Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Home Invasion Bill

No Probable Cause Required
‘Sneak and peek’ bill rolls quietly through (Virginia) General Assembly, Posted on March 10, 2015 Written by watchdog.org
PATRIOTIC? State Sen. Jen­nifer Wex­ton wants to endow Vir­ginia law-enforcement agen­cies with Patriot Act powers.
FA Update:  Virginia’s Republican-controlled Sen­ate and House have enrolled (passed) Sen­ate Bill 919 (text here), and House Bill 1946 (text here). House Bill 1946 was signed by the House Speaker March 6, and Sen­ate Bill 919 was signed by the Sen­ate Pres­i­dent March 7. Demo­c­ra­tic Gov­er­nor Terry McAu­li­ffe is expected to sign them into law.
Vir­ginia law­mak­ers want to give local and state author­i­ties the same sweep­ing search-and-seizure pow­ers used by the FBI and other fed­eral agen­cies under the Patriot Act.
Sen­ate Bill 919, by state Sen. Jen­nifer Wex­ton, D-Leesburg, passed 39–1 last month (Jan­u­ary, 2015). A sim­i­lar mea­sure, House Bill 1946 by Del­e­gate Jen­nifer McClel­lan, D-Richmond, awaits action.
The bills allow for “admin­is­tra­tive sub­poe­nas,” or what Vir­ginia civil lib­er­tar­ian John White­head calls “sneak-and-peek searches.” “You’ll never know you’re being inves­ti­gated,” White­head told Watchdog.org in an interview.
Bypass­ing the reg­u­lar search war­rant process, law-enforcement agen­cies could rifle through finan­cial trans­ac­tions, phone logs, com­puter records and other per­sonal data with­out obtain­ing a judge’s approval.
Fit­tingly, the Wexton-McClellan mea­sures are qui­etly rolling through the Gen­eral Assem­bly with lit­tle or no pub­lic notice. State Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, was the lone vote against Wexton’s bill. “It’s a bad idea — I can’t believe no one else voted no,” he told Watchdog.
White­head, pres­i­dent of the Charlottesville-based Ruther­ford Insti­tute, called the mea­sures “very Gestapo.” Not­ing that the FBI uses 30,000 “national secu­rity let­ters” a year to con­duct searches under Sec­tion 215 of the Patriot Act, White­head said, “The Fourth Amend­ment is dead. There is no pri­vacy any more.”
The Wexton-McClellan bills would grant sim­i­lar pow­ers to local author­i­ties who sim­ply assert their searches are “rel­a­tive to an ongo­ing investigation.”
Mark Fitzgib­bons, a North­ern Vir­ginia attor­ney, said the bills “evis­cer­ate prob­a­ble cause to a stan­dard of ‘rea­son to believe that the records or other infor­ma­tion being sought are rel­e­vant to a legit­i­mate law-enforcement inves­ti­ga­tion con­cern­ing violations.’”
“The Writs of Assis­tance (gen­eral war­rants) were passed by Par­lia­ment in vio­la­tion of the com­mon law stan­dards of being signed by a judge, after oath and affir­ma­tion of a wit­ness, and describ­ing with speci­ficity the place to be searched. Those stan­dards are found in the Fourth Amend­ment. Vir­ginia has come full cir­cle,” Fitzgib­bons said.
Nei­ther Wex­ton nor McClel­lan responded to Watchdog’s requests for com­ment by dead­line. McClel­lan did have time, how­ever, to post a salute to State Police who filled the House gallery on Tuesday.
“Thank you to the Vir­ginia State Troop­ers for their ser­vice to the Com­mon­wealth,” she retweeted, with pho­tos attached.
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