Speaker Identification

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock, Host: Identified from the opening introduction as the host of Leo Roundtable. The transcript renders the surname in several ways; the spelling Chip DeBlock is used consistently here, but it is listed for verification.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero, Guest: Identified by the host's introduction as an attorney, former law enforcement officer, founder of Blue to Gold, and search-and-seizure expert. The automated transcript renders the surname several ways; Anthony Bandiero is used consistently here, but it is listed for verification.

Speaker 3 - Prerecorded Sponsor / Promo Voice: Used for commercial and sponsor segments, including promotions for Galls, Compliant Technologies, GunLearn, and related show sponsor messages. Individual promo narrators are not separately identified in the transcript.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Welcome to Leo Roundtable at LeoRoundtable.com. My name is Chip DeBlock, and I am your host for a group of law enforcement professionals who talk about today's news and issues from a law enforcement perspective.

Let me introduce Anthony Bandiero. He is not just an attorney and not just a former cop; he is also the founder of Blue to Gold at BlueTheGold.com. Thanks so much for being on the show, Anthony.

Anthony is a search-and-seizure expert. He is the guru. He travels all over the country. He is in Colorado right now, and he lowers liability, not just for individual officers, but for agencies as well, by educating them on search and seizure. And search-and-seizure law changes. That is not even what we are covering today.

We originally had one topic, then two, and now we have four icebreaker topics, and there is some major stuff going on. I cannot wait to get to them. Anthony Bandiero is a big catch for today's show. You should be excited, because after today you are definitely going to be smarter when we talk about search and seizure.

Also, a shout-out to our sponsors. Our title sponsor is Galls at Galls.com. We also have Compliant Technologies, our side-by-side sponsor, GunLearn.com, MyMedicare.live, and Two Bells. Two Bells built a new online store at LeoRoundtable.com. You can go there and check out the online store they built for us. You can get cool gear like the shirt I am wearing, and I have the coffee mug behind me. We do not charge anything extra for it. We do not make a dime off what is in the store. We are just trying to get our stuff out there.

Also, there are some folks helping us get the story out and letting us stream to their locations. We have Brian Burns with the Tampa Free Press, so thanks to Brian and a big shout-out. Also, Reed Detrick at FormerLawman.com and our very own Travis Yates with LawOfficer.com. We are on every podcast platform known to man, including Spotify and Apple iTunes, the biggest ones. We are also on Rumble, Facebook, YouTube, X, formerly Twitter, Truth Social, and a lot more. The best way to find us is to go to our website, LeoRoundtable.com. The top menu bar has all the radio stations, dates, times, social media, TV stations, podcasts, and all of that.

Now, what in the world are we going to talk about today? We have some other items, but I am going to cover the four main topics. If we have time, we may get to a couple of updates and maybe some short videos, but I suspect we will not have time.

First, Alito and Thomas, names that should sound familiar because they are on the United States Supreme Court, scold SCOTUS. For people who do not know, SCOTUS stands for Supreme Court of the United States. They are scolding their own court for refusing to enforce what they call a colorblind Constitution in police encounters. I will tell you why: because there are only two of them and not four of them. That is why they are doing the scolding.

Then we will hop over to a Maryland court telling police that seeing a gun outline is not a green light to search. That is important stuff. Then we have gun stores slapping a lawsuit on a Democratic governor over warrantless transaction searches. MBS over on Rumble should pay attention because that is in his state of Colorado, where Anthony actually is right now. Then, if we have time, we will discuss the DOJ turning Google searches into a covert dragnet, and the Fourth Amendment never getting its day in court.

Anthony, it is great to have you. I will kind of whet the appetite on some of these and let you take it from there. The first story, which is arguably the biggest, is one I am excited about. Actually, the first two are tied together a little bit, I think, but you are the expert, not me. You may start off saying, “Chip, you are completely wrong.”

