I’m at a loss to explain why the Democrats can be perceived by many as the defenders of civil liberties. They’re awful, not only on the rights they oppose, like the Second Amendment, but also on the ones they supposedly support, like the Fourth:
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. . . The Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.
Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department’s request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans’ privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed.
I can’t figure these guys out. According to the Democrats, an intelligence agency conducting surveillance on a foreign terrorist overseas should stop listening whenever they call someone in the United States, or even route a communication through the United States. But on the other hand, they think the government should be free electronically to track the movements of US citizens at home. What is wrong with these guys?
(Via Instapundit.)
Internet Scofflaw 