The practical result of this amendment, objected to by plaintiffs, is that in criminal investigations, the government can now avoid the Fourth Amendment's probable cause requirement when conducting surveillance or searches of a criminal suspect's home or office merely by asserting a desire to also gather foreign intelligence information...

In place of the Fourth Amendment, the people are expected to defer to the Executive Branch and its representation that it will authorize such surveillance only when appropriate. The defendant here is asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. This court declines to do so.

This is complicated. On the one hand this is one of those provisions of the Patriot Act which I don't like, because it allows for anti-terrorism powers to be applied in cases which aren't primarily related to anti-terrorism. This passage, and others like it, are, in my view, the core problem with the Patriot Act: that it was a set of anti-terrorism powers obtained in the wake of a dramatic terrorist attack and yet many of them are designed to be used in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.

However, I'm not sure thats whats going on in this case. This guy was implicated (albeit incorrectly) in an international terrorism attack. It seems to me that the primary purpose of searching such a person would be national security related. I don't have time to read it... Eagerly awaiting Orin Kerr's analysis...

Patriot Act provision struck