states to determine whether it is operational as a condition of obtaining a registration and plate.
Now it would be different if you were stopped and searched as a condition of entering an airport…
Caspar Weinberger addressed precisely this point yesterday – and his remarks were that we would have to find constitutional ways to prevent such a horror from ever recurring. (Emphasis mine.) Though I’ve often disagreed with his stances on many issues, I think he was precisely right here.
We never need to have a case of “To save freedom, it was necessary to destroy freedom.”
And you do not have the right to do anything your little heart desires whenever and wherever you choose. That is license, not freedom under laws made by the common consent of the governed. You wanna board a plane? Submit to a search as a precondition. Nobody’s obliging you to submit to the search – just making it a necessary condition of your taking a plane. You wouldn’t think twice about somebody being turned away because they wanted to fly for free and the airline expects to get paid for flying them somewhere – this is just another condition. (I can remember airports before they did the metal detector security stuff – it’s merely more of the same.) There is the potential for Fourth Amendment violations if the country is/gets sufficiently riled to suggest that being named, e.g., Hussein Bin Ali is sufficient grounds for the FBI to search your house. (Note the “don’t attack American Arabs/Muslims” threads elsewhere on this board.)
It’s your right to be secure from unlawful searches and seizures. It’s your privilege to pay your money, check your baggage, and board a plane – and if you exercise that privilege, the airline/FAA/whoever may choose to add the requirement that you waive your Fourth Amendment rights to the extent that ensuring the flight doesn’t get hijacked calls for – just as taking my last job meant waiving my First Amendment freedom of speech rights as regards any proprietary knowledge I might learn in consequence of my job. They weren’t depriving me of my right – simply offering to hire me if, among other things, I wouldn’t blab their secrets to their competitors, their clients unless in context of their getting paid for the knowledge, etc. If I don’t like keeping my mouth shut about this stuff, I can try for a job elsewhere with their blessing, but they’re not gonna hire me. Same deal with the airlines – you don’t want to get searched, you don’t fly with us – take a cab or walk.
I agree with almost everything, except this. The FAA can not require you to waive your Fourth Ammendment rights for any reason. As an arm of the Federal Government, it would by definition be unconstitutional for them to do so. Similarly, it would be unconstitutional for the FAA to require airlines to require passengers submit to searches.
To quote the movie “Aliens,” “I ain’t been keeping score, but I think we just got our a$$ kicked.” No, not yesterday. I am speaking of the rollbacks in our 4th Amendment rights which have taken place over the last 20 or so years. The list is endless: Pretext stops OK, Public Safety exception, Hot Pursuit, etc…There are dozens more in the name of the “War on Drugs.” Those have really worked to stem the flow :sarcasm:.
I don’t see how any more exceptions will help short of going back to the good old days: how about Writs of Assistance? May as well just burn the Constitution while we’re at it.
I forgot the most important exception: The “border context” exception. This one has already gotten rid of practically any 4th Amendment rights we ever had in airports. You can be searched NOW. No changes needed.
Oh, I agree with most things being said here. Flying on an airplane is NOT a right. It is a privilege. But even so, how far can searches go before we, as a society, say “Wait a second. I feel that this is unfair to search me just to allow me to fly. I understand that you’re looking for terrorists, but I am a law abiding citizen and feel that this search is too much.” At what point do we say that?
Full checks through luggage?
What if they ask for you to arrive 4 hours early for each flight to do a full background check?
What if they ask for a strip search on random people?
What if they ask to disassemble your laptop because they can’t tell if there might be a bomb inside there?
What if they refuse access to you because you’re carrying anything that could remotely be used to hijack the plane? The terrorists yesterday allegedly used box cutters and plastic knives.
None of these are a violation of your 4th amendment rights. You have no constitutional right to fly an airplane and can clearly choose an alternative. But what if there isn’t an alternative? What if these same procedures start to take place on Amtrack and Greyhound? What if toll booths on the freeway did this before you could pass?
At what point is too much on the risk that there might be a terrorist somewhere?
EnderW24, your questions are too good to be answered. “Where will we draw the line?” I have a lousy answer, “after we slide all the way down the slippery slope.” We haven’t hit bottom yet.
I posted this in another thread but it fits better in this one.
I personally am willing to go on board with no carry-on luggage, and I would also be willing to surrender any stabbing or cutting device, even something as silly as scissors. I want you, Ender, to feel safe as you hurdle through the air on board a 200 ton missile that the missile will not hit anything other than the landing runway. I don’t find it intrusive or invasive or any other in- word that I need to take some extraordinary steps to ensure the safety of hundreds of airborn people and thousands of people on the ground.
When I was on jury duty a few weeks ago, I had to pass through a metal detector to get into the court house, and my bag was x-rayed. They managed to locate & confiscate a small pair of child’s safety scissors in my bag. These are the scissors with the blunt tips that you might give to a blind epileptic child. These scissors would have a hard time cutting through a stick of soft butter, but they took them anyway.
