Alright, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 in Austin.
We're streaming live worldwide at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Chris Calabrese.
I'm sorry, I don't know if I'm saying that right.
He's a lawyer for the ACLU.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks.
I'm sorry, how did I say your last name?
It's alright, it's actually Chris Calabrese, or at least that's how my grandmother said it.
Well, that's the right way then.
Grandmother has the final say on that.
Calabrese, thank you very much for joining us on the show today.
Very important stuff on the ACLU website that caught my attention the other day, the Constitution-free zone of the United States.
I was actually pleasantly surprised to see the gray space in the middle where apparently the Constitution still applies.
I hadn't realized.
Sorry, okay, bad joke.
This is about the 100-mile stretch of land where federal authorities apparently have a much lower standard for harassing U.S. persons and searching their belongings and so forth.
Can you please, I guess first of all, tell us what's changed about this?
Is this something new and how new and what all is the difference from how it was before?
Sure.
Well, it's not actually a change in the law.
It's really more of a change in how the law is being applied.
I mean, the regulations have always said, the law has always been that the Customs and Border Patrol people were able to do a variety of things within 100 miles of the border.
What's happened since 9-11, though, is the number of Customs and Border Patrol agents has doubled.
So they went from about 9,000 to about 18,000.
So they've got to find something for them all to do, I guess.
That's right.
I mean, and also you're starting to see, and we've seen for a long time, but it's becoming more and more prevalent, all the technologies that they use on the border are starting to sort of drift out and be used much more widely.
So it's really, and that, and I would say probably the third thing is we're just starting to see more internal checkpoint stops and stops, what are quote-unquote border stops, but yet they're not at the border.
They're 20 miles off the border or 50 miles off the border.
And that kind of stuff is really very much sort of your papers, please, very concerning for us, the idea where folks are stopped for no reason and essentially quizzed and questioned by federal authorities.
Now, I guess it's been a few years since I went to Mexico, although I guess it was post-September 11th, and I got pulled over, I guess I'd say maybe 10, 15 miles inside the border, and they basically just kind of looked in the car and made sure that nobody was an illegal alien, didn't quite search the trunk, but that's the same thing as this checkpoint.
It's just, you're saying the qualitative difference comes in the quantitative difference and how many of these things there are now across the, I guess I would assume, mostly the southern border of the country, is that right?
Well, yeah, that is right.
They are largely on the southern border right now, though they're clearly spreading to the northern border, which is, it's interesting, because folks in the southern border have had to deal with these for so long, I think that they're a little bit sort of jaded or they've fortunately been maybe worn down by having to deal with them for so long.
Maybe roll our eyes and just go along, because what are you going to do, go to jail tonight?
It's very informative, though, when they start doing it in the north, how upset people get.
It reminds you, at least it reminded me when I dealt with them, that this really is something unusual to America, these stops.
And I think what you're also seeing, it's not just the number of stops, they're also sort of starting to stretch out and become really, I don't know if you'd call them worse, so much is more intrusive, I guess that is worse.
For example, one of the guys who we talked to, his name is Vince Pappard, he was stopped similarly at an internal checkpoint coming back from Mexico.
Isn't that the guy from the A-team?
You know, now that you mention it, I think it is.
I never made that connection.
But it was clearly Pappard, wasn't he?
Yeah, I forget the first name.
No, that was George Pappard.
It was George Pappard.
Well, Vince is not on the A-team, but he is a very nice guy.
You don't want to get your van searched full of weapons like that.
That's right, the A-team would have been shut down in this day and age.
They never would have gotten through the border checkpoints.
Pardon me, please continue.
Yeah, no problem.
The thing is, Vince has stopped coming back from Mexico.
He went to Mexico to buy tile.
And he has no problem crossing the border, gives the officer his passport and waved through.
But then at this border checkpoint, which is like 20-25 miles inland, and really has nothing to do with the border.
I mean, he could have been coming back from the supermarket.
It just happens that he was crossing the border that day.
You know, suddenly he stopped at the internal checkpoint.
So the first thing he does is give the officer—he's traveling with his wife—the first thing he does is give him his passport.
Right?
Which is logical.
He's just crossed the border.
He's got it handy.
Boom.
Now, that, at least according to the courts, and I think reasonable interpretation of the law, would be that should be the end.
The purpose of this stop, at least for Fourth Amendment purposes, which is the constitutional amendment that applies here, would be that this is an administrative search.
