From -
Guest Post by John W. Whitehead
“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority.
For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our
liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the
beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be
appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation
Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—are being choked out by a
prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right
to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and
arrest
any individual at
any time and for the
slightest provocation.
Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws,
forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans,
forced inclusion in biometric databases—these are just a few ways in
which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over
what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government
officials.
Worse, on a daily basis, Americans are being made to relinquish the
most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic
blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure,
fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to clear the nearly
insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United
States: we are all guilty until proven innocent.
Thus far, the courts have done little to preserve our Fourth
Amendment rights, let alone what shreds of bodily integrity remain to
us.
For example, David Eckert was forced to undergo
an anal cavity search, three enemas, and a colonoscopy
after allegedly failing to yield to a stop sign at a Wal-Mart parking
lot. Cops justified the searches on the grounds that they suspected
Eckert was carrying drugs because his “posture [was] erect” and “he kept
his legs together.” No drugs were found. During a routine traffic stop,
Leila Tarantino was subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain
view of passing traffic, during which a
female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino.
Nothing illegal was found. Nevertheless, such searches have been
sanctioned by the courts, especially if accompanied by a search warrant
(which is easily procured), as justified in the government’s pursuit of
drugs and weapons.
Close to 600 motorists leaving Penn State University one Friday night
were stopped by police and, without their knowledge or consent,
subjected to a breathalyzer test using
flashlights that can detect the presence of alcohol on a person’s breath.
These passive alcohol sensors are being hailed as a new weapon in the
fight against DUIs. However, because they cannot be used as the basis
for arrest, breathalyzer tests are still required. And for those who
refuse to submit to a breathalyzer, there are forced blood draws. One
such person is Michael Chorosky, who was surrounded by police, strapped
to a gurney and then
had his blood forcibly drawn after refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test. “What country is this? What country is this?” cried Chorosky during the forced blood draw.
Thirty states presently allow police to do forced blood draws on drivers as part of a nationwide “No Refusal” initiative funded by the federal government.
Not even court
rulings declaring such practices to be unconstitutional in the absence of a warrant
have slowed down the process. Now the police simply keep a magistrate
on call to rubber stamp the procedure over the phone. That’s what is
called an end-run around the law, and we’re seeing more and more of
these take place under the rubric of “safety.”
The National Highway Safety Administration, the same government
agency that funds the “No Refusal” DUI checkpoints and forcible blood
draws, is also funding
nationwide roadblocks aimed at getting drivers to “voluntarily” provide police with DNA derived from saliva and blood samples, reportedly to study inebriation patterns. When faced with a request for a DNA sample by police during a mandatory roadblock,
most participants understandably fail to appreciate the “voluntary” nature of such a request. Unfortunately, in at least 28 states, there’s nothing voluntary about having
one’s DNA collected by police
in instances where you’ve been arrested, whether or not you’re actually
convicted of a crime. The remaining states collect DNA on conviction.
All of this DNA data is being fed to the federal government. Indeed, the
United States has the largest DNA database in the world, CODIS, which
is managed by the FBI and is growing at an alarming rate.
Airline passengers, already subjected to virtual strip searches, are
now being scrutinized even more closely, with the Customs and Border
Protection agency tasking airport officials with
monitoring the bowel movements of passengers suspected of ingesting drugs. They even have a special hi-tech toilet designed to filter through a person’s fecal waste.
Iris scans, an essential part of the U.S. military’s
boots-on-the-ground approach to keeping track of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan,
are becoming a de facto method of building the government’s already
mammoth biometrics database. Funded by the Dept. of Justice, along with
other federal agencies, the iris scan technology is being incorporated
into
police precincts, jails, immigration checkpoints, airports and even schools.
School officials—from elementary to college—have begun using iris scans in place of traditional ID cards. As for
parents wanting to pick their kids up from school, they have to first submit to an iris scan.
