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Mr. Moye was originally from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., but lived in the Charleston area and was visiting New Orleans at the time of his death, his sister Kimberli Duncan, 46, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

He was always fighting for justice, equality and fairness, she said. He always wanted to do for others. He never put himself first.

In 2015, Mr. Moye demonstrated on behalf of the family of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was fatally shot by a police officer in North Charleston that April.

Two months after that, nine black churchgoers in Charleston were murdered by the white supremacist Dylann S. Roof. Mr. Moye participated in demonstrations and spoke to news outlets about the history of racial inequality in the United States.

And when Donald J. Trump went to Mount Pleasant, a city near Charleston, for a campaign rally in December 2015, calling for a complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, Mr. Moye was there, too, in protest.

You would think wed learn from history, he told The New York Times, adding that his father was a Muslim.

Last year, when Mr. Moye tried to wrest the Confederate flag from a demonstrator, he did not succeed. The police surrounded him, eventually bringing him down to the ground and then arresting him. But after the video of his flying leap spread online, he told The Washington Post that he had tried to take the flag away from the demonstrator to help them understand what it is to meet a real resistance, to meet people that arent scared.

Ms. Duncan said her family was still waiting for answers about what happened to Mr. Moye, and she hoped his activism would inspire others to keep working for racial equality. Id like to keep up his dream, keep up his faith, she said. He was absolutely serious about it.

Originally posted here:
Muhiyidin Moye, Black Lives Matter Activist, Is Shot and ...

A Black Lives Matter activist who spent the past few years fully engaged in the movement was killed during a visit to New Orleans Tuesday, authorities said.

The circumstances surrounding Muhiyidin Moyes death were unclear, but an officer responding to a call about gunshots found him lying on the ground, according to a New Orleans Police Department report.

Moye, 32, asked for help as police arrived, according to the police report, which also described a bicycle near him as being covered in blood.

The shooting occurred around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, and Moye later died in the hospital, New Orleans police spokesman Beau Tidwell said in a statement.

Moye was the activist caught on video last year in Charleston, South Carolina, as he grabbed a Confederate battle flag from a demonstrator live on television, but his impact on the community extended much further, his brother said.

He wouldnt just protest; he was in the communities, working, speaking with leaders, checking on families, Ibraheem Moye, 27, told ABC News of his brother. He wanted to show people that social injustice wasnt going to be allowed.

Muhiyidin Moye earned his bachelors degree from the University of South Carolina in Columbia and his masters from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, according to his brother.

His brother wasnt sure why Muhiyidin was visiting New Orleans but he suspected it involved his activism.

Moye had previously demonstrated on behalf of the family of Walter Scott, whom a North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer shot to death after stopping him for a non-functioning brake light. Moye also subsequently interrupted several City Council meetings there, demanding changes be made in the police department.

The former officer, Michael Slager, was sentenced to prison in connection with Scotts death.

No arrest has been made in connection with Moyes shooting death, police said.

Continue reading here:
SC Black Lives Matter activist Muhiyidin Moye killed ...

The United Nations-backed, internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) struggled in 2016 to assert itself in the capital Tripoli, as two authoritiesone also based in Tripoli and another in eastern Libyacontinued to compete for legitimacy and control over resources and infrastructure.

Forces aligned with all governments and dozens of militias continued to clash, exacerbating a humanitarian crisis with close to half-a-million internally displaced people. The civilian population struggled to gain access to basic services such as healthcare, fuel, and electricity.

Militias and armed forces affiliated with the two governments engaged in arbitrary detentions, torture, unlawful killings, indiscriminate attacks, abductions, and forcible disappearances. Criminal gangs and militias abducted politicians, journalists, and civiliansincluding childrenfor political and monetary gain. The domestic criminal justice system remained dysfunctional, offering no prospects for accountability, while the International Criminal Court (ICC), despite having jurisdiction over Libya provided by the UN Security Council, failed to open any new investigation into ongoing crimes.