Which means it's a limited search for a limited purpose.
Really kind of analogous to when the building inspector comes in and has the right to look at your house, even without probable cause.
Just because they have this purpose of making sure that all the buildings are safe.
This is the purpose of this stop, is to make sure that he's—to ascertain his citizenship.
So that's a very important point, that this is not the same thing as, well, you know, you were driving kind of erratically.
Do you have anything to drink?
What's in your trunk?
Et cetera, et cetera.
It's an entirely separate category of detainment under the law.
Right.
Precisely.
And it has no—there's no suspicion here at all.
No one thinks he did anything wrong.
They didn't articulate anything he did wrong.
So he presents his passport, and that should have been the end of it.
But instead, and this is where you start to see this kind of—this drift.
They said, well, do you mind if we look around, look in your trunk?
And, you know, Vince is a good ACLU member, so he says, no, you can't look in my trunk.
That's not—that's certainly well beyond the search.
So at that point, the Customs and Border Patrol agents really started to kind of harass him.
Basically, they badgered him, said, we need to search your trunk.
They pulled him over to the side of the road and had him sitting there for like half an hour.
They photocopied his passport, his driver's license.
Then he said to me later, he said, you know, I'm afraid I'm going to end up on a list somewhere.
And then eventually they brought out the drug sniff dogs, and the dogs sniffed at something.
Oh, wait.
Now stop right there, because there's two things.
First of all, the dogs thing, that happens to everybody, and I guess I'll let you address that.
But I think the implication with, I'm scared I'm going to end up on a list, is simply because he's scared that he pissed off one of these cops who might just, for personal reasons, add him to some list.
Right?
I mean, that's sort of— And I'll tell you a little bit about another person who had exactly that happen to them.
Yeah.
But so here's what we have.
And eventually they searched the trunk, and they didn't find anything.
Here's, we have these sort of internal stops.
Vince didn't do anything wrong.
But the police are allowed to stop him, hold him for half an hour, give him a hard time, copy his passport.
I mean, these are all the hallmarks of Soviet Russia, or the Soviet Union, or East Germany.
These are societies that control their population through checkpoints, through making people present their identity documents.
These are not things that are consistent with American ideals.
So that's really what we want folks to take from this, is whether or not you've ever been through a checkpoint, or whether they waved you through or stopped you, the fact is that checkpoints are not something that America really should be about, or needs to be about, to be safe.
No, certainly not.
So we want to draw attention to that.
Right.
Well, and you know, that's the funny thing, too, is we all know, I think this is pretty much the common conventional wisdom, and it's correct, that they could have prevented 9-11 if they'd only been doing the job and going to the extent of the law as it was already written.
For example, the NSA could have gone to the FISA court and said, we want to trace these calls to the Yemen safe house from America somewhere, from California.
They could have done that under the law as it was.
It was criminal negligence and incompetence that allowed that thing to happen.
So it's hardly an excuse for throwing the law out the window and letting these people turn this country into a homeland security state.
I think that's exactly right.
And we've always said, the ACLU has always said, that the best way to keep us all safe is through things like conventional police work.
It's through investigating people who've said they want to harm the United States or have demonstrated that they've harmed the United States in the past, and investigating them and putting them in jail.
Or giving them a trial and saying, you know, what we don't, what we hate and what we think, frankly, is incredibly un-American and dangerous is this new idea.
And that's that we're all suspects.
We're all, where we should all go through random checkpoints because somebody might be a terrorist.
What we describe it as is wholesale surveillance, as opposed to sort of retail surveillance.
It would be like, oh, we pick specific individuals that we have a reasonable belief might be criminals.
Criminals, terrorists, people who've done something wrong.
That's fine.
Of course you're going to watch people you think committed a crime.
But what we have now is wholesale surveillance.
Let's surveil everybody.
Let's do it through stopping people at checkpoints.
Let's do it through things like watch lists and identity checks.
Let's put video cameras everywhere.
Let's go through everyone's email by having the NSA review their email and their financial information.
And let's just look at everybody and off chance that we can find a terrorist.
I mean, it's un-American and frankly, it doesn't make us any safer.
So that's one of the things that we like to talk about as being a real problem.
Well, now, and specifically on this border check thing, you know, this map has sort of this orange 100-mile internal border inside America, the Constitution-free zone here on the ACLU page.
