printFace it, the idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government is worse than naive. Rather, it WAS recklessly naive of the American Founding Fathers to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve as a check on one another.
Today, Judge William Pauley, “a Clinton appointee to the Southern District of New York,” ruled that “privacy protections enshrined in the fourth amendment of the US constitution needed to be balanced against a government need to maintain a database of records to prevent future terrorist attacks. ‘The right to be free from searches is fundamental but not absolute,’ he said. ‘Whether the fourth amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness.’”
Pauley argued that al-Qaida’s “bold jujitsu” strategy to marry seventh century ideology with 21st century technology made it imperative that government authorities be allowed to push privacy boundaries.
As if the purview of an American justice is to “marry” American law with Islamic ideology; a US judge must apply the constitution to the facts. In truth, any protection the natural law once provided us has been lost, buried under the rubble of legislation, statute, precedents, whatever.
The judgement, in a case brought before a district court in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union, directly contradicts the result of a similar challenge in a Washington court last week which ruled the NSA’s bulk collection program was likely to prove unconstitutional and was “almost Orwellian” in scale.
Friday’s ruling makes it more likely that the issue will be settled by the US supreme court, although it may be overtaken by the decision of Barack Obama on whether to accept the recommendations of a White House review panel to ban the NSA from directly collecting such data.
There you have the sum of American freedom and federalism: Legislation that flouts the Fourth Amendment is already in place to provide Pauley with all the positive-law backing he needs to justify an anti-Constitutional ruling.
To wit:
The [Judge dismissed the] ACLU case against the NSA … primarily on the grounds that bulk collection was authorised under existing laws allowing “relevant” data collection to be authorised by secret US courts.
And if the Supreme Court doesn’t play (as nicely as Supremo Roberts played for ObamaCare)—there is always an extra-constitutional committee to kill off/override constitutional protections.
As the nation f-cks around with the huckster Ducksters, the ‘privacy protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution’ just got still weaker, as if this were possible.