It's funny that even though the court ruled it is against the law to do so the federal agencies will continue to commit this crime (FBI) and pass illegal legislation (congress) until each specific agency changes it's internal regulations. If they do. The EFF seems to imply continued pressure is needed to convince them to do so.
Even if congress ends their blatantly unconstitutional endorsement of Section 702 spying, I still don’t see why anyone would believe that the government is going to do anything other than massively expand their ability surveil every living moment of our lives. I don’t see the point in them trying to play it off like the system has any integrity whatsoever.
The Fourth amendment "protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government". Then, third-party doctrine created by SCOTUS is a loophole for the fourth Amendment. Third-party doctrine says 4A "does not apply to information that is voluntarily shared with third parties".
Section 702 allows to collect all communications between American citizens and non-citizens, and communications between non-citizens, without any warrant. The issue is: does one need a warrant to search any data about a US citizen in 702 collections? Here, the court says it violates 4A.
section 702 applies different unconstitutional rules for citizens and foreigners. foreigners have no privacy rights there.
which is per-se unconstitutional, violating postal secrecy. they still think they are in war-times since the 30ies, and can store all meta-data and content in full. they are in war actually with all citizens.
Can we all stop pretending that they don't abuse of their power and hold your deepest darkest secrets indefinitely? Even though most of us are law abiding citizens.
Can we please start making open hardware without Apple/google backdoors and stop pretending our systems are "secure".
Can we please write all software in Rust and stop using languages that weren't designed for security. Yes C is beautiful. Yes it also lets you shoot yourself in the foot.
Can we please use distributed systems to avoid censorship or holding our private information in the hands of the rich?
No, we apparently can't, because every time someone attempts to do that, we don't end up with a usable end state or product that people actually want to use or participate in.
Perhaps we just haven't had success yet, and it's not impossible. But such desired outcomes tend to also require everyone to "be the same" (knowledge, skills, capabilities) or "want the same" (desire to spend time and attention on this sort of thing etc.) and that's not how people work.
>Can we all stop pretending that they don't abuse of their power and hold your deepest darkest secrets indefinitely? Even though most of us are law abiding citizens.
I don't anyone know who thinks powerful don't abuse their power. It is the nature of the beast.
And it seems none of us are law abiding citizens:
https://www.saponelaw.com/blog/2019/10/professor-says-that-e...
>Can we please start making open hardware without Apple/google backdoors and stop pretending our systems are "secure".
Few try...and either fail or languish in obscurity. You comment in itself is the proof that open hw cannot compete since you don't know of these open hw platforms and don't use them even tough you seem to advocate their creation here.
>Can we please write all software in Rust...
Rust only eliminates memory safety issues of C/C++. There are large number of languages, some decades older than Rust, that provide various aspects of Rust memory safety without imposing the same limits...and some are being used but people always flock to either new and flashy or the most widely used. Besides, Rust still provides ample foot guns and pushes reliance on 3rd party libraries which replaces memory safety issues with supply chain issues. Not to mention the the very poor ergonomics of the language that purposefully shies away from a lot of syntax sugar that makes writing and reading (understanding) code easier.
>Can we please use distributed systems to avoid censorship or holding our private information in the hands of the rich?
Even if you managed to persuade a lot of people to use these, some nodes will become popular/trusted and be targeted for censorship and propaganda and that will achieve the same result as the current model. Again, it is the nature of the beast.
What can be done? I don't know, probably nothing...things have to get to the point where most people are compelled to act because the alternative is death or worse, until such time there will just not be enough support for action to matter. Just how people are.
> We expect any lawmaker worthy of that title to listen to what this federal court is saying and create a legislative warrant requirement so that the intelligence community does not continue to trample on the constitutionally protected rights to private communications.
Sad to say it, but I find it laughable that the intel agencies would suddenly stop if it were illegal (though of course it should be illegal). They operate in secret and anyone in the government who opposes them will commit suicide or suddenly be in possession of child pornography.
As New York Sen. Chuck Schumer once told Rachel Maddow on air, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” [1]
Don't worry: SCOTUS will determine that the Framers did not have a history and tradition of protecting metadata, so the Fourth Amendment has no application here; and, furthermore, the Court's recent jurisprudence regarding the Executive (dieu et mon droit) necessarily implies that the Government has an extremely compelling interest sufficient to overcome the Fourth Amendment and permit warrantless searches of everyone in the United States and elsewhere.
