Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Joe Biden (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
I saw the Salon article yesterday and I finally stopped laughing long enough to write this little diddy. Washington was a military leader who led us to victory. Biden led us to the Afghanistan retreat. Jefferson was one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence. Biden was a plagiarizing author.
Now if the author just showed the defeats between the three, and how Washington and Jefferson owned slaves and Joe had KKK friends, I could see common ground. But to compare Joe’s destroying of the Trump economy with some of the great things the founding fathers did? Laughable.
Google searches are now being used by police for leads in crimes. NBC News
Privacy advocates are watching the case closely, concerned that police could use reverse keyword searches to investigate people who seek information about abortions.
(Oh? IS that the ONLY privacy concern? — TPR)
A teen charged with setting a fire that killed five members of a Senegalese immigrant family in Denver, Colorado, has become the first person to challenge police use of Google search histories to find someone who might have committed a crime, according to his lawyers.
The pushback against this surveillance tool, known as a reverse keyword search, is being closely watched by privacy and abortion rights advocates, who are concerned that it could soon be used to investigate women who search for information about obtaining an abortion in states where the procedure is now illegal.
In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.
That search of Google’s records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea.
The 17-year-old’s lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users’ queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.
“People have a privacy interest in their internet search history, which is really an archive of your personal expression,” said Michael Price, who is lead litigator of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Fourth Amendment Center and one of the 17-year-old’s attorneys. “Search engines like Google are a gateway to a vast trove of information online and the way most people find what they’re looking for. Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy.”
Keyword searches differ from traditional search warrants in that police seek them without knowing the name of a suspect; instead, they are seeking information that might lead them to a suspect.
Keyword searches have grown increasingly common in recent years, as police have used them to search for suspects in a variety of crimes, including a string of Texas bombings, sexual abuse in Wisconsin and fraud in Minnesota. They differ from traditional search warrants in that police seek them without knowing the name of a suspect; instead, they are seeking information that might lead them to a suspect.
Google does not publish data on the number of keyword search requests it receives, and did not respond to a request to provide that information. Google also did not respond to requests for comment.
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, privacy advocates and women’s rights groups worry that keyword searches could expand into investigations of illegal abortions in states that have outlawed them.
“Police officers are going to try to investigate people they think are violating those laws. One way of finding that is to ask Google to hand over information on everyone who has searched for a Planned Parenthood in a particular place,” said Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil rights group that plans to file a brief supporting the 17-year-old’s challenge to the keyword search warrant.
“If Google is allowed or required to turn over information in this Colorado case, there is nothing to stop a court in a state that has outlawed abortion to also require Google to turn over information on that kind of keyword search.”
(Boo hoo, snowflakes. Try your scare tactics elsewhere — TPR)
Abortion rights advocates are also concerned about geofence warrants, in which police ask Google to provide information on devices that were near the scene of a crime in order to find a suspect. That tool was found unconstitutional by a judge in Virginia last year, but that ruling doesn’t restrain police in other parts of the country.
Denver police, with help from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, turned to the keyword search several weeks after the fire, when they had yet to identify the people caught on security video in masks just before the fire was set.
The keyword search warrant, issued in November 2020, led Google to search for anyone who queried the address of the home that burned in the 15 days before the fire. Google delivered information on 61 queries, according to court filings, along with the IP address — a unique number for each computer on the internet. Investigators focused on a handful of those queries, asking Google to provide detailed user information for them. One of them was linked to the 17-year-old.
From there, investigators examined the teen’s other online activities, including Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and text messages.
The investigation revealed that the fire was set in a mistaken attempt at revenge against someone who’d stolen one of the co-defendant’s phones, a Denver detective testified last year. After the fire, the co-defendant realized the people killed were not the people he thought stole the phone, the detective said.
If it wasn’t for the keyword search warrant, investigators would never have suspected the 17-year-old or his friends, his lawyers wrote in the motion filed Thursday.
“The starting point was a search of billions of Google users, and all without a shred of evidence to search any one of them,” the lawyers wrote.
