Liberty is often lost in little drips.
The Citizen’s Guide to Refusing New York Subway Searches | FlexYourRights.org: While Flex Your Rights takes no position on the usefulness of these searches for preventing future attacks, we have serious concerns that this unprecedented territorial expansion of police search powers is doing grave damage to people’s understanding of their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In addition, as innocent citizens become increasingly accustomed to being searched by the police, politicians and police agencies are empowered to further expand the number of places where all are considered guilty until proven innocent.
Fortunately, this trend is neither inevitable nor irreversible. In fact, the high-profile public nature of these random subway searches provides freedom-loving citizens with easy and low-risk opportunities to “flex” their Fourth Amendment rights by refusing to be searched.
If you’re carrying a bag or package into the subway, here’s what you need to know and do in order to safely and intelligently “flex” your rights:
These searches are idiotic, especially in New York when often all you have to do after you refuse a search is walk across the street and go in the same station on the other side. While the link recommends going to a different station, I wonder, if the searches are truly “random” and refusing to consent to a search is not supposed to place any suspicion on you, why not just try to re-enter anyway and then complain if they pick you out because of the unlikelihood of you being “randomly” selected twice in a row and the fact that refusing to be search is not supposed to place you under suspicion? Maybe that’s too cute.