> Riley has been widely praised as “a sweeping victory for privacy rights”[5] with legal scholars describing the decision as "the privacy gift that keeps on giving."
To be fair the current court in 2025 is a different court than 2018, and in 2024 they overruled a long standing precedent in the chevron doctrine. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility that this court would disregard Riley.
I do agree that it currently like the court is broadly pro-privacy but I also think it entirely depends on the case and its specifics.
Five of the Riley justices are still on the court. Of the four that aren’t, there’s two that seem stronger on privacy than his or her predecessor (Gorsuch, KBJ), one that seems like a wash (Kavanaugh), and maybe one that’s less strong on privacy (Barrett).
You can point to Roe and Chevron, but those didn’t come out of nowhere. The first, conservatives vowed to overturn 50 years ago—and its expansive notion of judicially declaring rights is not embraced even among liberals on the court today. The second was a judge created interpretive doctrine anyway, and proved unworkable over time. But it also didn’t come out of nowhere. Gorsuch has been writing about it since before I was in law school, and that was 15 years ago.
Roe v Wade was based on the right to privacy. The Supreme Court ruling that overturned it eliminated our right to privacy. Then they invalidated Roe v Wade as a corollary.
Since the current court eliminated the right to privacy in the US, I doubt they’ll spontaneously decide to restore it.
Roe wasn’t about a right to “privacy.” The right to privacy comes from the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…
If Roe was about “privacy”—i.e. laws against abortion are a “search” of your “person,” then by the same logic—laws against drowning your infant in the bathtub constitute a “search” of your “house.”
Dobbs didn’t get rid of the right to privacy. It’s still there in the fourth amendment. It simply dropped the pretense that abortion was about privacy (which Casey had already done).
Wrong on your first point - Privacy right is not based on the 4th amendment but rather on the 9th amendment (unenumerated rights are persevered to the people).
Correct on your second point - Dobbs didn't take any rights away, it merely delegated to the States, where historically, such rights such rights are granted.
A right can’t be “based” on the 9th amendment. The 9th amendment just says the bill of rights isn’t an exhaustive enumeration. It can’t be the source of rights—the rights must come from somewhere else.
I don’t think this is right. It reads backwards to me. Didn’t Roe, controversially, hold that abortion was protected as a function of constitutional protections related to privacy (in the due process clause of the 14th amendment—specifically as one form of the “liberty” you can’t be “deprived of” without “due process of law”)? Then attempted to explain in medically specific terms when exactly your pregnancy crosses over from being a matter of liberty/personal privacy into a matter that can be regulated or prohibited?
Then didn’t Dobbs basically work by undoing the idea that you can locate abortion rights in the due process clause, rather than somehow wrecking the constitutional amendment itself?
Roe purports to be about privacy. But it’s really about the second point you list, which is purporting to define when a fetus becomes sufficiently developed to warrant protection from the state. After all, nothing changes between conception and the day before birth from the point of view of privacy. Or heck, even the day after birth—you have a privacy right in your home, not only your person. So the “privacy” right isn’t holding up any weight. All the work is being done by the moral determination that a fetus in the first two trimesters isn’t sufficiently developed to warrant legal protection. Once you assert that killing an 8 week fetus is no different than having a body part removed, the work being done by privacy is trivial.
That latter question has nothing to do with privacy or the constitution. It’s a general moral judgment based on underlying biological facts. In that respect, Roe simply is an articulation of Harry Blackmun’s Methodist religious beliefs. The United Methodist Church came out strongly in favor of abortion legality in the 1960s. But there’s nothing in the constitution supporting the determination Roe reached and Roe didn’t even pretend there was.
There is a legal subtlety here that's often misunderstood (or misrepresented) by most pro-abortionists:
The right to privacy was curved out of the 9th Amendment in the district court decision (not the 4th or the 14th).
The Supreme court upheld the district court decision and went further by adding the protection of the 14th amendment as to how and when this privacy right can be abridged by the states (not without due process of law).
States must show a compelling interest to intervene in women's decision to abort, and this compelling interest ripens only after the first trimester of pregnancy.
