"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. "
Last Thursday the 6th we woke up to the news that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting almost every electronic communication in America - Facebook postings, Twitter feeds, text messages, cell phone calls, credit card purchases, etc. - to compile a massive computer database, in order to detect and hopefully disrupt terrorist attacks against the United States. The operation had been leaked to a British newspaper and the leaker, a guy named Edward Snowden, a contract employee of NSA in Hawaii, announced in a television interview that he felt that the scope of the operation vastly exceeded the spirit and the letter of the Constitution and that he felt compelled to expose it - after he had abandoned his job and his girlfriend in Hawaii for a five-star hotel in Hong Kong, of course, so he's no Jefferson Smith - so the American public would be aware of the government's activities. Now you would think that after years of bitterly criticizing President Bush's use of the Patriot Act and authorizations from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to conduct electronic monitoring of terrorist cells, while he was a permanent campaigner,er, Senator from Illinois, Priest-King would be the last person to defend this sort of wide-ranging drift net snooping, let alone actively use it, but once again, Priest-King defies conventional wisdom. After all, his Department of Justice obtained private telephone records of over 100 Associated Press employees, named Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible "co-conspirator" in a national security leak investigation and obtained the private telephone records of Mr. Rosen's parents, and the IRS conducted a sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation of conservative advocacy groups during which they demanded volumes of detailed personal information which they then shared with liberal advocacy groups: What a guy!
SIDEBAR: ...and this is going on while the Priest-King administration leaked information about the Flame virus, the Predator "kill list," the Osama bin Laden raid, and stonewalls Congress about Benghazi. The theme: Information belongs to Priest-King alone. He can do whatever he wants with it. He wants to know everything about us, who we are, where we live, with whom we associate, what we say, what we eat, where we worship, what we believe, everything. He wants this information so he can control us, he may dispose of this information as he sees fit and anyone who thinks otherwise will be crushed.
SIDEBAR REDUX: The Attorney-General may sign a request to subpoena telephone records, accuse a reporter as a co-conspirator in leaking national security information, shop the request to three different judges until he found a judge who would approve it, lie to Congress that he'd never been involved in such a program, claim that he never intended to prosecute Mr. Rosen so he didn't actually perjure himself, and keep his job. This is a great country, isn't it?
Now coming back to this latest scandal, we are finally hearing the term "probable cause." The Constitution insists that if the government thinks I'm involved with a crime, they must obtain a search warrant based upon a reasonable suspicion and specify what they're searching for and where. That is the essence of that particular protection, that the government is NOT entitled to conduct general searches just to find out as much as they can and they are NOT entitled to keep whatever information they find. After 9/11, President Bush was deeply concerned about preventing future terrorist attacks and used electronic monitoring, authorized by the FISA court, to detect, identify and track communications between terrorists working overseas and their accomplices here in the United States. The Left, including Priest-King, slammed Dubya consistently for this focused, limited monitoring program but now we've gone miles beyond that. The government is sweeping up massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans, not because we are suspected of any crime or because we belong to a terrorist organization but to know as much as they can. I have not been charged with a crime, I have not been arrested, I have not been suspected, I live a fairly dull, ordinary, unexciting life but nonetheless the government wants to know everything about me. We can agree that we need to do everything we can to prevent future terrorist attacks like 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing, we can agree that nobody but the terrorists wants Americans to die and that government at all levels has to aggressively detect, pursue and deter terrorist threats, but within the bounds of the Constitution. Mr. Edward Snowden, like PFC Manning of WikiLeaks infamy, signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with the U.S. Government promising to protect the information to which he was granted access. (I'm sure that we'll find out more but it stinks to high Heaven that a) He was only in his job for three months before he leaked this information; b) He fled to China, our arch-rival in the Pacific; and c) He leaked this information the day before Priest-King's summit with new Chinese President Xi Jinping, seriously undercutting our negotiating position as we confront China over their hacking activities and their domestic surveillance program.) If he is extradited, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because the information he leaked did not belong to him, but now that it's out, it's time for a robust public debate about what the American people want and what they're willing to accept. A small, limited, tightly-controlled program focused on telephone calls from overseas to terror suspects in the United States is one thing, sweeping up every electron in America is quite another. The American people are justifiably suspicious of their government for the reasons I provided above as well as Priest-King's failure to enforce immigration law and the Defense of Marriage Act, allowing known Mexican drug traffickers to buy guns in the United States and use them to commit crimes in Mexico and, in Bill Clinton's day, sifting through hundreds of confidential FBI files to compile a White House enemies list. And let's not forget that under Obamacare, the medical records of every person in the United States are to be digitized and stored in a massive government database - the government will know which doctor you see, what medical conditions you have and which medications you take to treat them (and how much they cost), are you overweight, do you have a family history of heart disease or diabetes - so the government will be able to control your behavior. For God's sake, Eric Holder refused to deny, under oath, that the Executive Branch was spying on Members of Congress, so yes, the people have probable cause themselves to mistrust their government and to insist that it be restrained.
Case in point: In Katz v. United States, the U.S. Government suspected Mr. Charles Katz of running an illegal gambling operation across state lines and was using a public telephone to communicate with his confederates. The FBI placed a wiretap on the phone booth in question (they had things like that in 1967) without first obtaining a warrant, reasoning that because it was a public utility, Mr. Katz' conversations weren't protected by the Fourth Amendment. They obtained the evidence they needed, arrested and subsequently prosecuted Mr. Katz but in a 7-1 ruling, the Supreme Court overturned Mr. Katz' conviction on the ground that the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures applies to people, not places, and reminded the government they must operate within the law, especially where information is concerned.
The Federal government may think that because they own the Internet and the airwaves and the telephone lines, they can necessarily monitor - and archive, and exploit - whatever goes over them, but they can't. The Founding Fathers knew that a government that knows everything about everyone can bend the people to its will, and they had just fought a revolution against that kind of tyranny. Let's have this debate, let's vigorously protect against further terror attacks but if the government lacks probable cause, leave me alone.
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