On a recent visit to a local amusement park, I saw a person relieved of a very small pocket knife. The blade in this thing couldn’t have been more than an inch long. And do you know how they found it? Metal detectors. That’s right, they now have metal detectors at amusement parks:
How is it that minimum-wage amusement park employees can locate & confiscate a keychain-fob miniature swiss army knife, but people can get on passenger jets with razor blades?
Fine with me.
Then I’ll need to get up a few hours early that morning.
This one is a little bit of a stretch, but why “random” people? If a metal detector went off, those are tyhe people that need to be searched. If I was one of those people, and the security person couldn’t figure out what on my body was causing this, I don’t think I’d seriously object to stripping down to my skivvies, in private of course. I might bitch & moan, but that is the bad-tasting medicine we have to take sometimes.
My laptop is one inch thin, is that enough room for a bomb? I really don’t know how much room is required to conceal a bomb. How about I fire up my laptop to prove that it hasn’t been hollowed out to make room for a bomb?
This already happens. See my jury duty story (2nd paragraph of this post).
To sum up, I don’t personally have an objection to everything that goes on board (carry-on) being searched with a fine-toothed comb. This will probably cause passengers to bring fewer carry-on items, resulting in a balancing-out of the workload for luggage inspectors.
If they want me to open my mouth & count my cavities, fine with me.
The government “requires” you to waive your Fourth Amendment rights in all sorts of similar circumstances. Enter any military base, and you’re likely to see a sign that says you consent to a search of your vehicle while on post. The key is voluntariness. If you have ample opportunity to choose not to enter, then you’re not “required” to waive your rights - it’s voluntary. By the same token, the airlines can require you to submit your luggage to search as a condition of boarding the aircraft.
Now, could the government take that analogy further, requiring you to submit to searches of your car as a condition of driving on public roads, or of your person as a condition of walking along public sidewalks?
No. No, for two basic reasons. There is a manifestation of privacy in such actions that society has recognized as legitimate. Searches such as that would be “unreasonable” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. And in case that general assertion isn’t enough, there is ample case law that discusses the expectation of privacy for people in cars and walking around.
Secondly, the comparison is inapposite. Again returning to the key of voluntariness, even if we were to accept some crazy idea about searches for people walking around on public sidewalks, the people in question wouldn’t have the opportunity to decline the search and walk away, as they do when entering an airport’s secured area.
You know another way to ensure airline security? Pay the security personnel a whole lot more money so that they won’t be more subjected to bribes to look the other way. The situation here demonstrates that paying security people $6.00 an hour is not secure.
I think it would be alot better to simply put more security on the plane. How hard would it be to make the pilots section unreachable through the passenger section(ie if they tried to open the door while it was in the air they would be sucked out at 10,000 feet above the ground)? That would stop any hijacking right there.
Capacitor, take a look at some of our traitors like Robert Hanson. They weren’t underpaid. If people are going to take bribes, they will do so whether they make $6 an hour or $60 per hour.
Attrayant,
That was an interesting post. Obviously you’re very flexible about the issue of what others can do to you. That’s perfectly acceptable.
Me? I certainly don’t want to get blown up, or hijacked, etc. I’m willing to make many exceptions to my personal freedom to assure airport personnel that I won’t be the one to do those things they’re worried about.
But I also know that I value my personal freedom. I don’t want to lose my freedom because there’s a threat of something bad happening. There’s always a threat. That doesn’t change the fact that I have rights too.
So what happens when every form of mass transit requires an intense search? Then how much freedom are we giving up?
Worst of all, what happens if they take every precaution they can think of, limit our freedom, reduce our 4th amendment rights, and something bad still happens? What then?
Before 1961, there was no exclusionary rule deriving from the federal constitution for state court prosecutions – that is, the U.S. Supreme Court had never ruled that a state court could not use evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment against you. And in fact, you’ll see that the Fourth Amendment itself, which you posted in the OP, doesn’t say anything about what remedies will be available to someone who is unreasonably searched. The Amendment was adopted in the late eighteenth century; the Fourteenth Amendment, which made the Fourth applicable to the states, was adopted in the middle part of the nineteenth century. The wording hasn’t changed in all that time.
However, our authoritive interpretation of what they mean has changed considerably.
Even before this tragic event, searches at airports did not implicate the Fourth Amendment. If bus companies, train owners, and taxicabs demanded that you submit to a search before using their services, that would not implicate the Fourth Amendment either, since the Constitution limits government action, not rules imposed by businesses.
I guess I’m curious as to what “right” you have that you don’t want to lose? You have no “right” to bus, taxi, or airplane service. You certainly have no right to force bus drivers, taxicab operators, or airline pilots to fly you around if they don’t want to.