"HeyBub" wrote in message
...

You make some excellent points. Except one. You said: "... the feds don't
need no stinkin' warrants". I presume you are referring to Administrative
Subpoenas (AS) and its cousin, a National Security Letter.

Obama said during the campaign that if elected he would end the use of
security letters, instead he has continued their use and even apparently
sought to extend it--I hold that against him. If the feds want to open your
mail or listen to your phone calls or search your home etc., if they have a
good reason to do those things, then they should go before a judge and get a
warrant. I do not believe that "fishing expedition" searches that a judge
has not approved are a good idea and neither did the men who wrote the Bill
of Rights.

Actually, ASs are not new. They were originally implemented in 1978 to
deal with drug interdiction and money laundering.

Ah yes, the War On Drugs, helping to destroy your Constitutional rights for
over thirty years.

There is, in point of fact, no expectation of privacy in a commercial
transaction.

Except when there is. Your relationship with your doctor or lawyer is of a
commercial nature, and yet if either or those folks blabs about you they're
in trouble. If you're a renter your landlord can't enter your home (which
he owns) except in certain narrowly defined emergencies. If you buy or
lease many products you have to agree not to discover or communicate
proprietary information from those products--and so on. There are lots of
commercial transactions in which one or more parties have an expectation of
privacy--your blanket statement to the contrary is in error.

And, as a further correction, a warrant to disgorge information from a
hotel, Starbucks, or anywhere else would never be issued. If, previously,
a federal law enforcement official wanted to examine the credit card
records of a motel (and the owner declined to cooperate), the feds would
get a subpoena from a grand jury, not a warrant from a judge.

The point is of course that the feds couldn't just order someone to cough up
information on you on their own say-so, either a judge or a grand jury had
to okay it. But now all they have to do is send a letter and your ISP rolls
over and tells them whatever they want to know. But it's for
"security"--which apparently means that the Constitution is now more a
collection of guidelines than the supreme law of the land.

Like the man said: Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a
little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.