The Federalist has an article about Alito and Thomas scolding SCOTUS because the Court refused to enforce a “colorblind Constitution” in police encounters. This is really important. The subtitle says, “We have said that our Constitution is colorblind. It almost never allows government actors to treat persons differently based on their race.” That is what Justice Alito wrote.

The Supreme Court dodged a notable case that involved consideration of race and potential Fourth Amendment seizures. They did this on Monday, and it has become routine with many significant cases before the bench. Only Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas were willing to take it up. From what I understand, correct me if I am wrong, Anthony, you need four justices to vote to take on these cases. But two out of the four needed were all they got.

The High Court revealed in its latest order list that it had declined to hear arguments in this case. It is called United States v. Donte Carter, if I have that right. It deals with the legal question of whether perceptions of law enforcement that a court attributes to a particular racial group are a relevant factor in the Fourth Amendment analysis of whether a member of that group has been seized.

I will stop there. I can describe the case, but I know you probably can too. I will let you explain what happened and let the audience absorb what you have to say.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: That works. Sometimes you know the facts better than I do because you read these stories and prep a lot more. It is nice to be here, Chip. I am broadcasting from Littleton, Colorado, at Arapahoe Community College. That is why I have the whiteboard behind me. I am in a classroom environment.

This is an issue I have been talking about for a long time. This one really gets me fired up because, in my view, what the court decided in D.C. is blatantly wrong. Other courts have also taken a stab at this, including courts in Washington.

Essentially, at least two officers in D.C. saw a group of men hanging out. The officers were on a gun task force looking for guns. They conducted a good old-fashioned Level 1 consensual encounter. There are three levels of interaction with the public. Level 1 means a person should not feel detained.

They talked to Donte and the other people there and asked about firearms. The suspect lifted up his shirt and showed his waistband, saying, in effect, “Look, I have nothing. I am clean as a whistle.” Then the officer engaged more. Maybe he was seeing telltale signs in the suspect's nonverbals, that maybe the person was admirably nervous. The officer asked him to lift up a sock, and when he did that, the officer saw a bulge in the groin area that was consistent with an object. I am trying not to be phallic here, but he saw something that did not seem right.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: It was another object making the pants move.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: Yes, the pants moved and apparently made some kind of printing, which we are going to talk about in the Maryland case. So now the officer is thinking, “Why would you have something in the groin area?” It could be a firearm. It could be contraband. It is not a typical place.

Then they patted him down. Sure enough, he had a firearm, and he was charged accordingly. The trial court said, in effect, guilty as charged, because it was a consensual encounter. They tried to say race was a factor, and the trial court said no. This is an objective test. Objectively, would a reasonable person feel free to either leave or terminate the encounter? Sometimes people do not want to leave where they are, so the question is whether they can leave or terminate the interaction. The court rightfully said, based on the facts, that the person felt free to leave.

Then it went to the D.C. Court of Appeals, and they said, “Hold on, we have a problem.” Whether a person is detained or seized under the Fourth Amendment is a totality-of-the-circumstances test. In law enforcement, we know that many things are totality-of-the-circumstances tests, including whether use of force is lawful and whether someone is detained.

They said the person's race was a factor. They considered that D.C. is, as they call it, a highly policed area. They were presuming, I guess, that this person had negative interactions with local law enforcement. Therefore, because he presumably had not had a good experience with law enforcement, that would make him feel more detained. The idea is, “I cannot tell cops no, and I am more scared of cops because they kill innocent people,” and other hyperbole. These are stereotypes both ways: stereotypes about the person and stereotypes about the cops.

After considering that factor, the court held that the person would not feel free to leave. They said it was an unlawful seizure, and they suppressed the gun as fruit of the poisonous tree.

The problem is that this is not correct. It cannot be correct. There is no way under the Constitution that police officers on the front lines are supposed to consider a person's race in deciding whether or not that person would feel detained. Everything being equal, Chip, you have a white suspect, an Asian suspect, a Black suspect, a Hispanic suspect, and so forth. If all things are equal, we talk to them the same way. We do not have our hands on our gun. We are not being overly assertive. But under this approach, the white suspect would supposedly feel free to leave because he presumably has a good experience with law enforcement, while the Black suspect feels detained. Therefore, we would have to treat them differently.