The lawyers called the search a privacy violation of not only the 17-year-old defendant but of all people who conducted a search on Google during the 15-day period.
The Denver Police Department declined to comment. So did the Denver district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case.
Price said that allowing the government to sift through Google’s vast trove of searches is akin to allowing the government access to users’ “thoughts, concerns, questions, fears.”
“Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy,” Price said. “‘Psychiatrists in Denver.’ ‘Abortion providers near me.’ ‘Does God exist.’ Every day, people pose those questions to Google seeking information.”
Jon Schuppe is an enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York.
Snopes usually doesn’t get it right, but I know of two occasions that they did. One was about Thomas and the aborted fetus.
In a June 2022 dissenting opinion, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asserted a debunked claim about the use of aborted fetal cells in COVID-19 vaccines.
Rating
False
This is the second one.
Five conservative Supreme Court justices dishonestly suggested, in Senate confirmation hearings, that they thought Roe v. Wade was beyond overturning.
Rating
False
Fact Check
In May 2022, after news leaked that the U.S. Supreme Court had provisionally voted to overturn the abortion protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade, the left-wing political action committee MeidasTouch briefly caused “#LyingGOP” to trend on Twitter, with a video that accused five Republican-appointed justices of lying about their intentions to overturn the landmark ruling.
However, the creators of the video badly misrepresented the full scope of relevant facts in two important ways, and we are issuing a rating of “False.”
First, they engaged in highly selective editing of much longer and more nuanced archival clips of future justices during their U.S. Senate confirmation hearings, in order to grossly misrepresent the substance of what they said.
Second, they appeared to misunderstand or misrepresent the meaning of a Supreme Court precedent. In brief, describing a ruling as an important precedent is not tantamount to giving a commitment not to overturn that ruling, or indicating you believe that ruling cannot be overruled. Therefore, the sweeping allegations of premeditated dishonesty on the part of GOP-appointed justices were as poorly supported by evidence as they were wrongheaded.
The following is our breakdown of what the MeidasTouch “megaviral supercut” video claimed, lined up against what the factual record shows.
Justice Clarence Thomas
File photo of Clarence Thomas during his 1991 U.S. Senate confirmation hearings. Source: Bettmann / Getty Images.
The following is how Meidas Touch presented Thomas’s remarks:
Clarence Thomas: I believe the constitution protects the right to privacy. And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue.
Caption: HE LIED
In this section of the video, MeidasTouch mutilated a 1991 quotation from then-Supreme Court nominee Thomas, and grossly misrepresented the substance and meaning of his remarks. In reality, Thomas absolutely did not provide any assurances on how he might rule on the specific case of Roe v. Wade, nor on the question of abortion rights.
U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio, had been attempting to pin down Thomas’s views on whether the U.S. Constitution protects abortion rights, and had highlighted what he presented as discrepancies in Thomas’s past pronouncements.
In particular, Metzenbaum asked Thomas to resolve an apparent gap between his putative support for a constitutionally-enshrined right to privacy, more broadly, and abortion rights in particular. Metzenbaum put it to Thomas that:
I fear that you, like other nominees before the committee, could assure us that you support a fundamental right to privacy, but could also decline to find that a woman’s right to choose is protected by the constitution.
At the culmination of his remarks, Metzenbaum asked Thomas:
I must ask you to tell us here and now whether you believe that the constitution protects a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy, and I am not asking you as to how you would vote in connection with any case before the court.
In response, Thomas prevaricated, as so many judicial nominees have in recent decades:
I am afraid though, on your final question, Senator, that it is important for any of us who are judges, in areas that are very deeply contested…I think that to take a position would undermine my ability to be impartial…
I am afraid that to begin to answer questions about what my specific position is in these contested areas would greatly — or leave the impression that I prejudged this issue.