That Court you're so impressed with repeatedly refused to review lower court rulings that police can physically force a suspect to press their finger against their phone or force them to look at it to unlock it with thumbprint or face ID. The most recent ruling, which they refused to hear an appeal on, was v Payne. The opinion from the 9th circuit was that it was oke-dokeily because, and I quote, "required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking", and also because the cop could have done it while Payne was unconscious or asleep. The court you're so impressed with looked at that and in refusing to hear the appeal, upheld the decision.
That court you're so impressed with also:
..ruled that silence does not indicate someone is exercising their right to remain silent (!) in Berghuis v. Thompkins. I mean really, you can't make this shit up.
...made Miranda rights almost worthless in Vega v. Tekoh, where a cop cornered a nurse in a storage room, threatened the nurse by putting his hand on his gun, threatened him and his family with deportation, etc...and then his statements were then used against them in court. The ruling removed the right to sue for having one's Miranda rights violated, only that they can suppress the statements in court.
...ruled that imprisoning someone did not count as "custodial". Again, you cannot make this shit up.
...threw a hissy fit when people dared to start protesting outside their homes.
> The opinion from the 9th circuit was that it was oke-dokeily because, and I quote, "required no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking"
You might dislike it, but legally, these are equivalent, with the requirement of a finger being less onerous. Biometrics are public information, like it or now. It's a well-reasoned decision.
Just dealing with the one you seem to put as most important - the 9th circuit's logic is watertight and police have to be able to investigate or a lot of murders will go unsolved. You'd really need to provide a reason why the search was unreasonable to make a point with that one.
It makes a lot of sense to have protections against the police searching phones, homes, businesses, etc. But assuming that those protections aren't at play then it is entirely reasonable that a policeperson can force someone to put their thumb somewhere. The police already have the power to manhandle and imprison people, forced thumblocation is nothing compared to that. What do you want the Supreme court to do here, officially rule that police can coerce not just entire bodies at once, but also thumbs separately and individually? That seems like an unnecessary call for them to make.
> That Court you're so impressed with repeatedly refused to review lower court rulings that police can physically force a suspect to press their finger against their phone or force them to look at it to unlock it with thumbprint or face ID
My understanding of this case has nothing to do with metadata. The communications were captured in full because one party was not a citizen in the US (under national security reasons).
Those communications were then stored and made available in full via keyword based search interfaces, and those later searches were made without first securing a warrant.
I'm not going to bother reading the tea leaves too closely on this one, but I'd put it at least at even odds the supreme court would say the 4th amendment does apply here.
I think “metadata” is meant as an example of Barnum statement in the context of the original comment. It is very common for courts to reinterpret language as a means of getting to a specific end. Same reason that “Interstate Commerce” actually means all commerce in the 10th amendment.
Except in cases involving “metadata,” there’s typically a highly relevant difference in terms of who owns the data. The fourth amendment says:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…
You have a right as to your data, but not other people’s data about you. E.g. you have no right as to a pharmacy’s business records about you. (That’s their data, not your data.)
To my knowledge, no court has ever distinguished between say image and the file metadata on someone’s computer. But the way “metadata” becomes relevant is often because someone else owns “metadata” about your files, such as server logs.
No, a background of interstate commerce is considered to be meaningful. It’s why the Texas power grid being so isolating has meaning.
However the court views a commodity as influencing and being influenced by interstate trade even if that specific gallon of oil never crossed state lines. From a purely economic standpoint it’s a reasonable take. Even Europe’s use of oil influences US oil prices let alone what happens in another state.
It’s both an upside and downside of the judicial system that they take things in context.
The first is that the purpose of giving "interstate commerce" to the federal government was to address the problems incident to interstate commerce, e.g. someone in New York buys something from someone in Florida and there is a dispute, but New York doesn't have jurisdiction over the seller and Florida isn't interested in protecting New York buyers from Florida sellers. The sort of general purpose economic regulations at issue in Wickard weren't intended to be in scope to begin with.
And the second is that as soon as you let go of that limiting principle, you don't have a limiting principle. "Texas has its own power grid" but if Texas has lower or higher power costs then customers might be more or less inclined to locate in Texas rather than some other state and affect demand for power in some other state, so the distinction is lost and there is a practical erasure of any line at all.
Not really the Texas power grid is hardly the only example.
Banning products like say Fireworks is a much broader exception. If there’s no marker to regulate then the feds can’t get involved. This applies to more than just total bans, it’s also why California can have such influence on automobiles and Texas influences textbooks etc.