But does this officially count in the law for 100 miles inland from any of the three coasts?
Yes.
That's what the federal regulations say.
What the law says is that the Customs and Border Patrol have the power to stop and question people within a reasonable distance of the border.
And the regulations have interpreted reasonable distance.
Reasonable distance regulations are the rules that the Customs and Border Patrol people have laid out to explain and establish the law.
Those regulations say that that reasonable distance is 100 miles.
So then by ACLU calculations here, this includes nine of the ten biggest cities in America, excluding Dallas-Fort Worth, 12 entire states within this Constitution-free zone.
That is 197.4 million people.
Almost two-thirds of the U.S. population.
It's crazy.
And, I mean, this kind of intrusive questioning, it doesn't get better unless we push back.
That's the thing.
They're not going to stop doing it unless we say, listen, it's not right.
And another aspect of this that we haven't really talked about yet is that technology makes this worse.
Like, it makes it more intrusive.
For example, what you're seeing in Washington state on the ferries that go back and – there are ferries that go back and forth between islands in Washington Sound and the mainland Washington.
These are purely domestic.
They don't travel internationally or anything.
But what Customs and Border Patrol has done is set up essentially a checkpoint between the islands and the mainland.
And every car that goes on a ferry to cross, their license plate is automatically checked with an automatic license plate reader.
And it's run against a watch list.
So what you're seeing here is not just – I mean, first of all, these people who live on these islands are now basically in almost like a federal restricted zone, where they can't leave their little area without being checked by the feds.
But then you see this technology making that much worse because it's no longer like a custom agent kind of looks you over and waves you through.
Now it's like, let's check – the technology exists to check everybody.
And there are no controls at all on who ends up on those watch lists.
So as a result, you end up on a watch list because, as you said, you piss off somebody in Customs and Border Patrol.
And what happens is that suddenly the license plate reader pings you, and then all kinds of bad things happen.
Yeah, and part of this – I guess I'm always stuck on this book, Technopoly, by Neil Postman, where he talks about how all the responsibility is transferred from the goon to the computer monitor.
And so now, hey, you're not allowed on this plane, you're not allowed on this ferry, you're not allowed to do this, that, or the other thing.
I get to take you away.
Why?
The computer says so.
That's why.
That's right.
I'll give you a real-life example of that.
We have a guy who came to us, the nicest guy in the world.
His name is Craig Johnson.
He's a music professor in San Diego.
So Craig decided that he would attend a university – well, a university-endorsed – I don't know if the university-sponsored – but a protest where Customs and Border Patrol is going to essentially level a state park that's right along the border, the southern border, to build a three – this incredibly deep – like three deep fence to make the border more secure.
So he attends this protest, and as he's leaving, he finds out that Customs and Border Patrol is writing down the license plate numbers of everybody at the protest.
So this is a guy who lives in San Diego and has crossed the border literally hundreds of times without any problem.
So that was on June 1st that he attended the protest.
Since then, a week later, he crossed the border.
When he came back, he was arrested.
He was put in handcuffs.
He was told that he was an armed and dangerous terrorist.
He was questioned.
He was strip-searched, including cavity-searched, and held for about an hour.
Apparently, solely because he had protested at this event, he was considered to be armed and dangerous and placed on this list.
Right.
The national government got revenge against him for daring to speak out.
It's hard to characterize it as anything else but that.
Right.
I mean, how can you call it anything but, we didn't like that he protested, so we are putting him on the list.
And you don't know if it was – there's no standard.
You don't know if he was done by an individual agent.
You don't know if it's the policy of the U.S. government, but it clearly is aimed at stifling protest.
And, I mean, it's essentially – it's a huge harm.
I mean, never mind the invasion, awfulness of this.
He had the courage to go back again a couple of – about three months after that, very recently, just to see if it was a fluke or a problem.
And same thing happened again.
He was arrested.
He was put in cuffs.
He was questioned.
He wasn't searched quite so vigorously, but still, this is a guy who used to work in Mexico.
He's an opera singer by training, and he used to work with the Tijuana Opera.
He was across the border all the time.
This is something that we celebrate in this country, that we have this diversity of culture and this diversity.
But you know what?
He's pretty much cut off from Mexico.
Not because he's afraid to go to Mexico now, but because he's afraid to come back.
I mean, how awful is that?
