Two articles published yesterday by NBC News caught my eye. One on the Supreme Court's decision to further weaken prohibitions on non-consensual search and seizure without a warrant and another on tracking terrorists trained in Syria.
In a 2006 case the Court had decided by 6-3 vote that a search was permissible without a warrant even if an occupant declined to consent as long as another occupant agreed to the search. Today's decision went a step further and allowed the search if the dissenting occupant was not present at the time that the search was initiated. This is allowed even if the dissenting occupant has been removed by the authorities in a legal manner, such as arrest. That was exactly the situation yesterday as the 2009 case involved searching the apartment of a prior offender who refused such permission. When police noticed the occupant's girlfriend, who was also an occupant, was bruised and bleeding they arrested the boyfriend on suspicion of domestic abuse. By virtue of today's decision his absence trumped his dissent.
One can only assume that the authorities are required to prove the occupancy of the person granting permission by seeking the address on a driver's license or other acceptable form of identification. I have found no mention of that in the article, which was by Pete Williams and Erik Ortiz. Hopefully it is not assumed by the Court that this will take place.
The second article, by Robert Windrem has to do with increased efforts by MI5 and MI6 (Britain's equivalent of our CIA and FBI) in the UK to identify and detain dissidents returning from training in Syria to Europe via flights from Turkey. There apparently is a large training operation being conducted in Syria by al Quaeda in which they train dissidents from the West( and elsewhere) and return them to their homes to cause problems. I had read a few weeks ago that the new Director of Homeland Security here was speaking on this subject but didn't realize it was this widespread.
A senior U.S. counter-terrorism official credits the British with being the most aggressive in tracking such movements. So far, this year, they have detained 20 persons versus 24 in all of 2013. This includes 16 in January 4 last Tuesday.
An interesting point in this article is that MI5 has "admitted" that they had previously been lax in tracking such movements in Northern Ireland where "splinter groups" have been found to be responsible for the deaths of law enforcement personnel. These methods have been being used to track movements in Northern Ireland for the past two years. While I agree terrorism is horrible and just about any means to track such activities in their infancy can be justified, I hope that this isn't going to become an excuse for a renewal of tensions between these neighbors. It took centuries for Britain to settle the " Irish problem" and then only with the efforts of George Mitchell aiding in the process. To revert to the same problems that plagued these neighboring countries throughout their history would be a long step backwards.
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