You may feel there’s not enough things that fall into the exclusion, but that’s not the same thing as the exclusion not existing.
> address the problems incident to interstate commerce
Trademark infringement on trademarks held by an out of state entity breaks the principle you’re talking about without any sale directly crossing state lines.
Same deal if some state decides to subsidize growing broccoli, and that’s ultimately what decided the issue.
> This applies to more than just total bans, it’s also why California can have such influence on automobiles and Texas influences textbooks etc.
This isn't because the existing commerce clause jurisprudence excludes the federal government from regulating these things, it's because the federal legislature passed legislation carving out an exception for California to do that:
> Trademark infringement on trademarks held by an out of state entity breaks the principle you’re talking about without any sale directly crossing state lines.
Trademarks are already regional. If there is a Joe's Diner in California and another one run by a completely different Joe in Massachusetts, there isn't a problem any more than it would be if there was an independent Joe's Diner in Canada or England. Whereas if there is a Joe's Diner chain headquartered in California which is operating franchises in Massachusetts and they therefore want a federal rather than state-level trademark on the name, that's interstate commerce. Making interstate operations a prerequisite for a federal trademark would not be a real problem.
> Same deal if some state decides to subsidize growing broccoli, and that’s ultimately what decided the issue.
That's not what happened in Wickard. The state wasn't subsidizing anything, the federal government was prohibiting farmers from growing wheat. One of the farmers grew wheat for his own use, in the same state, and was fined for it.
The Court's theory was that this affected interstate commerce, because if he didn't grow it then he might have bought it. Which is a problem if you're trying to do national-level central planning of wheat production, but that's not what the commerce clause is supposed to be for. Everything "affects" interstate commerce. The purpose of the grant is supposed to be to deal with the issues that arise specifically as a result of commercial interactions between people in different states.
> it's because the federal legislature passed legislation carving out an exception for California to do that
I’m talking about the influence beyond it’s borders as mentioned by the Wikipedia article:
“The law also prevents states from setting standards that are more strict than the federal standards, but carves out a special exemption for California… The California standard was adopted by twelve other states,”
Other states without that exception can still have California standards.
> Trademarks are already regional.
Regions that often cross state boundaries. People regularly register federally even if they are only using it within a state. It’s not that someone in the middle of Texas cares about companies in Hawaii, it’s that someone on the border of most states could be 1 mile from a competitor in another state.
> That's not what happened in Wickard.
I didn’t say it did, I said that’s part of why the argument was convincing.
> but that's not what the commerce clause is supposed to be for.
They explicitly used commerce NOT trade. Thus from a pure textual standpoint the scope was absolutely intended to be broader than just trade.
> It’s not that someone in the middle of Texas cares about companies in Hawaii, it’s that someone on the border of most states could be 1 mile from a competitor in another state.
But now you're back to having actual interstate commerce, because you have residents of the neighboring state patronizing the business in Texas or vice versa.
> They explicitly used commerce NOT trade. Thus from a pure textual standpoint the scope was absolutely intended to be broader than just trade.
They used the word commerce because it was written in the 18th century. Here's the definition of "commerce" as recently as 1913:
> "The exchange or buying and selling of commodities; esp. the exchange of merchandise, on a large scale, between different places or communities; extended trade or traffic."
If anything, choosing the word "commerce" would imply that they meant to limit the scope of regulation to trade happening on a large scale.
More to the point, this is the actual text:
> To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
Is this meant to give the US Congress the power to regulate entirely local businesses in Spain because Spain is a foreign nation and local business activity in Spain affects commerce with foreign nations?
Meanwhile by 1680s commerce was taking on a wider definition than just the act of exchange. At the time something was commercial if it was done for profit. Commerce included the steps in preparation for trade rather than just the exchange of goods.
> But now you're back to having actual interstate commerce, because you have residents of the neighboring state patronizing the business in Texas or vice versa.
> Trade was in use as “the buying and selling or exchange of commodities” back in 1550.
No one is arguing that the word trade didn't exist at the time. But there are several other words that also existed at the time, like business, or work, or production, which they also didn't use.
Moreover, the expansive interpretation is inconsistent with the rest of the same article, e.g.:
> The Congress shall have Power
> ...
> To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
> ...
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
> ...
