Big Brother Wants to Inspect You!

From an article in Wired magazine, here is an incredible fact about the US's FCC: it claims the right to invade your home at any time to inspect you if you have any kind of wireless device on your premise!

FCC’s Warrantless Household Searches Alarm Experts
By Ryan Singel May 21, 2009

You may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it.

That’s the upshot of the rules the agency has followed for years to monitor licensed television and radio stations, and to crack down on pirate radio broadcasters. And the commission maintains the same policy applies to any licensed or unlicensed radio-frequency device.

“Anything using RF energy — we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference,” says FCC spokesman David Fiske. That includes devices like Wi-Fi routers that use unlicensed spectrum, Fiske says.

I never cease to be amazed how "organization creep" takes over people's lives. They simply grow and assume "rights" and never rethink their purpose and what would qualify as appropriate behaviour. It takes rebellion and long legal fights to get these mindless organizations to back off and let people live a quiet and happy life.

I love the phrase in the American Declaration of Independence about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". This is a foundational document for the US, but apparantly it's intent doesn't manage to penetrate the thick hide of bureaucracy.

The need for the FCC to deal with rogue radio stations or sources of electronic noise is understandable and the ability to enter premises to deal with this makes sense. But technology has moved on. The fact that wireless devices are everywhere does not mean that the FCC can blithely assume that its mandate has simply spread from a few commercial establishments to every house, every car, every nook and cranny is nutty!

Nothing in life is simple... the article goes on to note some problems in enforcement. I am bothered by the use of one reason to invade a premise to convict of another crime. That is ugly. On the other hand, as the following points out, those in the "business" of crime usually figure out a way to "handle" the quasi-police powers. The real victims of a warrentless invasion are the "ordinary folk" who don't have lawyers to advise them and who are doing something innocent like using a wireless router! Here's more from the Wired magazine article:

Administrative search powers are not rare, at least as directed against businesses — fire-safety, food and workplace-safety regulators generally don’t need warrants to enter a business. And despite the broad power, the FCC agents aren’t cops, says Fiske. “The only right they have is to inspect the equipment,” Fiske says. “If they want to seize, they have to work with the U.S. Attorney’s office.”

But if inspectors should notice evidence of unrelated criminal behavior — say, a marijuana plant or an unregistered gun — a Supreme Court decision suggests the search can be used against the resident. In the 1987 case New York v. Burger, two police officers performed a warrantless, administrative search of one Joseph Burger’s automobile junkyard. When he couldn’t produce the proper paperwork, the officers searched the grounds and found stolen vehicles, which they used to prosecute him. The Supreme Court held the search to be legal.

In the meantime, pirate radio stations are adapting to the FCC’s warrantless search power by dividing up a station’s operations. For instance, Boulder Free Radio consists of an online radio station operated by DJs from a remote studio. Miles away, a small computer streams the online station and feeds it to the transmitter. Once the FCC comes and leaves a notice on the door, the transmitter is moved to another location before the agent returns.

Civil society is not a given. Each generation has to rebuild from the ground up because the underlying "ground" of the society is dynamic and ever changing. If you think about voting rights, civil status, property rights, educational "rights", and health "rights", these are all evolving concepts. Americans tend to think that the revolution of 1776 endowed them with rights. Well, that started the ball rolling, but rights have evolved as courts have re-interpreted them, new laws extended rights, and people simply pushed for rights and reshaped their society to accept those rights: think of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s/60s.

I found it funny under the Bush administration where he sought judges who were "strict constructionists". The theory behind this is that the framers of the US Constitution were so far sighted that all one needed to do was go back into their mindset and look at the documents and it would be obvious how to apply the law. (That works if you are a conservative and don't want to change the social structure. Obviously the rich elite love this approach to life since it cements them in place as top dogs and vitiates any attempt at social change.) Sadly for the conservatives, the world changes. Buggy whip manufacturing has died out... and now it appears that even the automobile industry is dying out in favour of something looming on the horizon that isn't yet clearly discernible.