As for those endless pictures everyone so cheerfully uploads to
Facebook (which has the largest facial recognition database in the world) or anywhere else on the internet, they’re all being accessed by the police, filtered with facial recognition software,
uploaded into the government’s mammoth biometrics database and cross-checked against its criminal files. With good reason, civil libertarians fear these databases could “
someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas.”
As these police practices and data collections become more widespread
and routine, there will be no one who is spared from the indignity of
DNA sampling, blood draws, and roadside strip and/or rectal or vaginal
searches, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. We’re little more
than economic units, branded like cattle, marked for easy
identification, and then assured that it’s all for our “benefit,” to
weed us out from the “real” criminals, and help the police keep our
communities “safe” and secure.
What a bunch of hokum. As I point out in my book
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these databases, forced extractions and searches are not for
our benefit. They will not keep us safe. What they will do is keep us mapped, trapped, targeted and controlled.
Moreover, what if you don’t want to be forced to trust the government
with your most intimate information? What if you don’t trust the
government to look out for your best interests in the first place? How
do you protect yourself against having your blood forcibly drawn, your
DNA extracted, your biometrics scanned and the most intimate details of
who you are—your biological footprint—uploaded into a government
database?
What recourse do you have when that information, taken against your
will, is shared, stolen, sold or compromised, as it inevitably will be
in this age of hackers? We know that databases can be compromised. We’ve
seen it happen to databases kept by health care companies, motor
vehicle agencies, financial institutions, retailers and intelligence
agencies such as the NSA. In fact,
2014 was dubbed the Year of the Hack
in light of the fact that over a billion personal data records were
breached, leaving those unlucky enough to have their data stolen
vulnerable to identity theft, credit card fraud and all manner of
criminal activities carried out in their names.
Banks now offer services —for a fee—to help you in the event that
your credit card information is compromised and stolen. You can also pay
for services to protect against identity theft in the likely event that
your social security information is compromised and misused. But what
happens when your DNA profile is compromised? And how do you defend
yourself against charges of criminal wrongdoing in the face of erroneous
technological evidence—DNA, biometrics, etc., are not infallible—that
place you at the scene of a crime you didn’t commit?
“Identity theft could lead to the opening of new fraudulent credit
accounts, creating false identities for criminal enterprises, or a host
of other serious crimes,”
said Jason Hart,
vice president of cloud services, identity and data protection at the
digital security company Gemalto. “As data breaches become more
personal, we’re starting to see that the universe of risk exposure for
the average person is expanding.”
It’s not just yourself you have to worry about, either. It’s also
anyone related to you—who can be connected by DNA. These genetic
fingerprints, as they’re called, do more than just single out a person.
They also show who you’re related to and how. As the Associated Press
reports,
“DNA samples that can help solve robberies and murders could also, in
theory, be used to track down our relatives, scan us for susceptibility
to disease, or monitor our movements.”
Capitalizing on this, poli
ce in California, Colorado, Virginia and Texas use DNA found at crime scenes to identify and target family members
for possible clues to a suspect’s whereabouts. Who will protect your
family from being singled out for “special treatment” simply because
they’re related to you? As biomedical researcher Yaniv Erlich warns, “If
it’s not regulated and the police can do whatever they want … they can
use your DNA to infer things about your health, your ancestry, whether
your kids are your kids.”
These are just a few of the questions we should be asking before
these technologies and programs become too entrenched and irreversible.
While the Fourth Amendment was created to prevent government
officials from searching an individual’s person or property without a
warrant and probable cause—evidence that some kind of criminal activity
was afoot—the founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we
needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy
on a cellular level. Yet that’s exactly what we are lacking.
Once again, technology has outdistanced both our understanding of it
and our ability to adequately manage the consequences of unleashing it
on an unsuspecting populace. As for all of those databases being sold to
you for your safety and benefit, whether or not they’re actually
effective in catching criminals, you can be assured that they will
definitely be snatching up innocent citizens, as well.
In the end, what all of this amounts to is a carefully crafted
campaign designed to give the government access to and control over what
it really wants: you.
By Keith Coffman