When Metzenbaum again attempted to pin down the nominee, Thomas again prevaricated, providing the quotation that would be mutilated and misrepresented by MeidasTouch in their video:
Senator, as I noted yesterday, and I think we all feel strongly in this country about our privacy — I do — I believe the constitution protects the right to privacy. And I have no reason or agenda to prejudge the issue or to predispose to rule one way or the other on the issue of abortion, which is a difficult issue. [Emphasis is added].
As the transcript makes clear, MeidasTouch cut off the second half of Thomas’s sentence, in which he stipulated that he had “no reason…to prejudge” or “to predispose to rule one way or the other on the issue of abortion.”
In reality, Thomas was repeatedly urged and asked to make pronouncements on abortion rights, and refused to do so. The notion, therefore, that in this exchange he somehow gave an assurance that he would not ever vote to overturn Roe v. Wade is utterly without basis in fact.
Justice Samuel Alito
WASHINGTON – JANUARY 10: U.S. Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel Alito answers questions before the Senate Judiciary Committee during the second day of his confirmation hearings January 10, 2006 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The following is how MeidasTouch presented Alito’s remarks:
Alito: Roe v Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973. It has been challenged on a number of occasions and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the decision. When a decision is challenged and it is reaffirmed, that strengthens its value.
Caption: HE LIED
Once again, this presentation gives the grossly misleading impression that, in his confirmation hearings, Alito indicated he would not vote to overturn Roe v Wade. In reality, the full scope of his remarks clearly shows that — like most judicial nominees — Alito very carefully avoided giving any assurances about how he might vote on that precedent.
The clip in question came from Alito’s hearings on Jan. 11, 2006. Readers can examine a full transcript of the relevant exchange, or watch a video of it.
Ironically, the starting point for the exchange was the concern expressed by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that Alito had “decided to create categories of cases that have been decided by the Court that you will concede have constitutional protection, but you have left in question the future of Roe v. Wade.”
In other words, Durbin was concerned that Alito had not stated, for the record, that Roe v. Wade was no longer open to overturning, and indeed had in the past asserted that “the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”
So while MeidasTouch presented Alito’s remarks as proof that he thought Roe v. Wade was beyond overturning — “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court” — what those remarks actually constituted was Alito’s careful avoidance of describing the ruling as such. Here’s the key exchange:
Durbin: Do you believe [Roe v Wade] is the settled law of the land? Alito: Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It was decided in 1973, so it has been on the books for a long time. It has been challenged on a number of occasions, and I discussed those yesterday, and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the decision, sometimes on the merits, sometimes [as] in Casey based on stare decisis, and I think that when a decision is challenged and it is reaffirmed that strengthens its value as stare decisis… Durbin: Is it the settled law of the land? Alito: It is a — if settled means that it can’t be re-examined, then that’s one thing. If settled means that it is a precedent that is entitled to respect as stare decisis, and all of the factors that I’ve mentioned come into play, including the reaffirmation and all of that, then it is a precedent that is protected, entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis, in that way.
What Alito is saying here is that Roe v. Wade is clearly a precedent whose conclusions have been repeatedly reaffirmed by the court, and would not lightly be overturned, taking into account the doctrine of stare decisis — the legal principle of deference to precedent expressed in the Latin phrase, which means “let stand what has been decided.”
What Alito is not saying — indeed, what he is scrupulously avoiding saying, despite Durbin’s best efforts — is that Roe v Wade is beyond overturning, like various other landmark precedents he had mentioned elsewhere in the hearings, such as Brown v. the Board of Education.
So the full scope of Alito’s remarks, when viewed objectively and in context, actually show the opposite of what the brief clip, strategically cut away by MeidasTouch, appeared to show.
Justice Neil Gorsuch
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 22: Judge Neil Gorsuch testifies during the third day of his Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, March 22, 2017 in Washington. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The following is how Meidas Touch presented Gorsuch’s remarks.
Gorsuch: Roe v Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the United States Supreme Court, worthy [of] treatment [as] precedent, like any other.