The United States, United Kingdom, France, and the United Arab Emirates reportedly expanded their military activities in Libya to support forces in fighting extremists in Sirte and Benghazi.

The Islamic State (also known as ISIS) lost control over large parts of its self-proclaimed capital in Sirte, where it had been based since June 2015, and remained embroiled in fighting with Libyan and foreign forces. ISIS groups summarily executed people for alleged witchcraft and treason and imposed a severe and restrictive interpretation of Sharia law in areas under their control.

Tens of thousands of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from Africa and the Middle East transited through Libya on their way to Europe, with at least 4,518 drowning or going missing while crossing the Mediterranean in unsafe vessels. While in Libya, armed groups and guards at migrant detention facilities subjected many to forced labor, torture, sexual abuse, and extortion.

European Union efforts to stem migration from Libya risk condemning migrants and asylum seekers to violent abuse at the hands of government officials, militias, and criminal groups in Libya.

The Presidential Council (PC), the highest body of the GNA, arrived in March in Tripoli to take control of ministries and government facilities that had previously been under the control of the self-proclaimed National Salvation Government, which stepped down in April to make way for the GNA .

In October, the former prime minister of the National Salvation Government announced a comeback together with the rump General National Congress, the former legislature, and took over the Tripoli premises of the State Council, the advisory body attached to the GNA.

The Interim Government, meanwhile, refused to recognize the cabinet proposed by the Presidency Council and continued to operate as a rival authority from al-Bayda and Tobruk in eastern Libya. Despite enjoying international recognition, the GNA struggled to win support domestically and gain authority and control over territory and institutions.

The so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), under the command of General Khalifa Hiftar and allied with the Interim Government, gained control of substantial territory in 2016, including in the oil crescent, where they took over major terminals. Libyas legislative body, the House of Representatives, remained allied with the Interim Government. Throughout the year, deputies opposing the UN-backed GNA obstructed voting for a proposed cabinet.

In June, the president of the House of Representatives, Agilah Saleh, declared martial law, a de facto state of emergency, in the eastern region and appointed the LNA chief of staff, Abdulrazeq al-Nadhouri, as military governor for that region. Since then, al-Nadhouri has replaced several elected civilian heads of municipal councils with military governors.

In September, Abdurrahman Swehli, head of the High Council of State, declared that, in light of the inability of the House of Representatives to confirm a cabinet, the High Council of State would exercise all powers, including legislative ones.

Libyas Constitution Drafting Assembly failed to finalize a preliminary draft constitution and remained embroiled in internal disagreements.

In the absence of a state authority exercising control over the national territory, dozens of rival militia groups and military forces, with varying agendas and allegiances, continued to flout international law with impunity. They indiscriminately shelled civilians, abducted and forcibly disappeared people, tortured, arbitrarily detained, and unlawfully killed people and destroyed civilian property.

In the first half of 2016, fighters loyal to ISIS controlled the central coastal town of Sirte and subjected residents to a rigid interpretation of Sharia law that included public floggings, amputation of limbs, and public lynchings, often leaving the victims corpses on display.

Warring factions continued to indiscriminately shell civilian areas, mostly in Benghazi and Derna in the east and in Sirte. From March until August, 141 civilian were killed in the violence, including 30 children, and 146 injured, including 28 children, according to the UN Support Mission In Libya (UNSMIL).

In the east, the LNA and allied forces made substantial advances against the Benghazi Revolutionaries Shura Council, an alliance of groups including Islamist militias such as Ansar al-Sharia. As of November 2016, fighting remained concentrated in the Ganfouda neighborhood of Benghazi, where several hundred civilians, including Libyans and foreign nationals, remained trapped by a standoff between LNA and militants since 2014. Civilians, including children, struggled with limited access to medical care, electricity, and food.

