{"id":5982,"date":"2011-09-03T14:19:09","date_gmt":"2011-09-03T14:19:09","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-03T14:19:09","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=5982","title":{"rendered":"American Prospect: “Extreme Measures”: 9\/11 and the Fourth Amendment"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Prospect: Extreme Measures: Since September 11, the Fourth Amendment has been eroded in ways we do not even know. The scary part is that it’s going to take years to undo the damage<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The abuse of the Constitution that followed September 11, 2001, was neither surprising nor inevitable. It was not a surprise, because it wasn\u2019t the first time in American history\u2014but the sixth, by my count\u2014that fundamental rights had been violated during spasms of fear over national security. It was not inevitable, because prominent voices might have called the country back to its principles. There is no telling whether such appeals would have stood against the tide, but one man\u2019s words did make a difference in the emergency command center at FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue several hours after the attacks.<\/p>\n

The voice belonged to James Ziglar, then commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who thinks of himself as a Goldwater Republican. \u201cI\u2019m quite a Bill of Rights kind of guy,\u201d he says. At the FBI that day, he gathered with other senior officials for what he describes as a discussion about doing \u201csome big sweeps\u201d in \u201cany community where there was a large concentration of Arabs, to basically do a door-to-door.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ziglar objected: \u201cI was the only guy in the room who raised his hand and said, \u2018Wait a minute. We\u2019ve got something called the Fourth Amendment here. We don\u2019t do sweeps in this country. We had a revolution over warrantless searches.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}