How wrong is that, that this person who's been put on a watch list has no way to get off it, no understanding of why it's happened, solely because he had protested something that the U.S. government was doing?
This is the kind of control and the kind of scary stuff, frankly, for lack of a more colorful term, that happens when you have kind of all these bad things happening at the border, all this unchecked technological expansion.
It's very scary.
There are protesters charged under, I guess, state terrorism statutes from the protests during the Republican Convention in Minneapolis in August.
And this has really got to be, if you guys already have one or what, but this has got to be, if not the next major lawsuit of the ACLU, and you'll have to fight it over and over again, I guess, until you win, is that we must have a real and exact definition of terrorist in this country.
We cannot let the government go around just making up words and sticking them to people like this, where the guy like Craig Johnson that you just mentioned is called a terrorist for showing up at a protest, as though somehow he is in league with al-Qaeda, as though somehow he is part of a criminal conspiracy to mass murder civilians in this country.
That's what that means, and yet they throw it around like it's a person of interest.
We just made this up.
We don't have to read you your rights.
We'll just call you a person of interest now instead of a suspect, etc.
And it's the same kind of thing, only with the kind of definition that could get you up against the wall.
It really is very scary.
And it's not just a definition of terrorist, and I think that that's a big thing, because they do use that term incredibly loosely and in a way that is really, frankly, irresponsible.
But it's also – it's the lack of due process.
It's the lack of any kind of – and again, it's the same thing when you call somebody a person of interest.
It's like this is a standardless accusation.
I don't have to back it up.
I don't have to make any explanation as to why the person is on a list.
I don't have to give the person any opportunity to get off the list.
I just can put it out there, and then it has all these adverse consequences for somebody's life.
I mean, you see it all the time in the context of flying, where people can't fly or they're frisked every time they fly, and nobody can give them a good reason why, and nobody can figure out how to get them off the list.
It's really amazing when you think about it.
I mean, we expect fairness in this country from all kinds of people who have a lot less power over us than the U.S. government does.
I mean, if I go to a retailer, if I go into Walmart, and I want to return something, and I have the receipt, and they give me a hard time, I'm really upset.
I'm like, this is unfair that I can't do this.
I'm following the rules.
But I mean, when you think about that, how minor that is in comparison to your rights, the possibility that you could end up in jail or searched or harassed, and yet we have all these situations where there is no fundamental fairness.
There is no right to recourse.
There is no process.
Until we can push back in those kind of areas, we're really going to have a long way to go before we can recover the civil liberties we lost after 9-11.
Well, you know, a lot of this is about the precedent set, like with torture, as we discussed with our guests in the first hour of the show today, that we sort of have this revolution within the form so that the argument that I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't have anything to worry about, becomes quite moot when there's so much government with so much authority that it is basically irrelevant whether you've ever done anything wrong at all.
And you know, the definition of wrong changes so fast, too.
And you also have a lot of, frankly, a lot of mistakes, too, without trying to be too petty.
I mean, the Department of Homeland Security are the people who brought you Katrina.
These are not necessarily perfectly competent, super able super agents.
No, these are the guys who couldn't even get hired at ATF.
So, I mean, mistakes, I mean, we consistently see mistakes made.
Old lists are relied on.
Nobody knows why something is done the way it's done.
It just is.
So even if you didn't do anything wrong, I feel like you should still be pretty nervous about having this much power in someone's hand that may not be able to use it properly or may use it for bad reasons.
And also, you know, when you talk about the technology and the license plate readers and the automation comparison to all the databases and that kind of thing, can you address the radio frequency IDs that they're trying to add to or they are adding to the passports and then perhaps the virtual fence and predator drones and that kind of thing on the border?
Well, yes, they are adding.
Every passport that's issued now has a radio frequency identification chip in it.
And that chip has in it, in the passport, has a lot of the information, has basically all the information that's in your passport.
For example, your picture, your address, your name, your passport number.
The chips, I am frankly of two minds about these chips.
Well, that's not true.
These chips are bad news, and I think they're unnecessary.
We did work very hard with the State Department to get some pretty good protections for that information in those chips in terms of getting them encrypted, making them harder to read.
But the fact is, so, I mean, I try to give credit where I can in that the State Department did at least make an effort to work with us on this.
But the fact is, no one has ever adequately explained to me why a passport should have an RFID chip in it.
I mean, I know why they say they're doing it.
They say it's an international standard that all passports have to do it.