In February, two Serbian civilians held by ISIS died in US air strikes on targets in the western coastal town of Sabratha, which also killed dozens of fighters. The same month, unidentified aircraft attacked a hospital compound in the city of Derna, killing at least two civilians and causing extensive damage.

In May, armed groups allied with the GNA, backed by US airstrikes, launched a military offensive against ISIS fighters in Sirte. Hostilities continued at time of writing.

In Derna, the LNA continued to fight against the Derna Revolutionaries Shura Council, an alliance of militias that participated in the ousting of ISIS from the city in 2015.

In July, 14 unidentified bodies were found close to a dumpster in Benghazi with gunshot wounds, and in October, 10 unidentified bodies with gunshot wounds and torture marks were found in a nearby neighborhood of Benghazi. Both incidents took place in areas under LNA control. To date, authorities have not publicly announced any conclusion to their investigations. In October, shelling by unidentified forces killed one woman and injured six others in a camp for internally displaced people from Tawergha, in Tripoli.

Prison authorities and militias continued to hold thousands of detainees, including some women and children, in long-term arbitrary detention without charges or due process. While conditions varied, most prisons lacked a functioning medical facility and hygienic sanitary installations. Guards and militia members mistreated and tortured detainees with impunity.

In June, unidentified armed groups killed 12 detainees upon their conditional release from al-Baraka prison in Tripoli. All 12 were members of the former Gaddafi government and had been accused of taking part in the violence against anti-government protesters in 2011. According to the families, the bodies were found in various locations around Tripoli. At time of writing, no investigation had been conducted into these crimes.

Ongoing insecurity led to the collapse of the criminal justice system in Libya. Courts in the east remained mostly shut, while elsewhere they operated at a reduced level. The Supreme Court failed to issue judgments on all cases that were heard before it due to political divisions. In Sirte and environs, ISIS groups implemented their own interpretation of Sharia law in areas under their control including punishing people for smoking, wearing immodest dress, and adultery.

The ICC has the mandate to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity in Libya pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1970 passed on February 27, 2011. The ICC prosecutor has failed to open any new investigations into the grave and ongoing crimes in Libya, citing resource limitations.

Libyan authorities failed to surrender Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of former leader Muammar Gaddafi, to the ICC where he is wanted for committing crimes against humanity during the 2011 uprising. Gaddafi was held by a militia in Zintan since his arrest in 2011, and was last seen by UN monitors in Zintan in June 2014.

In her November 9 update to the Security Council, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced her office would expand the Libya investigations in 2017 to include recent and ongoing serious crimes.

The penal code contains more than 30 articles that provide for the death penalty. Since Gaddafis overthrow in 2011, civil and military courts around the country have imposed death sentences, including against eight former officials in the Gaddafi government in a flawed trial in 2015. No death sentences are known to have been carried out since 2010.

The UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated at 435,000 Libyas population of internally displaced people. UNHCR was unable to conduct vital activities such as child protection services at detention centers due to inadequate funding for its humanitarian programs.

In what amounts to a crime against humanity, militias and authorities in Misrata continued to prevent 40,000 residents of Tawergha, Tomina, and Karareem from returning to their homes in relation for alleged crimes during the 2011 revolution attributed to people from those cities against anti-Gaddafi activists and fighters.

In August, representatives of Misrata and Tawergha signed a reconciliation agreement that aims to ensure return home of the displaced from Tawergha as well as compensation for both sides and reconstruction of damaged structures. The deal also foresees accountability for serious crimes. It has yet to come into force.

In June, an ISIS fighter allegedly shot dead freelance reporter Khaled Al Zantani in Benghazi. In Sirte, an ISIS fighter allegedly shot and killed photojournalist Abdelkader Fassouk in July, and in September, an ISIS fighter allegedly shot and killed Dutch photojournalist Jeroen Oerlemans.

The fate of Sofiane Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari, two Tunisian journalists who went missing in September 2014 while on assignment in Libya, remained unknown.

