[The New Jim Crow] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow#Chapter_1:_The_Rebirth_of_Caste)
>The [1970s] saw a number of issues, such as civil rights enforcement, affirmative action, busing and welfare (conservatives indirectly suggested that the blacks were refusing to work, because they preferred to live off government hand-outs) developing into intense controversies. Nixon declared illicit drugs a "public enemy number one" and declared a "war on drugs", although no specific drug enforcement policy was yet envisioned and no right wing race and social policy consensus had yet emerged.
>The conservative revolution with the political focus in the Republican Party reached its mature stage when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Reagan issued many implicit, but formally race-neutral appeals concerning crime, welfare, taxes and state rights and his candidacy was enthusiastically embraced by frustrated and disaffected whites; 22% of all Democrats ended up voting for him. Once elected, Reagan proceeded to fulfill his promise of enhancing the federal government's role in combating crime, which at first seemed to be no easy task, since street crime had traditionally been the area of jurisdiction and responsibility of state and local authorities. But the determination was there and the expansion of federal authority posed no difficulty for conservative politicians in this case.
>The Justice Department first announced the cutting in half of the personnel assigned to the prosecution of white-collar crimes and switching its emphasis to street crime, especially the enforcement of illegal drug policies. In October 1982, President Reagan officially declared his administration's "War on Drugs", a political move intended to facilitate the implementation of the white right wing's informal race policies that were then assuming a definitive shape, rather than to address the (quite limited at that time) public concern about drugs.
I've recently seen a number of cases where civil liberties groups have spoken out about various forms of testing for criminal behaviour. Normally
The big one was the recent Supreme Court decision about the use of sniffer dogs looking for drugs. I for one don't see how a police using a sniffer dog to look for drugs is a violation of personal freedom, as long as they do not impede you in other ways. If the police detain you to wait for the dog to arrive, that's a different freedom that's impacted (and the Supreme Court said as much). If they pull apart your luggage to let the dog sniff everything, that's also obviously an impairment of the freedom from search. But I can't see how a cop, say, wandering around the neighbourhood with a sniffer dog could be seen as a violation of civil liberties because the dog is merely a tool to detect things that are "in plain scent".
I don't extend this logic to things like camera surveillance because surveillance carries with it big concerns of abuse of authority, because any time you are keeping that much data there is definitely a possibility (more like a certainty, really!) that it will be used for something other than catching criminals. But a police officer wandering around with a well-trained dog seems unlikely to impair the privacy of anyone who wasn't doing something illegal.
Thoughts?
Corporations are considered people, right? They have first amendment rights to free speech when it comes to campaign financing, but they don't have the fourth amendment right to unreasonable search and seizure? What am I missing?