That goes against everything we teach in the law. Race is not a factor, except when it is part of a particular suspect description. When we are looking for a particular suspect, race can be a factor. But when it comes to enforcing our laws, race cannot be a factor.

I know we are winding down for a break, but I will pick up on this. I have had conversations about this issue with citizen boards, and I recently had an issue with an agency taking enforcement action or discipline against an officer in Washington. It is a big deal.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: I can tell you are passionate and excited about talking about this. Guys, I hope you are enjoying this, whether you are streamers or listening on radio. It is about to get real. We have a lot more coming up, so come right back. It is a commercial break. Stick with us. We will be right back.

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Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Welcome back to Leo Roundtable at LeoRoundtable.com, the law enforcement talk show. My name is Chip DeBlock, and I am your host. We have Anthony Bandiero on the show from Blue to Gold, talking about search and seizure.

We left off talking about Alito and Thomas scolding their fellow Supreme Court justices. They are refusing to band together and vote to hear this case involving colorblindness for the Constitution and police encounters. Anthony was explaining this, and we have three more main topics after this one. Anthony, the floor is yours.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: I will wrap this up. Here is the main issue. The Supreme Court has made it clear that when it comes to the Fourth Amendment, the test is objective. It is what a reasonable person would believe. We do not care about what was inside the head of a police officer. We do not care what the officer thought. We also do not actually care what this particular suspect thought, because you do not know what is inside someone's head.

We care about what a reasonable person under the circumstances would think, and not just any reasonable person, but an innocent reasonable person. By telling a police officer that race should be considered, a court is basically saying that we are going to treat people differently. That is not objective. That is subjective. It is also a completely inappropriate stereotype. It is racist to believe that people of a certain ethnicity will believe one thing about cops while other people believe something else, and to treat them differently on that basis.

It is not workable. It is wrong. It goes in the wrong direction from where we are trying to go, which is basically colorblindness, as the article said and as Alito and Thomas said.

I have had conversations with civilians who have influence over police departments and think officers should be thinking about race in this way. I say, “All right, if you want that rule, which is not going to work, how do you want me to train it? Do you want me to walk into a room and teach officers that they can intentionally treat white people differently than other races? How is that rule going to work?”

Would the white person be told, “Oh, you can talk harder to me,” or “You can have more cops on scene with me than with other people”? Once you ask, “How do you want to train this?” it all falls apart. It is one of those equity things that feels good. It is like saying, “This population feels marginalized, so let's do something for that.” Okay, we want everyone to be better and to improve our relationships, but how do you actually do it in person?

It is like the old saying: if you put a survey out and ask who wants better schools, everybody does. Then ask who wants to pay for it. Now we have to get down to brass tacks. That is where we are with this. At the end of the day, it violates due process. It violates the Fourth Amendment and also equal protection, because you are not treating people the same because of their race. That is the problem.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: I will add one point. You are never going to have stops or police interactions where the statistics miraculously line up perfectly. If you have 13 percent of the population that is Black, you are not necessarily going to have exactly 13 percent of the people you stop and give tickets to be Black. The same is true for women or any other group. You are never going to have stats perfectly following those lines, nor should you expect them to. I see so many justifications for going in this direction, and it makes absolutely no sense to me.

We have a slightly related article at TampaFreePress.com. In Maryland, a court told police that seeing a gun outline is not a green light to search. Cops, pay attention. I know we are talking about Maryland, but Anthony is going to break it down.

In Baltimore, a Baltimore police detective saw the outline of a gun through Steven Hicks' shirt. He stopped him and searched his satchel. Do they use the word satchel instead of purse when it is a guy?