Armed groups kidnapped and disappeared other journalists. According to RSF, in January, a unit allied with the LNA in Benghazi arrested and tortured a local correspondent for a TV station, Libya HD, Badr Al Rabhi, for three days.

The penal code permits a reduced sentence for a man who kills or injures his wife or another female relative because he suspects her of extramarital sexual relations. Libyan law inadequately prohibits domestic violence and its personal status laws continue to discriminate against women, particularly with respect to marriage, divorce, and inheritance.

Same-sex relations are prohibited and punished with up to five years in jail.

Militias continued to abduct and disappear civilians, including politicians and journalists, with impunity. Criminal groups abducted residents, including children, demanding large ransoms from their families and often killing their victims if relatives failed to come up with the money.

Those still missing include Tripoli civil society activist Abdelmoez Banoon and Benghazi prosecutor Abdel-Nasser Al-Jeroushi, both abducted by unidentified groups in 2014. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity and sentenced to death in absentia by a Tripoli court for crimes committed during the 2011 revolution, was last seen in June 2014, in Zintan. Gaddafi was held by the Abu Baker al-Siddiq Brigade in Zintan following his arrest in 2011.

Refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, continued to flock to Europe via Libya. As of November, UNHCR recorded over 342,774 arrivals to Italy by sea from North Africa since January mostly from Libya. According to UNHCR, at least 4,518 died or went missing while crossing the Mediterranean from Libya to Europe. The International Organization for Migration estimated that 771,146 migrants and asylum seekers were in Libya as of November.

Members of the Libyan Coast Guards or Navy intercepted boats and returned the migrants and refugees back to land and into detention centers, often subjecting the migrants they intercepted to physical and verbal abuse. While the Department for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM), which is part of the Ministry of Interior, managed the majority of migrant detention centers, militias and smugglers controlled other unofficial detention facilities.

Conditions at migrant detention facilities remained abysmal. Officials and militias held migrants and refugees in prolonged detention without judicial review and subjected them to poor conditions, including overcrowding and insufficient food. Guards and militia members subjected migrants and refugees to beatings, forced labor, and sexual violence.

The United States, European Union, and regional states all played significant roles in the armed conflicts occurring in Libya. The US, France, and United Kingdom reportedly participated in military activities in support of Libyan forces against militant groups, most notably ISIS in Sirte and Benghazi.

Efforts to reach a political settlement between warring factions, led by the UN envoy to Libya Martin Kobler, and backed by members of the international community most notably the US, UK, France, and Italy, failed to achieve the desired results as parties remained engaged in hostilities, competing for legitimacy.

On March 8, the UN Panel of Experts on Libya, established pursuant to UN Security Council resolution 1973 (2011), issued its final report which said that several countries, individuals, and companies were responsible for violations of the arms embargo against Libya. According to the report, the UAE, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Ukraine and Sudan have all violated the arms embargo against Libya since 2011, by transferring weapons, ammunitions, aircraft or armored vehicles to the conflict parties.

Also in March, a leaked document revealed that British special forces had been actively fighting extremist groups in Libya since January. In July, France announced that three of its soldiers were killed in Libya after a helicopter crashed during an intelligence-gathering operation. In August, the US expanded its air campaign in Libya, at the request of the GNA, to include targets in the ISIS stronghold of Sirte.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report in February documenting widespread violations and abuses committed in Libya since 2014 that included unlawful killings; indiscriminate attacks; torture and ill treatment; arbitrary detention; abductions and disapperances; and violations against women, journalists, human rights defenders, migrants, and children.

Despite a recommendation by the High Commissioner that the Human Rights Council consider establishing an independent expert mandate on Libya to report on the human rights situation and progress towards accountability, the councils resolution only requested a further report from the high commissioner in March 2017. In a September update, the high commissioners office reported to the council that the situation has not improved and that impunity prevails, and reiterated the recommendation that the council create an independent expert mandate.

