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The U.S. Government has long maintained a policy that they have the right to stop and search anyone at the border. The Department of Homeland Security is now taking the position that “the border” is the 100-mile wide strip that wraps around the “external boundary” of the United States. The ACLU took all the recent census maps and came to a rather surprising conclusion.

What we found is that fully TWO-THIRDS of the United States’ population lives within this Constitution-free or Constitution-lite Zone. That’s 197.4 million people who live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders.

That means the Fourth Amendment of the constitution, barring random and arbitrary stops and searches, does not apply to two-thirds of U.S. Citizens.

Shouldn’t Senator Leahy and the Judiciary Committee be looking into this?

You will be happy to hear that Homeland Security’s terrorist watch list will hit 1 Million names tomorrow.

Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program, spoke today along with two victims of the watch list: Jim Robinson, former assistant attorney general for the Civil Division who flies frequently and is often delayed for hours despite possessing a governmental security clearance and Akif Rahman, an American citizen who has been detained and interrogated extensively at the U.S.-Canada border when traveling for business.

I feel safer already.