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: It should be a crossbody bag. That is what they really mean.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Thank you. I am trying to get the visual here because I am a guy and we are visual creatures.

According to a new ruling from the Appellate Court of Maryland, that stop violated the U.S. Constitution. Hicks, and I was going to call him the bad guy who got stopped, but let me take that back because he had a license to carry a firearm without restrictions. So he had a license.

The court decided that simply seeing a gun printing through someone's clothes does not give law enforcement the right to stop and search that person. Judge Catherine Grille Graff, if I have that name right, wrote in her opinion that officers need more than just the sight of a weapon to justify the stop. Anthony, you have about two and a half minutes.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: This is another big deal. Most states have held that knowing somebody is concealed carrying is not presumptively unlawful behavior, which of course is the right answer. It is the Second Amendment.

The fact that a person prints, or lifts up a shirt to get Cheerios at Walmart, which is where you need a gun to be safe, and you see the butt of a gun, does not mean, “Call the police. Let me stop you.” Some states took the opposite view. California, no surprise. Minnesota, kind of a surprise. Maryland, New Jersey, and some other states said, in effect, guns are bad, and gun plus concealed carry equals a stop.

This is something I have been talking about for years because it introduces a stereotype. The reality, Chip, is that all the cases I have seen involving, “I know you are concealed carrying,” involve Black suspects in high-crime areas. That is not right. I am not saying it has not happened to other people. I am saying all the cases I have read come from high-crime areas.

It is not right for a cop to see a person in a high-crime area and make the assumption that this person is a criminal. The assumption should be that in this state, especially after Bruen, concealed carry is a right. It is a shall-issue right. The presumption is, “He has a concealed carry license. I will presume he is a lawful person unless I see otherwise.”

If I go up to him, can I do a consensual encounter? Sure, but have good motive. Be fair about it. You can ask, “Hey, man, I see you have a gun. Do you have your license on you?” and go from there. But that is not what happened here. The officer presumed this person was a criminal. In fact, the officer was wrong. But even if he was right, that does not make it right. I am glad Maryland got this one right, because not all courts think that way.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: We are seeing some of the same issues with drugs too, like marijuana cards. There is a difference between smelling burnt marijuana and fresh cannabis. In a state where a person can be a legal marijuana user, with a marijuana card or whatever, that is all new too, right? We will get back, guys. Our second commercial break is next. Stick with us. We will be right back.

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Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Welcome back to Leo Roundtable at LeoRoundtable.com, the law enforcement talk show. My name is Chip DeBlock, and I am your host. We are joined by attorney Anthony Bandiero, the founder of Blue to Gold at BlueToGold.com. He is the search-and-seizure guru, lowering liability for individual officers and agencies.

We left off talking about our second search-and-seizure article involving guns. A Maryland court told police that seeing a gun outline is not a green light to search. Anthony, take it from here.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: It is not a green light to stop either. Either way, there is no search or seizure based on those facts. I am glad this opinion came out. It is absolutely the right opinion.

In states that are constitutional carry, it is even more obvious that you cannot detain somebody just to verify that they are legitimate. We have Delaware v. Prouse, where the Court said you cannot just stop vehicles randomly to see if the driver has a license. Why is this any different? I know guns are bad, but guns are constitutional, right?

The logic of Prouse and these other cases applies, and equal-protection issues come in. As I told you before, many of these stops involve stereotypes. If officers have their own intuition or hunch that something is afoul, do a consensual encounter and go from there. But do not detain the person.

I can tell you, East Coast guys, this is notorious behavior because they are so anti-gun over there. They have been doing this kind of stuff. I have LEOSA, which means I can carry in all 50 states. If I walk down Times Square - and Times Square might be an unlawful sensitive place now, but if I walk in a place where I can lawfully carry - and an officer sees me printing, they are probably going to stop me.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Before the commercial break, I mentioned marijuana. There is a correlation there, right? Just because you have marijuana or smell like marijuana, there is a difference between burnt marijuana and fresh cannabis. If you are in a state where someone can be a legal marijuana user with a marijuana card, that is new too.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: The analogy is appropriate. I am from Vegas, though now I live in beautiful Idaho. I like to say that I have walked into many casinos and come out smelling like smoke, but I have never smoked a cigarette. Just because you smell like a substance does not necessarily mean you are a consumer of it. You need something more.