> To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;
Counterfeiting and copyright infringement and high seas piracy are all going to affect interstate commerce, so why would they need to be separately enumerated if the commerce clause was intended to make them redundant?
> Meanwhile by 1680s commerce was taking on a wider definition than just the act of exchange. At the time something was commercial if it was done for profit. Commerce included the steps in preparation for trade rather than just the exchange of goods.
But what is this distinction buying you? Suppose that commerce includes production of goods intended for sale, and then "commerce among the several states" would include production of goods intended for sale between states. That still doesn't get you Wickard, which was production of goods for the direct use of the producer within a single state and continues to manifest the flaw that it omits any discernible limiting principle.
> So lost business is a concern.
Trademarks aren't about lost business, they're a consumer protection rule designed to prevent fraud. They protect the buyer from being misled about the identity of the seller. This is why you nominally can't sell a trademark. (Businesses use a conceit where they sell the "goodwill" associated with the mark and transfer the mark with it, which is a loophole that the courts have long let them get away with so everybody uses it, but in principle it's not allowed, and this is presumably why you don't see many blatant instances like people openly selling trademarks on eBay.)
Except in the ruling that established that idea, Filburn did not participate in any market at all with the grain in question. There was no commerce with anyone, which the court ruled affected commerce, and therefore subject to federal regulation. The idea that not participating in something is a form of participation is absurd and can be argued about literally everything.
Federal government wants to regulate what's allowed for parks, public or private? As entertainment, they're a substitute good for copyrighted movies, so if you go to a park, you're not watching a movie. Interstate commerce.
Federal government wants to regulate how you have sex with your spouse? They can regulate a market for traveling prostitution services. Don't use one because you're exclusive with your spouse? Interstate commerce.
These aren't even that far from the actual ruling (actually the park one is probably less extreme), where he couldn't feed his chickens with food he grew. Literally they argued they can regulate how you feed yourself from the fruits of working your land with no trade.
Sometimes it's fair to say SCOTUS deserves no respect and are either extremely disingenuous and corrupt, or profoundly mentally challenged and incompetent. Wickard is such a ruling. It's one of those things that makes you completely lose faith in the legitimacy of our government when you learn about it.
> Filburn did not participate in any market at all
You missed the nuance here. Growing alone didn’t make him a participant, his use made him part of the demand for a commodity.
That [Filburn’s] own contribution to the demand for wheat may be trivial by itself is not enough to remove him from the scope of federal regulation
Thus if he had been growing wheat as practice or for the artistic value without using it then he would not have been considered as influencing the market.
I'm not missing that nuance. My examples are making reference to that. Like I said, their argument can be made about literally anything at all. Make a completely private intimate recording with your spouse for your personal use? That affects the national market for pornography by reducing your demand, and the exact same reasoning would claim that the commerce clause grants the federal government authority to regulate it. Hosting a house party and want to play a flute that you literally carved out of wood that you produced on your land? That reduces demand for streaming platforms, and musicians are struggling so the government has a right to prop up their market and make it illegal for you to provide music services yourself. Want to install solar panels on your land? Now you're not participating in energy markets, so it's interstate commerce. Build a home by hand out of compressed earth dug up on site? The extra thermal mass and insulation reduces your demand for energy from interstate markets vs. usual construction methods. Interstate commerce. Plant a shade tree on the south side of your land or install awnings on your south windows? Reduced energy demand. Interstate commerce. Grow tomatoes or raise chickens for eggs in your backyard? Pretty much exactly analogous to Wickard. Interstate commerce. Capture and filter rainwater or drink municipal tap water? Reduced demand for bottled water. Interstate commerce. Have a horrible terminal disease and want to be allowed to die? Reduced demand for all sorts of things (including food and energy). Interstate commerce. The absence of demand for something because you did it yourself doesn't make you a market participant. It makes you not a market participant. Providing for yourself is part of your inalienable right to life.
> Make a completely private intimate recording with your spouse for your personal use?
Wheat is a commodity, works are art are not. So even just the first example you used doesn’t apply. We’ve specifically brought up multiple classes of exceptions on this thread and you added another one.
