When we learned the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the phone data of every American last June, it posed a serious constitutional question: Do we no longer have a Fourth Amendment?
On Friday, Jan. 17, President Barack Obama essentially responded, “No, we really don’t.”
After noting Ladar Levison’s new effort to build an NSA-proof email service that protects users from the prying eyes of the surveillance state, I wasn’t surprised to see a reader object. Its creators “might want to ask the public if they really want this service, a service which will undoubtedly make it much easier for radical anti-US elements anywhere in the world to much more easily plan and wreak their proverbial havoc against the American government,” she wrote. “I expect the rabid Tea Partiers will be dumping lots of dough into Kickstarter to help Levison pump up those who might be anxious to repeat 9/11, but this time with 4 planes aimed at the White House in order to rid them of their, the Teas, arch enemy. I for one do NOT want such a service, which will make it impossible for the government to do what it is supposed to do: protect the U.S. against all types of attacks.”
Remember when George W. Bush was president and dissenters on the left were the ones accused of empowering the terrorists? But my purpose isn’t to dwell on the anti-Tea Party attacks. Instead, I want to concede one point. My reader is right that if the NSA can’t hoover up and analyze every piece of email sent in the world, it may miss some conversations between terrorists intent on doing us harm. Privacy prevents authorities from seeing all sorts of things, some of them bad.
What I’d like is for this reader to apply her standard generally, not just to digital communications.
Why stop at criticizing those of us who want to be able to write emails without the government seeing it? The Boston Marathon bombers were assisted in their plot by the ability to carry pressure-cooker IEDs past security officials in opaque backpacks. I am sitting at my computer beside my black Swiss Gear backpack, supporting a company that helps conceal things with intentional design decisions.
Is that wrong of me?
Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City using an explosive-filled Ryder truck. Yet truck companies continue to offer vehicles with metal sides.
They even sell locks for the back!
Most terrorist attacks are plotted, at least in part, inside terrorists’ dwellings. In the U.S. those are subject to Fourth Amendment protections and built with opaque walls, doors with locks, and windows that are frequently covered with the products of dastardly curtain and mini-blind companies, who facilitate all sorts of bad behavior by being complicit in the method by which it is hidden from view. Wouldn’t police be more able to stop bad guys if we all lived in glass houses?
In the analog world, everyone recognizes the absurdity of effectively outlawing privacy or the notion that the government should be empowered to conduct surveillance on everyone in order to catch a few bad apples. Why do so many Americans totally lose that understanding when the conversation turns to the digital world? It is not radical to believe Americans should be free to talk to their friends, lovers, family members, and associates in private, without anyone listening. And it is no more radical to suggest that they ought to be able to do so via email.
Full article: http://www.theatlant … nti-american/281188/
Two weeks ago we learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on the chancellor of Germany and on the president of the United States.
Last week we learned that it has spied on the pope and on the conclave that elected him last March.
This week we learned that it also has spied on the secretary general of the United Nations and has hacked into the computer servers at Google and Yahoo.
What’s going on?
President Obama, who has yet to address these outrages to serious questioners, must know of them, because apparently he has gotten into the habit of wanting to know in advance what is on the minds of those with whom he is scheduled to meet.
The New York Times reported recently that it learned from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA happily told Obama what U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was planning to ask him well in advance of when he asked it.
The NSA could have learned that only from its surveillance of the secretary general’s personal cell phone calls, emails and texts. It seems the NSA is providing this service to its clients, and chief among them is the president.
Also among them are other parts of the government, such as the Department of Justice, the IRS, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. This is where we find even more dangers to personal freedom than the constitutional violations and personal privacy outrages visited on all Americans and on foreign officials. The NSA claims it can operate outside the restraints of the Fourth Amendment.
The NSA and its congressional apologists have argued that because its task is essentially to gather foreign intelligence for national security purposes only, and because the Fourth Amendment, which requires detailed language in search warrants particularly describing the person or place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized, only restrains the government when it is engaged in criminal prosecutions and not when it is on a fishing expedition for intelligence purposes, the Fourth Amendment does not restrain the NSA.
Yet, the plain language of the Fourth Amendment protects everyone in America from government intrusion in their persons, houses, papers and effects, whether the government is looking for evidence of crimes or of evidence of sophistry.
The NSA’s argument that the Fourth Amendment only regulates criminal prosecutions is nonsense. It never has seriously been made to or accepted by the Supreme Court, and it defies what we now know about the client list of the NSA.
Its clients consist surely of the 15 or so other intelligence agencies in the federal government. But its clients are also the premiere federal agencies that decide whom to prosecute. In order to decide whom to prosecute, these agencies need to examine evidence. And if the evidence they are examining has come through extra-constitutional means, these agencies are destroying the fabric of liberty they have sworn to uphold, which includes the use of only lawfully and constitutionally gathered evidence.
Full article: http://www.foxnews.c … nd-fourth-amendment/
