It’s About Time
December 23rd, 2005 at 9:18 pm by Preston Taylor Holmes(via Ace)
The leaks just keep on comin’.
Feds monitor muslims without search warrants – search mosques for dirty bombs.
In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.
Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government’s domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought.
All I’ve got to say, is that it’s about damned time.
December 23rd, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Unfortunately, the right to radiation privacy is in the constitution. Damn it.
December 24th, 2005 at 2:39 am
They should’t need a warrant for something like that if they’re just carrying a Geiger counter around in a public place. There would be no expectation of privacy for walking into a public building (like a church or mosque) that lots of people have access to.
As seen in the Kyllo case, the question is where technology can begin in a 4th Amendment case. The terror investigations might not have to conform to the probable cause standards of a traditional criminal investigation and the technology for measuring radiation in a mosque might not be considered as invasive as say…a thermal imager pointing at someone’s house to pick up heat from “grow” lamps. As a mosque is a public place and a home would shelter a greater expectation of privacy.