Rand Paul: We Fought A Revolution Over Behavior Like The NSA’s

 by Tim Brown

With the outing of the NSA’s clear violation of the United States Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) took to the Wall Street Journal to blast the behavior of the NSA saying “We fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked. Our lives are now so digitized that the government going from computer to computer or phone to phone is the modern equivalent of the same type of tyranny that our Founders rebelled against.”

The Kentucky Senator wrote:

These activities violate the Fourth Amendment, which says warrants must be specific—”particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” And what is the government doing with these records? The president assures us that the government is simply monitoring the origin and length of phone calls, not eavesdropping on their contents. Is this administration seriously asking us to trust the same government that admittedly targets political dissidents through the Internal Revenue Service and journalists through the Justice Department?

No one objects to balancing security against liberty. No one objects to seeking warrants for targeted monitoring based on probable cause. We’ve always done this.

What is objectionable is a system in which government has unlimited and privileged access to the details of our private affairs, and citizens are simply supposed to trust that there won’t be any abuse of power. This is an absurd expectation. Americans should trust the National Security Agency as much as they do the IRS and Justice Department.

Paul believes that “through millions of phone records hampers the legitimate protection of our security.”

As evidence of this fact, Sen. Paul points to the recent Boston Marathon bombing. “The government sifts through mountains of data yet still didn’t notice, or did not notice enough, that one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was traveling to Chechnya.”

He then makes the point that we have been making all along and that is to be focused on who you are placing under surveillance (that being with a specified warrant and with probably cause).

“Perhaps instead of treating every American as a potential terror suspect the government should concentrate on more targeted analysis.”

That’s a pretty novel idea, don’t you think? Target only those who are actually suspect and stop violating the law. This would mean that the Federal government would have to profile and that profile would not be evangelical Christians. It would not be Mormons. It would not be Roman Catholics and it’s not law abiding gun owners. It means that the Obama administration would have to scrap their sanitized manuals which seek to give special rights to Islamists, instead of profiling them.

Paul closed his op-ed by pointing out that he is looking to file a class-action lawsuit that would overturn the decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that allowed for the NSA to run reckless with American citizens’ security and privacy. “I will take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.”

Ironically, there is another point to make. Many in the Federal government believe that the man who informed the public about the government’s illegal activity is now a traitor. In other words, the man who did the right thing in making this known is now considered an enemy to the country, not the men who were actually engaging in the criminal activity.

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

–Isaiah 5:20

Paul’s father, Ron, believes the Federal government may actually go after Edward Snowden to murder him with drone strike since he has left the country.

“I’m worried about, somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile,” said former Texas congressman Ron Paul, who twice ran for the Republican presidential nomination, in an interview Tuesday with Fox Business Network. “I mean, we live in a bad time where American citizens don’t even have rights and that they can be killed, but the gentlemen is trying to tell the truth about what’s going on.”

“It’s a shame that we are in an age where people who tell the truth about what the government is doing gets into trouble,” he added. “What about the people who destroy our Constitution?… What do we think about people who assassinate American citizens without trials and assume that that’s the law of the land? That’s where our problem is. Our problem isn’t with people who are trying to tell us the truth about what’s happening.”