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>>>>I was making a general point, Tracy. If you think the Bush appointees, especially the Roberts Court, have not had a huge role in undercutting individual rights, you have not been paying attention.
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>>>And I'm lovin it! Cocaine dealers of the world NEED to have warrantless searches conducted!
>>
>>You mean suspected coke dealers, or coke dealers? I kind of thought that "innocent until proven guilty" was important.
>>It's a rather slippery slope that can get way out of control quickly. I recall a few years ago when I was living in FL I was woke up at 4:30am with a bunch of cops breaking down my door screaming "what are you growing in here?"....which I said "uhhh..file-servers?". As it turned out I had 15 or so computers running 24/7 and it was taking a lot of electricity and made the house warmer. Supposedly they had "searched" my house from a helicopter with infrared and decided I was a pot grower because of the extra heat. No warrant, probably cause...NOTHING. In the meantime it freaked out my neighbors and made me 1/2 a day late for work and they ruined my front door and frame beyond repair. And oh yeah one of the cops ran over my neighbors cat too.
>
>I believe I said - search incident to arrest. That means AFTER an arrest. As for kicking the doors on a high elecgtrical useage - sans warrant - I have a hard time believing they didn't have a warrant, if they actually forced their way into your house. Now, we do a thing we call "knock and talk" which is just what it says. We show up at a suspected problem's address, knock and ask the owner if we can come in and look around. You would be surprised at how many people let us in, without a warrant. AND, you would be surprised at how many times we get drugs, guns, money and peeps.
>
>Now, as to that high electric bill, you might want to investigate Virtual Servers! lol

Ok I guess I didn't explain very well. They had a warrant to search my place when they showed up and destroyed my door - however the reason they were able to get that warrant is because they searched my house WITHOUT a warrant via infrared and a helicopter. My logic is that hey there were taking pictures of the inside of my house for no reason at all. Plus what kind of reason for a warrant would that be in the first place? So first they take infrared pics of the inside of my house, then use the results of that as a reason to take a look at my past electric bills...then use that to invade my home.
Prior to this happening, had they simply done what you call a "knock and talk" I would of laughed about it and let them in and explained even though the infrared thing would of ticked me off. Now if I was to get a "knock and talk" I would say "kiss my a--" and slam the door shut.