May 2014 – Page 22 – The Burning Platform

Pennsylvania Sure Has It’s Priorities Straight

It even amazes a pessimistice cynic like me sometimes when I read what goes on in PA. We have amazing shitties like Shittsburgh and Detroitadelphia, consistently rank amongst the worst for roads, take money from New Jersey so they can dump their shit in our state, have had great leadership like Ed Rendell, Corbett and Linda Thompson running our cities and state. I heard 2 bits of news in the last 12 hours that proclaim how messed up our priorities are.

Here is House Bill 1259 that moves to ban anyone 16 years old or younger from using an indoor tanning salon.

HARRISBURG — Legislation that prohibits children from using indoor tanning salons is awaiting the signature of Governor Tom Corbett.

House Bill 1259 cleared its final legislative hurdle Monday when it was approved by the state Senate.

The measure bans anyone 16 years old or younger from using an indoor tanning salon.

An amendment to the bill will allow 17-year-olds to use a tanning salon with parental consent.

Supporters of the measure say it will protect children from the potential dangers related to exposure.

See HERE.

So 16 year olds aren’t capable of determining whether or not they should or shouldn’t get tan at a salon. I thought they couldn’t afford it anymore because Obamacare was going to tax tanning salons. I have a question, will this bill only safeguard the chilrun from commercial tanning salons or will it outlaw their use for minors even in private homes. To ensure their safety we need to create a special task force that will monitor energy levels of homes and do no-knock raids on those suspected of allowing their the community’s chilrun to partake in black market tanning.

: Better not be tanning illegally in there oh, by the way soon we won’t need a warrant to enter your house

And then the PA Supreme Cocksuckers say the Keystone Copfuks don’t need a warrant to search your vehicle, they only need probable cause and reasonable suspicion. Because we are all viewed as threats, enemy combatants and suspects that means our vehicles cane be searched anytime, anyplace for any conceivable reason. I am sure this is an adequate safeguard; the same type of people making sure this isn’t abused are the same types that choked this kid unconcious because they said he was resisting arrest (Story of PA Supreme’s ruling below).

Divided Pa. Supreme Court OKs warrantless searches of cars

By Matt Miller | [email protected]The Patriot-News

April 30, 2014 at 12:36 PM, updated April 30, 2014 at 10:00 PM

As of this week, police in Pennsylvania no longer have to secure a warrant to search your car.

A sharply-split state Supreme Court ensured that by ruling Tuesday that Pennsylvania will henceforth follow federal law that requires only that police officers have probable cause before searching vehicles.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Seamus P. McCaffery. Read McCaffery’s profile.

Previously, officers in the Keystone State generally were required to obtain warrants before searching a vehicle unless the car’s owner gave consent for a search.

The decision to adopt the federal approach came on a 4-2 decision, with Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, and Justices J. Michael Eakin, Seamus P. McCaffery and Thomas G. Saylor in the majority.

Justices Debra McCloskeyTodd and Max Baer opposed the move. In a sharply-worded dissenting opinion, Todd contended that the majority’s decision “heedlessly contravenes over 225 years of unyielding protection against unreasonable search and seizure which our people have enjoyed as their birthright.”

In the majority opinion, McCaffery said adopting the federal stance will ensure that police in Pennsylvania follow a “uniform standard for a warrantless search of a motor vehicle, applicable in federal and state court, to avoid unnecessary confusion, conflict and inconsistency in this often-litigated area.”

Requiring that police have probable cause for warrantless vehicle searches “is a strong and sufficient safeguard against illegal searches of motor vehicles,” he wrote in the 62-page majority decision.

The Supreme Court’s ruling stems from a legal battle over a January 2010 traffic stop in Philadelphia.

Two police officers pulled over a sport-utility vehicle driven by Shiem Gary because they believed its window tinting was too dark. The officers then claimed they smelled marijuana coming from the SUV and that Gary told them there was “weed” in the vehicle.

Police said a drug-sniffing dog hit on the SUV and a subsequent warrantless search discovered about 2 pounds of marijuana hidden under the hood.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Debra McCloskey Todd. Read McCloskey Todd’s profile.

Gary challenged whether the police had legally obtained the drug evidence. The case came to the Supreme Court on appeal after the state Superior Court backed Gary.

In the Supreme Court’s majority decision, McCaffery noted the federal law allowing warrantless searches of vehicles with probable cause evolved from federal rulings that date to the Prohibition Era of the 1920s, when federal agents were chasing bootleggers.

