Americans are being searched at airports and their belongings seized without probable cause.
Whether you’re a member of the ACLU, the Tea Party, or the Beer Lovers Party, one of the things that distinguishes you from people living in more authoritarian regimes--Iran, China, Libya, to name a few--is your right to form political associations without fear of government reprisal.
Freedom of association is so vital to our democracy that the framers put it in the First Amendment, alongside freedoms of speech, press, religion, and petition. After all, what good is the right to speak, pray, or petition the government if you can’t freely associate with other people who support your cause?
Defending that right for all Americans is why the ACLU today is filing a lawsuit in Federal Court in Boston on behalf of a 24-year-old computer programmer and Cambridge activist named David House. The case challenges the government’s targeting and suspicionless search and seizure at the border of David’s computer and camera, which occurred as a result of his association with the Bradley Manning Support Network.
The Bradley Manning Support Network, which David helped to create, is a group of people and organizations who advocate for the legal defense of Pfc. Bradley Manning--the soldier who was charged and subsequently held in solitary confinement for allegedly accessing and disclosing a video and documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the website WikiLeaks.
Although the Support Network engages solely in lawful and constitutionally protected advocacy, members of the group have apparently been targeted by the Feds for exercising the right to free association. David has been visited by agents from the FBI, Department of State, and the military--who repeatedly question him about his political beliefs and associations. Then, last November, when David arrived at the Chicago airport from a vacation in Mexico en route to Boston, he was again stopped--this time by two Homeland Security agents--who not only questioned him again about his political beliefs, but seized his laptop, flash drive, and video camera--all without David’s consent and without any reason to believe a search would turn up evidence of wrongdoing.
Link:
http://boston.com/community/blogs/on_liberty/2011/05/suspicionless_searches_and_sei.html