But that, frankly, is just bunk, for lack of a better word, because it was really the State Department that lobbied to get the international standard to be RFID chips.
So to say we have to do it because it's an international standard is kind of silly.
And at the end of the day, I've never heard an adequate justification for why a passport should have an RFID chip in it.
For people who don't know what an RFID chip is, an RFID chip is a little chip that if when a reader that's not part of the chip that's somewhere else broadcasts a radio signal, that radio signal bounces off the chip, and the chip responds with whatever information is on it.
So it is by definition insecure technology.
It's technology that is meant to be read.
Now, you can put all kinds of protections in place, which the State Department did, and you can say, okay, this is great.
We've protected the information.
But really what you're doing is making water less wet.
It's always going to be insecure.
The purpose of the technology is to be read.
It initially started as technology for tracking pallets and cargo and things for retailers.
So the chips are supposed to be read, and we just don't think you should go around broadcasting personal information.
Now, and what probably makes this worse is that it's hard to do this right, and it's easy to do it wrong.
And what we're starting to see is some states are issuing what are called enhanced driver's licenses for crossing the border.
And these licenses have RFID chips in them.
And in large part, these RFID chips are not adequately protected.
The protections aren't as good as the past were.
So now you're broadcasting, and in many of those cases of those chips, they're just broadcasting a number.
But still, I mean, a license plate is just a number.
It's still something that identifies you, and they can be used to track you or follow you from a distance or keep track of where you go.
All of this sort of creeps out from the border, which is really the underlying point.
It starts with passports.
It creeps to driver's licenses.
Suddenly you look around, and you're carrying around an RFID chip with you all the time.
And that's frankly scary, and that's one of the things you see creeping.
You mentioned the drones.
Well, let me stop you on the RFID thing real quick, because it seems like one of the implications of this would be identity theft-type situations where you have, say, never even mind other states' intelligence agencies or anything nefarious like that, but even just organized crime, walking around in airports in, say, foreign countries, scanning for Americans, and then kidnapping them, charging extra, or trying to find a group of Americans to set off a bomb near there, where you're stealing their identity and getting entry to the country, pretending to be an American, when in fact they are Ayman al-Zawahiri's henchmen.
Yes, exactly.
That is exactly right.
I mean, all of those scenarios are possible.
They're harder now, but without getting into too many details, it's just really hard to do this right, and it's very easy to do it wrong.
For example, there are certain protections that the State Department is supposed to be doing around making sure that the chips can't be copied, for example, and placed in a fake passport that they aren't doing.
So as a result, it's possible to grab somebody's passport, the information on somebody's passport from a distance, copy it, put it on a new chip, and then put it in a fake passport.
So, yeah, I mean, it's identity theft, and it creates a security vulnerability where none existed before, because you've given the terrorist or the criminal the opportunity to get their hands on this information without ever actually stealing your passport.
Yeah, frankly, we've always been maybe puzzled is the nicest word we can use as to why these chips were necessary.
I think they are.
They do create as much of a security problem as they could ever, a security benefit.
Well, you know, the state basically is just a gang of thieves writ large.
They want to be able to read our passport from inside our pocket at all times and track us like packages, basically, right?
You know, I try to ascribe the best motives to people that I can.
You're a good man.
I'm not that good of a gentleman.
But I don't understand it.
I really don't.
I mean, I don't think it provides increased security.
I do think that it makes people more vulnerable to things like being identified as an American in a foreign land.
I mean, these are manifestly bad things.
I don't understand why you would want to see them in your primary identity document.
Well, maybe they just haven't thought it through.
Maybe.
Or, you know, maybe there's a vendor selling them something.
Now, speaking of terrorism and Ayman al-Zawahiri and so forth, these Predator drones ought to be flying around in Waziristan looking for the one six and a half foot Arab hanging out of Osama bin Laden, right?
But instead, they're flying them.
Now, this hundred mile inland border of Constitution less rights zone, are these drones going to be all over the place in this country like this?
Two thirds of the American population under surveillance?
That's a great question.
It's clear that these drones have gotten a real boost from border security and the decision to spend more money on the border.
It's clear that a lot of that money has gone to new technologies like the virtual fence and these drones.
I suspect that you will see them.
I mean, this is actually something that's not even limited by the hundred mile zone These cities and towns are allowed to use, are allowed to surveil people from the sky, actually, without any reason.
