The Jihad Against Privacy

It isn't enough that the government calls its monitoring program "Muslims of America" (and apparently its just me and two others that are outraged about that) and then goes on to datamine the rest of us.

There is simply no defense for going off and monitoring the islamic community in their homes -- without warrant -- willy nilly.

Their IS no defense to this:

The FBI has been covertly monitoring mosques and Muslim homes and businesses in U.S. cities for abnormal radiation levels since 2002, several government officials confirmed Friday.

One government official said the authorities don't obtain warrants because the testing is conducted from outside the buildings on what they consider public property.

An official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that none of the FBI's programs target gathering places of any specific segment of the population and that non-Muslim sites were also monitored for radiation. (Watch how sources say the monitoring took place nationwide -- 1:31)

A Muslim advocacy group has said that the program is "misguided" and targets "the wrong people."

"It is a waste of time, it is a waste of resources and it is causing us to be concerned about our citizenship, our constitutional rights," Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told CNN.

Several sources said the covert program is legal because the authorities conduct the testing in areas like parking lots.

I'm sorry, that last excuse doesn't fly.

It is NOT legal for the FBI to come outside my house on a public street and monitor my house using thermal techniques because I'm a liberal, a Kerry voter, a George Bush detester, etc. In fact, it is illegal to do so without a warrant PERIOD!

We think that obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical “intrusion into a constitutionally protected area,” Silverman, 365 U.S., at 512, constitutes a search–at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use. This assures preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted. On the basis of this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search.
-- Kyllo v. U.S., 533 U.S. 27 (2001)

I fail to see the distinction in this case. In fact, it is even worse, in Kyollo the police suspected Kyollo was growing pot and had decent reason for suspecting. Nevertheless, they did a thermal image search before getting a warrant.

Here the government is simply willy nilly targeting homes and mosques for radiation searches throughout the country for no real reason whatsoever it appears but suspecting large groups of muslims of making dirty bombs.

There's been no evidence of any of this whatsoever, including Mr. Padilla as it turns out.

These SOB's cannot be reigned in soon enough.