Just because you see a gun does not necessarily mean someone is a criminal. There are cops who live in states like Texas and other states where recreational marijuana is not legal, but maybe their parents smoke. Maybe their mom smokes, or they have a cousin who smokes, and they smell like marijuana. That does not mean they smoke.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Exactly. I get it. Thank you. Are you ready to go to the gun store?

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: Yes, let's go to the gun store.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: The Liberty Daily has a story: gun stores slap a lawsuit on a Democratic governor over warrantless transaction searches. We are actually in the state that our favorite MBS on Rumble is in, and Anthony himself is in Colorado. That is what we are talking about.

According to the Daily Caller, an alliance of firearms dealers and Second Amendment advocates sued Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis over a new law authorizing warrantless searches of gun-sale records. When you hear the scope of this, especially as a cop, it blows my mind. Sometimes, wearing certain hats, you are working with code enforcement and you have the right to go into businesses and do checks, but usually when they are open for business to the public.

Governor Polis signed House Bill 26-1126, according to the transcript. It allows any peace officer to inspect the sales records of any gun store without a warrant at any time and for any reason. He signed it on June 2. The lawsuit was filed by the Colorado Shooting Sports Association and the Colorado Federal Firearms Licensees Association on behalf of three federal firearm licensees, or FFLs. They are challenging the warrantless inspection provisions of the bill on Fourth Amendment grounds.

If you do not mind me jumping ahead, I will get this part out. The statute, according to the lawsuit, provides no notice of regularity, empowers an overbroad class of inspectors with no nexus to firearms, imposes no temporal or frequency limitations, and places no restrictions on the manner of inspection. It is like open havoc.

They contrast this with the federal firearms-inspection framework, which already has checks and balances that the state statute does not have. I also love what the director of operations, Daniel Pencilson, said at the end, but I can bring that up later if we get to it. Anthony Bandiero?

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: This is my wheelhouse as well. Obviously, the Fourth Amendment, but also gun laws. A small part of my business is called The FFL Lawyer, so I help FFLs and I know how they work on the legal side.

The first thing we have to discuss is whether, under the Fourth Amendment, the government can conduct warrantless inspections of businesses. The answer is yes. This is called the special-needs doctrine, and it has four requirements. These are the four things courts typically look at to determine whether the inspection program will be upheld.

Number one is notice. Notice means, would a gun shop be on notice that these inspections can occur? The answer is yes in this case because it is in Colorado law. They will win that one. When I say notice, I do not mean the government has to say, “We will be at your business in two hours or 24 hours.” The ATF may give a courtesy notice, but they do not have to. Notice means notice in the statute.

The next requirement is a compelling reason. In order to conduct a special-needs search, the government must have a legitimate compelling reason. Do they have that here? The courts will likely find there is at least a rational basis, if not more, for the government to conduct random spot checks to make sure guns are not getting into the wrong hands. So Colorado gets that check too.

The next one is lack of discretion. This is a big one, Chip, because warrantless inspections are not supposed to be used to harass certain groups based on race, ethnicity, or other protected classes. Think of a DUI checkpoint. Officers cannot say, “Chip, go to the left, Anthony, go to the left, and all other cars keep driving.” They have to check every third car, every car, or every fifth car. TSA also cannot target a particular person for enhanced screening without a reason.

The last requirement is that the search must be minimally intrusive. How much intrusion does the government need in order to satisfy the compelling interest? This is where the state of Colorado will absolutely go down in flames. There is no way a court is going to uphold limitless, suspicionless searches under these facts.