The UN Security Council extended for another 12 months in March an arms embargo on Libya. In June, the council unanimously authorized the inspection of vessels off Libyan high seas in an effort to crackdown on illicit weapons smuggling. The council also passed a resolution in July that authorized moving Libyas category 2 chemical weapons out of the country and destroying them. In October, the council renewed its authorization for the interdiction of vessels used for smuggling migrants on the high seas off the coast of Libya.

The Rule of Law and Human Rights division at UNSMIL, which operates from Tunis and visits Libya only rarely due to security concerns, scaled down its public reporting on human rights violations. However, in March, it started producing a monthly bulletin on civilian casualties in Libya.

In June, the EU extended its anti-smuggling naval operation in the central Mediterranean, Operation Sophia, to include training for the Libyan Coast Guard and Navy. In July, NATO committed to supporting Operation Sophia by providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, as well as capacity-building for the Libyan coastguard and navy.

See original here:
World Report 2017: Libya | Human Rights Watch

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Heres a bit of history from another America: the Bill of Rights was designed to protect the people from their government. If the First Amendments right to speak out publicly was the peoples wall of security, then the Fourth Amendments right to privacy was its buttress. It was once thought that the government should neither be able to stop citizens from speaking nor peer into their lives. Think of that as the essence of the Constitutional era that ended when those towers came down on September 11, 2001. Consider how privacy worked before 9/11 and how it works now in Post-Constitutional America.

The Fourth Amendment

A response to British King Georges excessive invasions of privacy in colonial America, the Fourth Amendment pulls no punches: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In Post-Constitutional America, the government might as well have taken scissors to the original copy of the Constitution stored in the National Archives, then crumpled up the Fourth Amendment and tossed it in the garbage can. The NSA revelations of Edward Snowden are, in that sense, not just a shock to the conscience but to the Fourth Amendment itself: our government spies on us. All of us. Without suspicion. Without warrants. Without probable cause. Without restraint. This would qualify as unreasonable in our old constitutional world, but no more.

Here, then, are four ways that, in the name of American security and according to our government, the Fourth Amendment no longer really applies to our lives.

The Constitutional Borderline

Begin at Americas borders. Most people believe they are in the United States as soon as they step off an international flight and are thus fully covered by the Bill of Rights. The truth has, in the twenty-first century, become infinitely more complicated as long-standing practices are manipulated to serve the expanding desires of the national security state. The mining of words and concepts for new, darker meanings is a hallmark of how things work in Post-Constitutional America.

Over the years, recognizing that certain situations could render Fourth Amendment requirements impractical or against the public interest, the Supreme Court crafted various exceptions to them. One was the border search. The idea was that the United States should be able to protect itself by stopping and examining people entering the country. As a result, routine border searches without warrants are constitutionally reasonable simply by virtue of where they take place. Its a concept with a long history, enumerated by the First Congress in 1789.

Heres the twist in the present era: the definition of border has been changed. Upon arriving in the United States from abroad, you are not legally present in the country until allowed to enter by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials. You know, the guys who look into your luggage and stamp your passport. Until that moment, you exist in a legal void where the protections of the Bill of Rights and the laws of the United States do not apply. This concept also predates Post-Constitutional America and the DHS. Remember the sorting process at Ellis Island in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? No lawyers allowed there.

Those modest exceptions were all part of constitutional America. Today, once reasonable searches at the border have morphed into a vast Constitution-free zone. The border is now a strip of land circling the country and extending 100 miles inland that includes two-thirds of the US population. In this vast region, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) can set up checkpoints and conduct warrantless searches. At airports, American citizens are now similarly subjected to search and seizure as filmmaker Laura Poitraswhose work focuses on national security issues in general and Edward Snowden in the particularknows firsthand. Since 2006, almost every time Poitras has returned to the US, her plane has been met by government agents and her laptop and phone examined.