So, but why it's connected to the border is because the border is sort of a proving ground.
As we militarize the border and make it more and more like a sort of military checkpoint, we bring in things like drones that are essentially military technology and we start to use them on a civilian population.
I mean, spy satellites are the same thing.
You're saying it's legal right now for the local sheriff's department to get one of these if it's in their budget?
I think what you'll see is, yeah, and what you're seeing is the border is starting to be the way we invest in these technologies.
We buy drones, we make them, we figure out what makes them work, you know, how they work best, how they, you know, what doesn't work, they get cheaper.
All of this comes from spending on them to work on the border.
And then as they become cheaper and, frankly, as Homeland Security, as little sheriffs in places that don't really have a terrorist threat start looking for ways that they can spend these dollars, these Department of Homeland Security sort of grant dollars, they say, well, maybe we'll get a drone.
That seems like a cool thing.
And then you've got, I mean, of course they're not looking for terrorists, they're looking for meth labs.
But that's what it becomes.
Let's surveil everybody and fly around and use these drones.
Yeah, well, and this is where we get back to all the total information awareness over at the National Security Agency, which is where they moved it after the story was leaked, that we are approaching a day, I guess we're not there yet, but we are approaching a day here pretty soon where all the, say, Texas Department of Public Safety cameras that are up on all the highways here in Austin, Texas, will be telling the IRS where I am.
We'll be telling Oklahoma that, hey, here's this guy in case he has a speeding ticket fired out in your state.
We'll have all these databases instantly updated and keeping track of us all the time as the computer power gets more and more integrated.
It seems like it is going to be like East Germany.
I hate to sound like hyperbole, and yet we live in hyperbolic times.
It's true.
And the thing that you have to remember here is that this isn't just about government.
It's also about sort of natural laws of technology, if you will.
As we sit here and talk on the phone, computer chips are getting faster.
Data storage is getting cheaper.
Integrating systems is getting easier.
This is just a fact of technology.
It's not a good thing or a bad thing.
Obviously, we like this increased processing power when it gives us cool new smartphones and other great stuff, but it just is the way the technology is.
But as it gets cheaper, it gets easier and easier to do all the things you just described.
It becomes easier to network those video cameras.
It becomes easier to save all the information you've got on those video cameras, save all the license plate scans that they do.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that that's a realistic concern.
I mean, one thing people have to remember, though, is that these developments are not inevitable.
It's not like there's no choice.
Technology is getting more powerful.
We're powerless.
This is just a function of bad laws and the lack of controls.
I mean, if you look around you, for example, to give you a real-world example, you see video cameras everywhere, right?
But you don't see microphones on them, and there's a very good reason for that.
The Supreme Court said in 1965, essentially, that walking around in public was not protected by the Fourth Amendment, was not private.
However, the conversations you were having with the person when you were walking around in public were private and did have an expectation of privacy that had to be protected.
So that was just a legal distinction.
They decided that conversations were private.
Just being outside was not private.
We got lucky with that one.
I know, right?
We caught a break.
But you see, the result was all this technology that doesn't listen to your conversations.
That's one of the few strong legal protections we still have is on monitoring conversations, monitoring phone calls, for example, though the NSA has obviously substantially eroded that in the last couple of years, but still a lot stronger than a lot of other things.
But that's really the point, though, is that when you have good laws, you can put limits on these technologies.
It's not inevitable.
It's just that the law doesn't exist right now.
Well, and, you know, the precedents get so screwy.
I remember Jonathan Turley gave this incredible speech at the Future Freedom Foundation conference in June, and he went through like a few anecdotes about the way the Fourth Amendment was reinterpreted and reinterpreted, and I think one of them was concerning being pulled over on the side of the road.
Well, we need to lower the standard for probable cause to search to just the cops say so on the side of the road because, after all, you're in a public place, and what are we going to do, call and wake up every judge in the middle of the night and drive them out there and whatever?
But, of course, now everybody's got a cell phone, and technology has made it so that the arguments that lowered the standard for searching people's cars on the side of the road are now moot, and yet those standards have not been raised back up again.
That's right.
Yeah, it's hard to go back.
Yeah.
Well, so I guess we'll just keep calling the shots on the road to hell.
Well, you keep suing them, and I'll keep interviewing you about it.
All right.
All right.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
It was good to talk to you.
All right, everybody.
That's Chris Calabrese from the ACLU.