This is why the ATF regulations allow only one suspicionless search every 365 days. They cannot do more than two within a year without a warrant. We also have a Supreme Court case called Krull, K-R-U-L-L. I think it is from the 1970s or 1980s, maybe when you were in your 40s, Chip. That was a joke. I am always bagging on Chip because I love him.

Krull involved a very similar statute, probably almost exactly the same, although I have not compared them line by line. Illinois allowed officers to conduct random, unlimited, suspicionless searches at junkyards looking for stolen vehicles and chop shops. The U.S. Supreme Court said the government could not do it that way. It was too intrusive. It was an abuse. These people have businesses to run.

Under the Colorado statute, they could literally go there every day. It is not enough to say, “We do not have the resources to do that.” The issue is that they could, and that is why the law is unconstitutional.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Wow. That is amazing that they thought they could get away with it. What will end up happening?

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: It will be overturned. There is no doubt about it. But the Colorado legislature is doing this, in my opinion, to harass gun shops. The people who wrote this law are either completely ignorant of Supreme Court precedent, or they are trying to harass gun stores out of business until the law is flipped.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: And the governor signed it.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: Yes.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: All right, guys, you are listening to Leo Roundtable. See, I promised you a great show, and we are not done. Stick with us. Commercial break. We will be right back.

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Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Welcome back to Leo Roundtable at LeoRoundtable.com, the law enforcement talk show. My name is Chip DeBlock, and I am your host. We are joined by attorney Anthony Bandiero, founder of Blue to Gold at BlueToGold.com. It is all about search and seizure, and wow, did we bring the articles and stories today.

We have been talking about gun stores in Colorado filing a lawsuit against the Democratic governor over warrantless transaction searches. We also have a fourth story coming up involving Google. Anthony, the floor is yours. We have a little over nine minutes.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: One thing I will say is that, unfortunately, there is a gap in the law and a gap in remedies when legislatures pass laws that they know, or should know, are clearly violative of the Fourth Amendment. Really, the Second Amendment too.

I have always been concerned about the fact that legislatures have absolute immunity. I have not done enough research to know whether there is a carve-out for this, but I think there could be. If you have a law that is clearly violative of the Fourth Amendment and Second Amendment, why should the legislature get off scot-free? Why should the governor be able to sign it? They harass citizens for years, the law gets overturned, and they still got what they wanted. They are playing a long game. They are trying to harass people into submission.

I hope the Supreme Court eventually creates a mechanism to hold states monetarily accountable for these violations. To me, the biggest culprit is California with its gun laws. They are so extreme that they are not even remotely in line with the Second Amendment. States that ban AR-15s are another example. Magazines can be more debatable, although I believe they are part of an arm, but AR-15 bans are a major issue.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: There is a quote from the Colorado Shooting Sports Association's director of operations. He said criminals do not follow gun laws. They never have and never will. That is one we have never heard, right?

He describes himself as a school-shooting survivor. He said criminals steal firearms, obtain them on the black market, and use other illegal means to obtain weapons. Not a single piece of gun legislation passed through and by Bloomberg, as he put it, has ever protected anyone in Colorado.

The state of Colorado is also being sued by the Second Amendment section of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ over its ban on standard-capacity magazines, anything more than 15 rounds. They are also challenging a ban on modern semiautomatic firearms imposed by the City of Denver.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: It disappoints me that the U.S. Supreme Court has not taken up more of these gun cases. The Second Amendment is treated like a second-class right. I am hoping that one day, in my lifetime, I can walk into a 7-Eleven and buy a Glock switch.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Oh, gee. “Shall not be infringed.” I think I understand it pretty clearly, but I digress.

Our last story, and I say last, because I am glad we will have time to cover all four, comes from The Liberty Daily. The article says the DOJ turned Google searches into a covert dragnet and the Fourth Amendment never got its day in court.