There are multiple similar high-profile cases (including those of a Wikileaks researcher and a Chelsea Manning supporter), but ordinary citizens are hardly exempt. Despite standing in an American airport, a pane of glass away from loved ones, you are not in the US and have no Fourth Amendment rights. How many such airport searches are conducted in the aggregate is unknown. The best information we have comes from a FOIA request by the ACLU. It revealed that, in the 18-month period beginning in October 2008, more than 6,600 people, about half of them US citizens, were subjected to electronic device searches at the border.

Still, reminding us that its possible to have a sense of humor on the road to hell, the CBP offers this undoubtedly inadvertent pun at its website: It is not the intent of CBP to subject travelers to unwarranted scrutiny. (emphasis added)

Making It All Constitutional In-House

Heres another example of how definitions have been readjusted to serve the national security states overriding needs: the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a Post-Constitutional interpretation of the Fourth Amendment that allows it to access millions of records of Americans using only subpoenas, not search warrants.

Some background: a warrant is court permission to search and seize something. As the Fourth Amendment makes clear, it must be specific: enter Thomas Andersons home and look for hacked software. Warrants can only be issued on probable cause. The Supreme Court defined probable cause as requiring a high standard of proof, or to quote its words, a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.

A subpoena on the other hand is nothing more than a government order issued to a citizen or organization to do something, most typically to produce a document. Standards for issuing a subpoena are flexible, as most executive agencies can issue them on their own without interaction with a court. In such cases, there is no independent oversight.

The Department of Justice now claims that, under the Fourth Amendment, it can simply subpoena an Internet company like Facebook and demand that they look for and turn over all the records they have on our Mr. Anderson. Their explanation: the DOJ isnt doing the searching, just demanding that another organization do it. As far as its lawyers are concerned, in such a situation, no warrant is needed. In addition, the Department of Justice believes it has the authority to subpoena multiple records, maybe even all the records Facebook has. Records on you? Some group of people including you? Everyone? We dont know, as sources of data like Facebook and Google are prohibited from disclosing much about the information they hand over to the NSA or other government outfits about you.

Its easy enough to miss the gravity of this in-house interpretation when it comes to the Fourth Amendment. If the FBI today came to your home and demanded access to your emails, it would require a warrant obtained from a court after a show of probable cause to get them. If, however, the Department of Justice can simply issue a subpoena to Google to the same end, they can potentially vacuum up every Gmail message youve ever sent without a warrant and it wont constitute a search. The DOJ has continued this practice even though in 2010 a federal appeals court ruled that bulk warrantless access to email violates the Fourth Amendment. An FBI field manual released under the Freedom of Information Act similarly makes it clear that the Bureaus agents dont need warrants to access email in bulk when its pulled directly from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or other service providers.

How far can the use of a subpoena go in bypassing the Fourth Amendment? Recently, the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) issued a subpoenano court involveddemanding that the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) turn over all information it has collected relating to abuses and mismanagement at VA medical facilities. POGO is a private, non-profit group, dedicated to assisting whistleblowers. The VA subpoena demands access to records sent via an encrypted website to POGO under a promise of anonymity, many from current or former VA employees.

Rather than seek to break the encryption surreptitiously and illegally to expose the whistleblowers, the government has taken a simpler, if unconstitutional route, by simply demanding the names and reports. POGO has refused to comply, setting up a legal confrontation. In the meantime, consider it just another sign of the direction the government is heading when it comes to the Fourth Amendment.

Technology and the Fourth Amendment

Some observers suggest that there is little new here. For example, the compiling of information on innocent Americans by J. Edgar Hoovers low-tech FBI back in the 1960s has been well documented. Paper reports on activities, recordings of conversations, and photos of meetings and trysts, all secretly obtained, exposed the lives of civil rights leaders, popular musicians, and antiwar protesters. From 1956 to at least 1971, the government also wiretapped the calls and conversations of Americans under the Bureaus counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO).

