Month: November 2012

May require a warrent?

Amendment 4 Liberty

Should police be required to get a warrant before reading your emails? The Senate Judiciary Committee thinks so: it voted unanimously Thursday to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a bill that hasn’t been changed since 1986, to require a warrant for inspection of emails and other digital communications.

Huh? That isn’t the law already?

Under current law, which wasn’t written with today’s massive hard drives or cloud-based storage in mind, police only need a warrant for emails less than six months old.

I guess not.

The email warrant reform was proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. He believes the ECPA, like a decades-old operating system, badly needs an update in order to keep protecting citizens’ online privacy.

I agree. Read the complete article here Congress May Require Police to Get a Warrant for Your E-Mails

More Women Are Packing Heat

Amendment 2

Violence against women is on the rise and across West Michigan and gun range owners say the number of women applying for their Concealed Pistol Licenses or Concealed Carry Permit (CCW) is going up right along with it.

Fox 17 out of Grand Rapids, MI has this video and news article about how more women are packing heat these days. The article that goes along with this video can be found here.

Fears of gun control

Amendment 2

Johnny get your gun but you better hurry, because supplies are becoming limited. Not by the government, but by the laws of supply and demand.

Since President Obama was re-elected, gun sales have risen. This actually started before the election.

In October alone, the FBI reported an 18% increase in back ground checks done before hand gun purchases. The official numbers for November aren’t out yet but, gun shops across the country are claiming big jumps in sales.

Read more: Fears of Gun Control Fox News Memphis

And there is that.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose

Liberty

John Stossel asks Did Freedom Win (in this last election)?

At least some people with records of supporting liberty were elected: Sen. Jeff Flake in Arizona and U.S. Reps. Justin Amash and Kerry Bentivolio in Michigan and Thomas Massie in Kentucky.

Also, Washington and Colorado voted to allow any adult to use marijuana. (But users beware. Your newfound freedom may be short-lived thanks to that extraordinary human being in the White House—you know, the one who smoked pot when he was in school. Despite promising that he wouldn’t, he has cracked down on pot dispensaries far more often than President Bush did.)

And voters in Maine, Maryland, and Washington said yes to gay marriage; Minnesota defeated a proposed constitutional amendment that would have outlawed it.

That’s the good news. But overall, the results were bad for freedom. As P.J. O’Rourke says, we need to “fix” government. By that, we mean “fixing” government the way we neuter a cat or spay a dog.

I am no expert on election analysis but I am going to check this one off as a NO. What do you think? Did freedom win? (respond in the comments)

After Obama win, U.S. backs new U.N. arms treaty talks

Liberty

Hours after U.S. President Barack Obama was re-elected, the United States backed a U.N. committee’s call on Wednesday to renew debate over a draft international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global conventional arms trade.

Read the rest at Reuters.com. On the surface it does seem to be limited to global trade and not on the domestic market. Although, strangely, having that assurance from the U.N., this administration, and Reuters doesn’t make me feel any better. Let me know what you think in the comments or over on the Liberty1st forum.