We're from the government and we're here to help....

I agree with that. Moreover, even if a person is found to be under the influence of pot, that is insufficient evidence to convict that person of being in possession of pot.

http://delcode.delaware.gov/title10/c009/sc03/index.shtml

§ 1002. Delinquent child not criminal; prosecution limited.

Except as provided in § 1010 of this title, no child shall be deemed a criminal by virtue of an allegation or adjudication of delinquency, nor shall a child be charged with or prosecuted for a crime in any other court. In this Court the nature of the hearing and all other proceedings shall be in the interest of rather than against the child. Except as otherwise provided, there shall be no proceedings other than appellate proceedings in any court other than this Court in the interest of a child alleged to be dependent, neglected, or delinquent.

a) Any judge of any state or municipal court or any official designated for such purpose may issue a warrant directing a peace officer to take into custody a child alleged to be delinquent.

(b) Any judge of any court of this State, including justices of the peace and local aldermen, before whom a child is brought by a peace officer:

(1) May release the child on the child's own recognizance, or on that of a person having the child's care, to appear before the court when notified so to do;

(2) May require the child to furnish reasonable cash or property bail or other surety for the child's appearance before the court when notified so to do;

(3) May order the child detained in a facility designated by the Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families pursuant to § 1007(a) of this title provided that no means less restrictive of the child's liberty gives reasonable assurance that the child will attend the adjudicatory hearing; and provided, that the alternatives delineated in § 1007(b)(5) of this title have been considered; and provided, that such detention shall continue only until the next session of the Family Court;

(4) Shall notify the person having the care of the child, if an address be known, of the child's having been taken into custody, the reason therefor, and the disposition of the matter;

(5) Shall file with this Court forthwith a petition in accordance with § 1003 of this title on forms furnished by this Court.

10 Del. C. 1953, § 934; 58 Del. Laws, c. 114, § 1; 64 Del. Laws, c. 108, § 20; 67 Del. Laws, c. 158, § 2; 67 Del. Laws, c. 390, § 2; 67 Del. Laws, c. 392, § 1; 69 Del. Laws, c. 335, § 1; 70 Del. Laws, c. 186, § 1.;

§ 1006. Process; service; return; interim orderHowever, if a child reaches its eighteenth birthday prior to an adjudication on a charge of delinquency arising from acts which would constitute a felony were the child charged as an adult under the laws of this State, then the Family Court shall retain jurisdiction for the sole purpose of transferring the matter to the Superior Court for prosecution as an adult. Any such transfer under this section shall not be subject to § 1011 of this title.

Ticomaya wrote:

All of which is not to say the teacher gave bad advice.

I'm inclined to believe Dryden had his amendments wrong, but was right to warn the students. If I confessed to having smoked pot and the cops heard of it, wouldn't that give them probable cause to search me for possession?

By Eugene Robinson, Thursday, June 6, 5:28 PM E-mail the writer
Someday, a young girl will look up into her father’s eyes and ask, “Daddy, what was privacy?”

The father probably won’t recall. I fear we’ve already forgotten that there was a time when a U.S. citizen’s telephone calls were nobody else’s business. A time when people would have been shocked and angered to learn that the government was compiling a detailed log of ostensibly private calls made and received by millions of Americans.

The Guardian reported Thursday that the U.S. government is collecting such information about customers of Verizon Business Network Services, one of the nation’s biggest providers of phone and Internet services to corporations. The ho-hum reaction from officials who are in the know suggests that the government may be compiling similar information about Americans who use other phone service providers as well.

The Guardian got its scoop by obtaining a secret order signed by U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since we know so little about this shadowy court’s proceedings and rulings, it’s hard to put the Verizon order in context. The instructions to Verizon about what information it must provide take up just one paragraph, with almost no detail or elaboration. The tone suggests a communication between parties who both know the drill.

Indeed, Senate intelligence committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the order obtained by the Guardian was nothing more than a “three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years.”

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), another intelligence committee member, also said that “this has been going on for seven years” — and added that “to my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint.” Chambliss did not explain how any citizen could possibly have complained about a snooping program whose existence had been kept secret.

Authority for the collection of phone-call data comes from the Patriot Act, the Bush-era antiterrorism measure that the Obama administration has come to love. The Verizon court order compels the company to provide “on an ongoing daily basis . . . all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad, or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

Telephony metadata includes the phone numbers of both parties, their physical location to the extent it is evident, the time and duration of a call and any other identifying information.

An unnamed senior administration official noted in a statement to news outlets that “the information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber.” But come on.

If the National Security Agency’s computers were to decide there was something about calls to and from a certain number that merited further investigation, how many nanoseconds do you think it would take the agency to learn whose number that was? And if the number were that of a mobile phone, the “metadata” provided by the phone company would include the location of cellphone towers that relay the customer’s calls — thus providing a record of the customer’s movements.

“Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States,” the Obama administration statement said, “as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

Feinstein described the program as “lawful” and maintained that it is effective. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s consistent with our traditional values.

Maybe that old idea about a law-abiding individual’s contacts and movements being none of the government’s business is a quaint relic of an earlier age. Surveillance cameras watch us as we walk down the street and snap pictures of our license plates when we drive through toll plazas. We leave an electronic trail whenever we use our ATM cards. Our lives are recorded in a way that was impossible in earlier times, and history suggests there is no turning back.

But it is precisely because of this technological momentum that we should fight to hold on to the shreds of privacy that remain. If the collection of phone-call data is so innocuous and routine, why are the surveillance court’s orders stamped top secret? Why can’t we know more about this snooping? What’s there to hide?

We have to ask these questions now, while we still remember what privacy is. Or was.

It appears the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance is not something only Verizon customers should be concerned about. The agency has also reportedly obtained access to the central servers of major U.S. Internet companies as part of a secret program that involves the monitoring of emails, file transfers, photos, videos, chats, and even live surveillance of search terms.

The Washington Post disclosed Thursday that it had obtained classified PowerPoint slides detailing the program, codenamed PRISM, from a career intelligence officer who felt “horror” over its privacy-invading capabilities. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the source told the newspaper.

Participating in the PRISM program, according to a selection of the leaked slides, are Internet titans including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. It was established in 2007 and is used by NSA analysts to spy on Internet communications as part of the agency’s foreign intelligence-gathering work. The analysts use PRISM by keying in search terms supposedly designed to “produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s ‘foreignness’.” However, the Post notes, training materials for the program instruct new analysts to submit “accidentally collected” U.S. content for a quarterly report, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”

According to the Post, the system enables NSA spies to monitor Google’s Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive (formerly Google Docs), photo libraries, and live surveillance of searches. If agents believe a target is engaged in “terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation,” they can use the spy system to exploit Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities." And PRISM can monitor Skype, the Post notes, “when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of ‘audio, video, chat, and file transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer alone.” In order to receive immunity from lawsuits, the participating companies are obliged to accept a directive from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to “open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA.”

The story will add to the controversy surrounding a leaked court order detailing the NSA’s mass snooping on Verizon customers’ phone records, which lawmakers have said has been going on for at least seven years. The PRISM program is far more extensive and intrusive than the Verizon phone records grab because it reportedly includes communications content and seemingly unfettered access to the internal servers of the world’s largest Internet companies.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA can obtain a secret court order to lawfully intercept communications from foreign targets, and in some cases the agency admits that it can sweep up Americans’ communications incidentally. But spy agencies having direct access to the servers of companies like Microsoft and Google, which privacy advocates have previously warned about, raises major questions about the extent of companies’ undisclosed complicity in government surveillance. In a recent transparency report, for instance, Microsoft claimed that it had received “no requests” requiring it to hand over communications content for Skype users—which is cast into serious doubt if it has allowed the NSA direct access to its servers to mine chats apparently at will.

It is also worth noting, though, that some of the claims in the Post’s report are disputable. It claims that the NSA has the ability to mine Google communications by gaining access to the company’s central servers, but the FBI has said that U.S. authorities have difficultly monitoring Gmail and other Google services in real time, which is central to the bureau’s push to upgrade a 1994 surveillance law. In response to the story, Google said in a statement that it “does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Either way, the significant disclosure shines an unprecedented level of light on the NSA’s shadowy surveillance operations, which are very rarely talked about publicly due to the extreme secrecy that shrouds them. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the NSA was operating a program called Ragtime, an effort similar to PRISM in which as many as 50 undisclosed companies were said to be participating as part of a domestic-data-collection initiative. Now we may know at least a few of those companies’ names.

The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.

This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.

Even more impressive were improvements made to the Kinect. A brief demo of the unit taking place in a testing room revealed a brand-new infrared vision ability. Even with all lights turned completely off, the camera had no problem detecting both the participants and furniture before it.

A new ‘Time of Flight’ function measures the speed at which photons are emitted and then return to the Kinect. With this addition, the unit is able to render participants in a shocking level of detail, including minor wrinkles in their clothing and the thickness of the buttons on their shirts. Factor the infrared back in, and it’s possible for the Xbox One to monitor a person’s heart rate and emotional response level based on how much blood flow is occurring under the skin of their face. It’s even able to measure force output and muscle exertion. While exercise games may be the obvious implementation here, such an advance could be a real revolution in the Survival Horror genre — just imagine how a person’s actual fear level could factor into game play.

Why would anyone buy one of these if they are concerned about privacy that much?

This is a little off topic but I came across this today and since it deals with privacy rights and most XBox users are young people I thought I'd include it here