Whether a good is fungible is a a subjective thing. Would the wider market consider your private recording as fungible among all of the other recordings out there? Almost certainly yes. In any case, it would certainly meet the threshold for affecting interstate commerce that Wickard started, which does not require you to be interacting with commodities markets specifically. The meaning of that was almost unlimited for a long time after Wickard. It took 53 years to finally decide that something was not interstate commerce: existing near a school in possession of a gun, and that was a 5-4 decision. The dissenting opinion postulated that gun violence in schools has a substantial effect on the job market because employers view education as important, and existing in possession of a gun near a school could affect gun violence in schools. This very nearly won out as an argument. You can't make this stuff up it's so ridiculous.
The court actually affirmed 6-3 in 2005 that Congress can regulate home-grown marijuana for personal consumption because of its possible effects on demand within a market that it is federally illegal to participate in. Because some people make illegal trades, even if you are a law-abiding citizen and never would, you apparently affect interstate commerce by following the law and growing your own (in a state where doing so is legal). Absolute trash ruling by a clown court. Directly based on Wickard.
When you look at the whole framework/design of the US government, it's obvious that Wickard was a garbage ruling and that they had at that point completely capitulated to FDR, who we recall had threatened to pack the court if they didn't start giving him carte blanche to do whatever he wanted. FDR wants unlimited authority to do anything? Commerce clause suddenly means Congress can regulate anything which could possibly (even in a counterfactual universe) involve a casual chain where someone interacts with something that interacts with something that eventually at some point in the chain could have crossed state lines.
> Whether a good is fungible is a a subjective thing.
It’s a continuum, but not particularly subjective. The degree to which something is an equivalent good depends on how people treat the item in question.
They may both be religious books but I doubt you’d find many people ambivalent if they are buying a Bible or Quran. They evaluate a used car based on mileage, but people are far more picky about content.
Can you explain why? That doesn’t seem like sound reasoning to me.
If you believe the reason is corruption, what personal incentive would the courts have to rule this way? Judges can easily be the victim of government overreach as well.
And having a log of every conversation and keystroke that any outspoken judge has ever made gives you all sorts of ways to align their opinions with the above all importance of “National Security”
Data in this case is on the side of wealth and power. You're also wrong about it being an inanimate object for two reasons. Reason A: Data is not an object but a pattern of objects or attributes of object(s) wherein the arrangement forms symbols according to a standard or protocol. Reason B: Data is quite animated when moving e.g. in response to searches or otherwise (re)-transmitted.
We have more than one wealthy and powerful person. They're rarely all on the same side.
So regardless of how courts rule on most issues, one could almost always argue they're taking the side of wealth and power and against the side of wealth and power.
And data is inanimate in the dictionary definition sense of it not being alive. That other things can move it doesn't make it animate.
The new administration just ordered the resignation of every Democratic-appointed member on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight - this is the body that oversees the intelligence agencies and makes sure they don't abuse their power to spy on Americans. So much for dismantling the deep state.
> But I say again, if a mere scribe such as I—one who knows nearly nothing—can use the very simplest of these methods to pick the name of a traitor like Paul Revere from those of two hundred and fifty four other men, using nothing but a list of memberships and a portable calculating engine, then just think what weapons we might wield in the defense of liberty one or two centuries from now.
The people whose job it is to interpret the law have abandoned any pretense of doing that in favor of shoving words into the mouths of men who died before humans discovered dinosaurs. The court is openly, brazenly corrupt.
In a democracy, what method would you propose judges use to impose restrictions on the actions of the democratically elected government based on a written constitution?
> what method would you propose judges use to impose restrictions
Judges are appointed (or voted in) by the very people you think they "impose restriction" on. Any ruling against the ruling class in our favor is nothing more than a happy accident.
Do you have an argument that would be persuasive to someone who doesn't believe that representative democracy is fundamentally flawed or somehow inoperative in the US?
We should go even further and abolish the FBI. They all believe they're above the law and have consistently been the enemy of Americans. What success can they even point to?
Don't forget about it's little sibling, the NSA, and its reputation for openly and overtly mocking our Constitution and its social compact. Snowden is still in political exile in Moscow for the heinous crime of whistleblowing.
The FBI hunts down and removes extremely violent criminals from society every day. They certainly operate right on the edge of the law, as they should. Furthermore, they never stop and never quit and no distance is too far--they will prevail no matter what. Extremely important to the stability of society.
No law enforcement agency should be "operating right on the edge of the law". Their purpose is to enforce laws, not to seek creative ways to get away with breaking them.
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