But those who look to such history of government illegality for a strange kind of nothing-new-under-the-sun reassurance have not grasped the impact of fast-developing technology. In scale, scope, and sheer efficiency, the systems now being employed inside the US by the NSA and other intelligence agencies are something quite new and historically significant. Size matters.

To avoid such encroaching digitization would essentially mean withdrawing from society, not exactly an option for most Americans. More of life is now onlinefrom banking to travel to social media. Where the NSA was once limited to traditional notions of communicationthe written and spoken wordnew possibilities for following you and intruding on your life in myriad ways are being created. The agency can, for instance, now collect images, photos, and video, and subject them to facial recognition technology that can increasingly put a name to a face. Such technology, employed today at casinos as well as in the secret world of the national security state, can pick out a face in a crowd and identify it, taking into account age, changes in facial hair, new glasses, hats, and the like.

An offshoot of facial recognition is the broader category of biometrics, the use of physical and biological traits unique to a person for identification. These can be anything from ordinary fingerprinting to cutting-edge DNA records and iris scans. (Biometrics is already big business and even has its own trade association in Washington.) One of the worlds largest known collections of biometric data is held by the Department of State. As of December 2009, its Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) contained more than 75 million photographs of Americans and foreigners and is growing at a rate of approximately 35,000 records per day. CCD also collects and stores indefinitely the fingerprints of all foreigners issued visas.

With ever more data available, the NSA and other agencies are creating ever more robust ways to store it. Such storage is cheap and bounteous, with few limits other than the availability of electricity and water to cool the electronics. Emerging tech will surely bypass many of the existing constraints to make holding more data longer even easier and cheaper. The old days of file cabinets, or later, clunky disk drives, are over in an era of mega-data storage warehouses.

The way data is aggregated is also changing fast. Where data was once kept in cabinets in separate offices, later in bureaucratically isolated, agency-by-agency digital islands, post-9/11 sharing mandates coupled with new technology have led to fusion databases. In these, information from such disparate sources as license plate readers, wiretaps, and records of library book choices can be aggregated and easily shared. Basically everything about a person, gathered worldwide by various agencies and means, can now be put into a single file.

Once you have the whole haystack, theres still the problem of how to locate the needle. For this, emerging technologies grow ever more capable of analyzing Big Data. Some simple ones are even available to the public, like IBMs Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness software (NORA). It can, for example, scan multiple databases, geolocation information, and social media friend lists and recognize relationships that may not be obvious at first glance. The software is fast and requires no human intervention. It runs 24/7/365/Forever.

Tools like NORA and its more sophisticated classified cousins are NSAs solution to one of the last hurdles to knowing nearly everything: the need for human analysts to connect the dots. Skilled analysts take time to train, are prone to human error, andgiven the quickly expanding supply of datawill always be in demand. Automated analysis also offers the NSA other advantages. Software doesnt have a conscience and it cant blow the whistle.

What does all this mean in terms of the Fourth Amendment? Its simple: the technological and human factors that constrained the gathering and processing of data in the past are fast disappearing. Prior to these advances, even the most ill-intentioned government urges to intrude on and do away with the privacy of citizens were held in check by the possible. The techno-gloves are now off and the possible is increasingly whatever an official or bureaucrat wants to do. That means violations of the Fourth Amendment are held in check only by the goodwill of the government, which might have qualified as the ultimate nightmare of those who wrote the Constitution.

On this front, however, there are signs of hope that the Supreme Court may return to its check-and-balance role of the Constitutional era. One sign, directly addressing the Fourth Amendment, is this weeks ;unanimous decision that the police cannot search the contents of a cell phone without a warrant. (The court also recently issued a ruling determining that the procedures for challenging ones inclusion on the governments no-fly list are unconstitutional, another hopeful sign.)

Prior to the cell phone decision, law enforcement held that if someone was arrested for, say, a traffic violation, the police had the right to examine the full contents of his or her cell phonecall lists, photos, social media, contacts, whatever was on the device. Police traditionally have been able to search physical objects they find on an arrestee without a warrant on the grounds that such searches are for the protection of the officers.

