All posts tagged: fourth amendment

Georgia cop who killed donkey claims immunity, citing ‘imminent threat’

Georgia cop who killed donkey claims immunity, citing ‘imminent threat’

Published by José Betancourt

The Georgia officer responsible for killing a 1-year-old miniature donkey, HeeHaw, has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against him, claiming the body camera footage proves he “reasonably believed the donkey posed an imminent threat to a fellow officer.” But even if it doesn’t, the officer argues he is immune from liability.  In the early morning hours of August 30, Hannah Michelle Israel was at her Cedartown home in western Georgia when she received a distressing phone call. A supervisor with the Cedartown Police Department “tersely informed [Israel] that a donkey on her property had been ‘dispatched,’” according to her federal lawsuit. After some clarification, she learned that police had not only entered her enclosed private property in the middle of the night without permission while looking for a missing person, but also shot and killed her miniature donkey in the process.  Israel immediately set out to search for her beloved pet, HeeHaw, only to find her bottle-raised donkey’s lifeless body alone in her field. Israel told ABC7 News the incident has left her …

FBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms

FBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms

Published by skeptic

The FBI has resumed purchasing reams of Americans’ data and location histories to aid federal investigations, the agency’s director, Kash Patel, testified to lawmakers on Wednesday. This is the first time since 2023 that the FBI has confirmed it was buying access to people’s data collected from data brokers, who source much of their information — including location data — from ordinary consumer phone apps and games, per Politico. At the time, then-FBI director Christopher Wray told senators that the agency had bought access to people’s location data in the past but that it was not actively purchasing it. When asked by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, if the FBI would commit to not buying Americans’ location data, Patel said that the agency “uses all tools … to do our mission.” “We do purchase commercially available information that is consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us,” Patel testified Wednesday. Wyden said buying information on Americans without obtaining a …

US Lawmakers Move to Kill the FBI’s Warrantless Wiretap Access

US Lawmakers Move to Kill the FBI’s Warrantless Wiretap Access

Published by skeptic

A bipartisan privacy coalition in the United States Congress introduced legislation on Thursday that would impose a strict warrant requirement on the FBI’s backdoor searches of Americans’ communications, aligning federal law with a 2025 federal court ruling that found the warrantless practice unconstitutional. The bill, the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026, repeals controversial expansions of the government’s warrantless wiretapping authority while overhauling key aspects of federal surveillance law—setting up a showdown with the US intelligence community and its congressional allies weeks before a sweeping global spy program sunsets on April 20. Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Lee are leading the legislative push alongside Representatives Warren Davidson and Zoe Lofgren. The measure carries endorsements from civil liberties organizations across the political spectrum. The legislation arrives in a surveillance landscape fundamentally altered since 2024, when Congress last renewed the wiretap program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill’s sponsors framed the Government Surveillance Reform Act as a necessary corrective to a surveillance state that has been supercharged by modern technology …

Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI?

Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI?

Published by skeptic

That’s because until the last several decades, people weren’t generating massive clouds of data that opened up new possibilities for surveillance. The Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, was written when collecting information meant entering people’s homes.  Subsequent laws, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 or the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, were passed when surveillance involved wiretapping phone calls and intercepting emails. The bulk of laws governing surveillance were on the books before the internet took off. We weren’t generating vast trails of online data, and the government didn’t have sophisticated tools to analyze the data.  Now we do, and AI supercharges what kind of surveillance can be carried out. “What AI can do is it can take a lot of information, none of which is by itself sensitive, and therefore none of which by itself is regulated, and it can give the government a lot of powers that the government didn’t have before,” says Rozenshtein.  AI can aggregate individual pieces of information to spot patterns, draw inferences, …

US Judge Rules ICE Raids Require Judicial Warrants, Contradicting Secret ICE Memo

US Judge Rules ICE Raids Require Judicial Warrants, Contradicting Secret ICE Memo

Published by skeptic

A federal judge in Minnesota ruled last Saturday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violated the Fourth Amendment after they forcibly entered a Minnesota man’s home without a judicial warrant. The conduct of the agents closely mirrors a previously undisclosed ICE directive that claims agents are permitted to enter people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. The ruling, issued by US District Court judge Jeffrey Bryan in response to a petition for a writ of habeas corpus on January 17, did not assess the legality of ICE’s internal guidance itself. But it squarely holds that federal agents violated the United States Constitution when they entered a residence without consent and without a judge-signed warrant—the same conditions ICE leadership has privately told officers is sufficient for home arrests, according to a complaint filed by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group representing whistleblowers from the public and private sector. In a sworn declaration, Garrison Gibson, a Liberian national who has lived in Minnesota for years under an ICE order of supervision, says agents arrived …