Caption: HE LIED
MeidasTouch badly misrepresented Gorsuch’s remarks in the same way as it did Alito’s. In reality, by describing Roe v. Wade as a precedent “worthy of treatment as precedent,” Gorsuch was assiduously avoiding going any further or categorizing it as beyond overturning.
The pattern should be familiar by now. Gorsuch’s remarks came during a Senate confirmation hearing on March 21, 2017, and can be read and viewed in their proper context.
During his questioning of the Trump nominee, Judiciary committee chairman U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Gorsuch whether he thought DC v. Heller, a landmark 2008 decision in which the court reaffirmed the Second Amendment right to bear arms, had been correctly decided. Gorsuch said:
Senator, I would respectfully respond that it [DC v Heller] is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court, and as a good judge, you do not approach that question anew, as if it had never been decided. That would be a wrong way to approach it. My personal views, I would also tell you, Mr. Chairman, belong over here. I leave those at home…Part of being a good judge is coming in and taking precedent as it stands, and your personal views about the precedent have absolutely nothing to do with the good job of a judge.
Gorsuch then effectively reiterated the same response in relation to several other landmark precedents, including Citizens United, Hosanna-Tabor, Gideon v. Wainwright and Roe v. Wade. On the latter case, Gorsuch said:
Senator, again, I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. The reliance interest considerations are important there, and all of the other factors that go into analyzing precedent have to be considered. It is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992 and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy [of] treatment [as] precedent like any other.
Did Gorsuch indicate that Roe v Wade was particularly or unusually vulnerable to being overturned? No. Did he suggest it was immune to overturning? Absolutely not.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh
Brett Kavanaugh speaks at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, USA, 27 September 2018. (Photo: Pool / Getty Images).
The following is how MeidasTouch presented Kavanaugh’s remarks.
Kavanaugh: As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By “it” I mean Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey. Been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent.
Caption: HE LIED
The clip in question came from Kavanaugh’s Senate judiciary committee hearing on Sep. 5, 2018, during questioning by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Readers can consult the relevant transcript and video.
Feinstein had been attempting to pin down Kavanaugh about his views on the status of Roe v. Wade as a precedent, and whether it “could be overturned.” Kavanaugh, stating the obvious, acknowledged Roe was a precedent and described Planned Parenthood v. Casey as “precedent on precedent” but declined to go further, despite repeated invitations by Feinstein.
Feinstein: …It has been reported that you have said that Roe is now settled law. The first question I have of you is what do you mean by “settled law”? I tried to ask earlier do you believe it is correct law? Have your views on whether Roe is settled precedent or could be overturned, and has your views changed since you were in the Bush White House?
Kavanaugh: Senator, I said that it is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis. And one of the important things to keep in mind about Roe v. Wade is that it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years, as you know, and most prominently, most importantly, reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.
Feinstein followed up one last time, asking “What would you say your position today is on a woman’s right to choose?” and Kavanaugh again prevaricated on the future sustainability of Roe v Wade:
As a judge, it is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. By “it,” I mean Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. They have been reaffirmed many times. Casey is precedent on precedent, which itself is an important factor to remember.
As we have pointed out in other cases, acknowledging that a ruling is a precedent, or even “precedent on precedent,” is not the same as saying you would never overturn it.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett
In this Oct. 14, 2020 file photo, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett speaks during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool)
The following is how MeidasTouch presented Barrett’s remarks.
Barrett: Roe is not a superprecedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased, but that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled.
Caption: THEY ALL LIED
This is perhaps the most egregious example of all, and comes from the second day of Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing, Oct. 13, 2020. An official transcript was not readily available in this case, but readers can consult video footage.
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., was questioning Barrett about various Supreme Court landmarks, and the concept of the “superprecedent” — a somewhat ambiguous term coined by former Sen. Arlen Specter.