In its new decision, however, the court acknowledged that cell phones represent far more than a physical object. The information they hold is a portrait of someones life like whats in a closet at home or on a computer sitting on your desk. Searches of those locations almost always require a warrant.

Does this matter when talking about the NSAs technological dragnet? Maybe. While the Supreme Courts decision applies directly to street-level law enforcement, it does suggest an evolution within the court, a recognition of the way advances in technology have changed the Fourth Amendment. A cell phone is not an object anymore; it is now recognized as a portal to other information that a person has gathered in one place for convenience with, as of this decision, a reasonable expectation of privacy.

National Security Disclosures Under HIPPA

While the NSAs electronic basket of violations of the Fourth Amendment were, pre-Snowden, meant to take place in utter secrecy, heres a violation that sits in broad daylight: since 2002, my doctor can disclose my medical records to the NSA without my permission or knowledge. So can yours.

Congress passed the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) in 1996 to assure that individuals health information is properly protected. You likely signed a HIPPA agreement at your doctors office, granting access to your records. However, Congress quietly amended the HIPPA Act in 2002 to permit disclosure of those records for national security purposes. Specifically, the new version of this privacy law states: We may also disclose your PHI [Personal Health Information] to authorized federal officials as necessary for national security and intelligence activities. The text is embedded deep in your health care providers documentation. Look for it.

How does this work? We dont know. Do the NSA or other agencies have ongoing access to the medical records of all Americans? Do they have to request specific ones? Do doctors have any choice in whose records to forward under what conditions? No one knows. My HMO, after much transferring of my calls, would ultimately only refer me back to the HIPPA text with a promise that they follow the law.

The Snowden revelations are often dismissed by people who wonder what they have to hide. (Who cares if the NSA sees my cute cat videos?) Thats why health-care spying stands out. How much more invasive could it be than for your government to have unfettered access to such a potentially personal and private part of your lifesomething, by the way, that couldnt have less to do with American security or combating terrorism.

Our health-care providers, in direct confrontation with the Fourth Amendment, are now part of the metastasizing national security state. Youre right to be afraid, but for goodness sake, dont discuss your fears with your doctor.

How the Unreasonable Becomes Reasonable

At this point, when it comes to national security matters, the Fourth Amendment has by any practical definition been done away with as a part of Post-Constitutional America. Whole books have been written just about Edward Snowden and more information about government spying regularly becomes available. We dont lack for examples. Yet as the obviousness of what is being done becomes impossible to ignore and reassurances offered up by the president and others are shown to be lies, the government continues to spin the debate into false discussions about how to balance freedom versus security, to raise the specter of another 9/11 if spying is curtailed, and to fall back on that go-to nothing to hide, nothing to fear line.

In Post-Constitutional America, the old words that once defined our democracy are twisted in new ways, not discarded. Previously unreasonable searches become reasonable ones under new government interpretations of the Fourth Amendment. Traditional tools of law, like subpoenas and warrants, continue to exist even as they morph into monstrous new forms.

Americans are told (and often believe) that they retain rights they no longer have. Wait for the rhetoric that goes with the celebrations of our freedoms this July 4th. You wont hear a lot about the NSA then, but you should. In pre-constitutional America the colonists knew that they were under the kings thumb. In totalitarian states of the last century like the Soviet Union, people dealt with their lack of rights and privacy with grim humor and subtle protest. However, in America, ever exceptional, citizens passively watch their rights disappear in the service of dark ends, largely without protest and often while still celebrating a land that no longer exists.

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during the Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. A Tom Dispatch regular, he writes about current events at his blog, We Meant Well. His new book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, is available now. This is the second in a three-part series on the shredding of the Bill of Rights. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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4 Ways the Fourth Amendment Wont Protect You Anymore ...

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