I suspect a lot of people are not aware of this. I was unaware of how far down the rabbit hole we have gone. A single Google search for a political-party street address became enough to land hundreds of Americans inside a federal investigation with absolutely zero notice, no chance to object, and no legal recourse after the fact.

Newly unsealed court documents revealed that the Justice Department demanded that Google identify 311 users who simply searched for the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington during the first five days of January 2021. That was the same week pipe bombs were discovered outside both buildings on the eve of the Capitol riot.

Google fought the warrant behind sealed doors and lost. But they did not lose because the request was constitutional. They lost because the company allegedly had no standing to raise the Fourth Amendment challenge before the warrant was executed. That is where we are, Anthony. I know this is complicated, but you have a good way of simplifying it. The floor is yours.

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: The government initially wanted a lot more than a few hundred people. They potentially wanted thousands, and then it was whittled down to roughly 311.

The case was dismissed because the court said Google did not have standing. In other words, Google's rights were not the rights being implicated. The privacy interest belonged to the people doing the searching. If the FBI comes knocking on my door because I Googled the RNC during those five days, it is my rights being implicated, not Google's.

Standing is a Fourth Amendment concept that asks whether the person or business has its own legitimate expectation of privacy. Businesses can definitely have rights. If the answer is yes, they can challenge government action. If the answer is no, they cannot complain about that particular issue.

Fine, the court may be right about standing. But there should be other mechanisms to fight back against draconian search warrants. I will also say I am not a big fan of Alphabet as a company. Google started with the mantra “do no evil,” and I think they do a lot of that today when it comes to freedom-of-speech issues.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Was that their model when Google first started?

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: Yes. I do not know why that was their mantra, but that is what they said in the late 1990s. I say that because of issues involving suppression of speech. I was surprised they actually fought this, because I think in many ways they are morally corrupt in how they treat YouTubers and others. We have had issues. We essentially had to leave YouTube, except for a very small presence, because we believe they were trying to shut us down, presumably because we are law enforcement and conservative. I believe that is absolutely what it was.

I still use YouTube. I pay for the premium because I feel like I am a captive audience. But returning to the question at hand, the phones of these people were searched. The punchline is that the records were sealed for four years. Everyone who was not charged was never told, “By the way, you were the subject of a search warrant.” By law, you are supposed to be told eventually that you were searched. I guess that never happened, or if it did, it was not effective.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: I know we are getting down to the wire, but I like the last tagline and the key points. The ruling creates a working template for future investigations, which kind of scares me: ask a search engine to turn its own index against the people using it, keep the request hidden under a nondisclosure order, and then win on a question of timing rather than on the merits of the warrant itself.

The key points are that the DOJ demanded that Google identify 311 users who searched for RNC and DNC addresses during the first five days of January. Google warned that the warrant was grossly overbroad and would catch innocent party members, volunteers, and ordinary people who typed the committee's name into a search box. The court ruled Google could not challenge the warrant on Fourth Amendment grounds before it was executed, citing a 2006 Supreme Court decision. The government dropped its demand for technology-connected users, but the court's warrant stood, and Google produced the identities. The affected users were never notified, and the ruling leaves behind a legal framework that effectively nullifies Fourth Amendment protections in keyword-warrant searches.

Wow. Are we done?

Speaker 2 - Anthony Bandiero: This is tough. You do not want to allow too much litigation before the execution of a warrant because that would slow the wheels of justice down. Warrants are ex parte. There is only one party seeking those warrants, and that is the government. The defendant has no right to know that the warrant is being sought until the door comes crashing in.

At the end of the day, we are not balanced here. The federal government has too much power to get these warrants, and it can seal them. Something has to change.

Speaker 1 - Chip DeBlock: Anthony Bandiero with Blue to Gold. Go to BlueToGold.com to get more information, or look him up on LinkedIn. Galls.com is our title sponsor. Do not forget Radio15 as the code, CompliantTechnologies.com, GunLearn.com, MyMedicare.live, and TwoBells.com. We will see you back tomorrow at 12 noon Eastern.