In a 2013 paper, Barrett wrote “Superprecedents are cases that no justice would overrule, even if she disagrees with the interpretive premises from which the precedent proceeds,” and included the following more detailed explanation from law professor Michael Gerhardt:
[T]he point at which a well-settled practice becomes, by virtue of being well-settled, practically immune to reconsideration is the point at which that precedent has become a superprecedent. Nothing becomes a superprecedent, at least in my judgment, unless it has been widely and uniformly accepted by public authorities generally, including the Court, the President, and Congress.
In that 2013 paper, Barrett also explicitly listed a handful of Supreme Court cases — including Brown v. the Board of Education — which were typically cited as superprecedents.
Earlier in her confirmation hearing, during questioning by judiciary committee chairman U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Barrett had said that, in the context of legal scholarship, a superprecedent was a “precedent that is so well established that it would be unthinkable that it would ever be overruled” and Barrett would also similarly tell Klobuchar that the term described a precedent that was “so widely-established and agreed-upon by everyone [that] calls for its overruling simply don’t exist.”
That was the background against which Klobuchar asked Barrett whether Roe v. Wade was a superprecedent, and Barrett explicitly excluded Roe v. Wade from the small handful of cases to which that term applies. She said:
The way that [“superprecedent”] is used in the scholarship, and the way that I was using it in the article that you’re reading from was to define cases that are so well settled that no political actors and no people seriously push for their overruling. And I’m answering a lot of questions about Roe, which I think indicates that Roe doesn’t fall in that category. And scholars across the spectrum say that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled, but descriptively it does mean that it’s not a case that everyone has accepted and doesn’t call for its overruling.
…As Richard Fallon from Harvard said, Roe is not superprecedent because calls for its overruling have never ceased, but that doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled. It just means that it doesn’t fall on the small handful of cases like Marbury v Madison and Brown v the Board, that noone questions any more.
Reading Barrett’s remarks in their proper context clearly demonstrates that she directly and explicitly exploded the frankly laughable claim, made by MeidasTouch, that she had indicated Roe v. Wade was immune to overruling. In fact, she did just the opposite.
Sources:
– CONFIRMATION HEARING ON THE NOMINATION OF HON. BRETT M. KAVANAUGH TO BE AN ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-115shrg32765/html/CHRG-115shrg32765.htm. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Alito Confirmation Hearing, Day 3 Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?190503-1/alito-confirmation-hearing-day-3-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Barrett Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?476316-1/barrett-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Barrett Confirmation Hearing, Day 2 Part 2 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?476316-4/barrett-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-2. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Becker, Jo, and Charles Babington. “No Right to Abortion, Alito Argued in 1985.” Washington Post, 15 Nov. 2005. www.washingtonpost.com, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/11/15/no-right-to-abortion-alito-argued-in-1985/bcbd4e02-0c2e-4dac-8caf-0d252c5630a0/.
“Exclusive: Supreme Court Has Voted to Overturn Abortion Rights, Draft Opinion Shows.” POLITICO, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473. Accessed 5 May 2022.
GOP Judges EXPOSED as Liars in Megaviral Supercut. www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jbHMHN_mfo. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Gorsuch Confirmation Hearing, Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?425138-1/supreme-court-nominee-stresses-independence-calls-criticism-judges-disheartening&airingid=61108104. Accessed 5 May 2022.
“Hunting for ‘Super Precedents’ in U.S. Supreme Court Confirmations – National Constitution Center.” National Constitution Center – Constitutioncenter.Org, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/hunting-for-super-precedents-in-u.s-supreme-court-confirmations. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Judiciary, United States Congress Senate Committee on the. Nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to Be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, First Session … U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.
“Stare Decisis.” LII / Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/stare_decisis. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “Roe Is ‘Settled Law,’ Kavanaugh Tells Collins. Democrats Aren’t Moved.” The New York Times, 21 Aug. 2018. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/kavanaugh-collins-abortion.html.
Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearing, Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?449705-1/supreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaugh-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.
Thomas Confirmation Hearing Day 2, Part 1 | C-SPAN.Org. https://www.c-span.org/video/?21115-1/thomas-confirmation-hearing-day-2-part-1. Accessed 5 May 2022.
