printIt’s plain as day. Last “Thursday morning,” Judge Andrew Napolitano has written, “we learned that the Republic has been lost.”
We learned, according to published reports, that the Obama Department of Justice, the same folks who improperly seized emails from Fox News and telephone conversations from the Associated Press, has nearly half of all adult Americans in its cross hairs.
We learned that the DoJ sought a search warrant for every phone call of every customer of Verizon in the United States, without showing evidence of guilt against anyone.
Verizon reports that it has 113 million customers and handles one billion telephone calls in America every day.
Since at least April 25th of this year, every one of those calls had the names of the callers and all persons on the calls, their telephone numbers, their locations, and the length of the calls identified and sent directly to the National Security Agency–America’s domestic spies–on a daily and an on-going basis. …
The Constitution doesn’t trust them. We have not seen as broad and wide and deep a violation of the Fourth Amendment in our history. But thanks to the Patriot Act–that’s the Bush-era statute that lets federal agents write their own search warrants in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment–the feds went to a secret court and asked and received a warrant unknown to history and unheard of in its scope to monitor the behavior of nearly half the nation; and they did so without telling us.
…President Obama, who must have approved of this, Attorney General Holder, who must have authorized it, and U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson who signed an open-ended search warrant ordering it are so blind to personal liberty in a free society that they are unworthy to hold their offices.
AND on the genesis of a naturally illicit law:
When British soldiers were roaming the American countryside in the 1760s with lawful search warrants with which they had authorized themselves to enter the private homes of colonists in order to search for government-issued stamps, Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The soul searching became a revolution in thinking about the relationship of government to individuals. That thinking led to casting off a king and writing a Constitution.
What offended the colonists when the soldiers came legally knocking was the violation of their natural right to privacy, their right to be left alone. We all have the need and right to be left alone….
…After 9/11, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, as if to mimic the British soldiers in the 1760s. It was amended to permit the feds to go to the FISA court and get a search warrant for the electronic records of any American who might communicate with a foreign person.
In 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, the legal standard for searching and seizing private communications – the bar that the Constitution requires the government to meet – was lowered by Congress from probable cause of crime to probable cause of being an agent of a foreign power to probable cause of being a foreign person to probable cause of communicating with a foreign person.