McCaffery wrote that, while police must secure warrants before searching homes or offices, “there is a diminished expectation of privacy in motor vehicles” that is recognized not only by the feds, but by other states as well.

Todd countered in her dissenting opinion that the majority’s decision “severely diminishes” the “important personal privacy rights which owners and occupants of automobiles possess therein.”

“Advances in technology have caused cars to become data repositories revealing the most discrete information about how and where individuals drive, whom they call from their car and any number of other revealing insights into what they do in their daily lives,” she wrote. “For most people, the automobile…has become a rolling repository of their private possessions.”

When warrants are required before vehicle searches, at least a neutral judge, and not the police, makes the call regarding whether searches are legally permissible, she wrote.

In any case, Todd noted, advances in communications now enable police to obtain search warrants almost immediately, so time constraints that once might have hindered investigations no longer exist.

Original HERE.

Check your privelege and know your enemy.

http://thestrangestbrew.com/

Can Police Search Your Cell Phone Without A Warrant? The Supreme Court Is About To Decide

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Two very important cases related to the 4th Amendment protection of cellphone data went before the Supreme Court yesterday. At issue here is whether or not police can search someone’s cellphone upon arrest. As usual, the Obama administration’s Justice Department is arguing against the citizenry, and in favor of the (police) state. Let’s not forget that the “Justice” Department also argued in favor of the police being able to place GPS tracking devices on people’s cars without a warrant back in 2011. Fortunately, the Supreme Court ruled against it.

Naturally, the feds in the current case will discuss all of the criminals they were able to bring to justice as a result of these privacy violations, but they will certainly not point out America’s current epidemic of unlawful arrests, as well as arrests for petty non-violent crimes that happen each and every day. For instance, let’s not forget statistics that came out last fall from the FBI that showed police make an arrest every two seconds in the USA. I covered this in detail in my post: Land of the Free: American Police Make an Arrest Every 2 Seconds in 2012.

That translates to 12.2 million arrests in 2012, only 521,196 of which were for violent crimes. So should cops be able to search cellphones of millions of Americans being arrested for non-violent crimes such as drug possession? Or what about the street artist in NYC who was unlawfully arrested for putting on a puppet show? Or the guy who’s house was raided by police for a parody Twitter account. Allowing cops to search cellphones upon arrest in a trigger happy police state seems barbaric, immoral and downright stupid to me.

Furthermore, isn’t it interesting that the feds appear so obsessed with taking away your civil liberties to catch petty criminals, yet they couldn’t put a single banker behind bars for the far more egregious crime of destroying the U.S. economy and ruining millions of lives?

Here are some excerpts from a The New York Times article to help you get up to speed on what’s at stake:

WASHINGTON — In a major test of how to interpret the Fourth Amendment in the digital age, the Supreme Court on Tuesday will consider two cases about whether the police need warrants to search the cellphones of the people they arrest.

“The implications of these cases are huge,” said Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, noting that about 12 million people are arrested every year, often for minor offenses, and that about 90 percent of Americans have cellphones.

The justices will have to decide how to apply an 18th-century phrase — the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” — to devices that can contain 100 times more information than is in the Library of Congress’s 72,000-page collection of James Madison’s papers.

Others say there must be a different standard because of the sheer amount of data on and available through cellphones. In February, for instance, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals suppressed evidence found on the phone of a high school student who was arrested on charges of causing a disturbance on a school bus. “Searching a person’s cellphone,” the court said, “is like searching his home desk, computer, bank vault and medicine cabinet all at once.”

Officials in California told the justices that searches are required because cellphones can be used to set off bombs. Mr. Riley’s lawyers responded that “this scarcely resonates as an everyday concern.”

Oh yeah, destroy privacy rights for 320 million people because a phone could potentially trigger a bomb. You can’t get much more stupid and pathetic than that argument.

In any event, the Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday, and from what I can gather the justices appear somewhat split. The conservative justices seem to side with the feds, while the liberal justices appear on the side of privacy. Professor Orin Kerr of The George Washington University Law School wrote in The Washington Post that he expects a middle-ground rule, which would make searches legal in some cases and illegal in others.

On a related note, the Pennsylvania state supreme court just ruled against civil liberties with regard to warrantless car searches. Whereas in the past police would need a warrant in all cases unless there were “exigent circumstances,” now the supposed smell of pot or a dog signaling for a search is good enough. This is extremely concerning given the fact that often times such “probable cause” is a bullshit excuse to violate your rights and no drugs are ever found. The viral video from Tennessee on Independence Day last year is a case in point. Recall: Extremely Powerful Video: Happy 4th of July from a Police State Checkpoint.