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Analyst's note:  Absolutely must carefully consider and get involved in the discussions.  Discuss the details and know where you stand and why.  In our day the unthinkable is now thinkable, thus it becomes extremely important that we NOT focus on the "shiney objects" being placed before us from either side of the argument .... and silently give up our liberty.  Some say that we are watching unfold the discussions of what is perhaps the greatest single violation of the U.S. Constitution by OUR federal government in the history of our nation.  George Orwell's dystopian novel continues to come true in too many ways.

It is my opinion that the driving excuse used for spying on all here in America is that they don't want to be guilty of singling out "certain" groups .... political correctness.  In other words, No Profiling!  So rather than identify suspicious characters and get a warrant, let's just search and retain files on everyone, equally ... because we can.  This diverts much resources.

One of the reasons that we are all rightfully concerned with this situation today is that we do NOT TRUST any federal government (just as it is supposed to be) .... but especially distrust this Obama administration!  The scandals associated with the IRS illegal targeting of conservatives, the insider trading, attempts to muzzle the media, the Benghazi affair, the real potential of a 'Coup d'Etat' to 'take over this country', liars operating publically in OUR government, attempts at redifining "domestic enemies", years of ignoring our national borders being used for political advantage, enemy murders being called "work-place violence", raw hubristic arrogance by those who should remember they work for the American people, illegally targeting of veterans, drones monitoring our farmers, collecting our DNA without guilt, Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadist operating within our government, dwindling ammunition supply for the America people, illegal immigration, growing concerns about wide-spread voting irregularities, repeated attempt to remove our absolute right to bear arms, socialist/Marxist tendencies by many in our federal service ..... the list is almost unending "transformation" this country to what?


U.S. Constitution - Amendment 4
Amendment 4 - Search and Seizure

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.

As a good American citizen, I am watchful and naturally distrustful of the potential abuse of government power.  Maybe it is just me, but I do NOT see the NSA scanning and storing of meta-data as a problem .... so far.  From the public reports, NSA is NOT going beyond that knowledge which is available from my mail being carried by a third-party .... without a court order.  I see no difference between using my media or phone meta-data than that of the post office having access to similar meta-data available from knowledge of the mail I receive and send. 

I do want NSA to be able to marshal their resources to identify and go after suspicious foreign characters and to get a warrant for suspicious Americans who are working or planning to kill me or my fellow American citizens ... enemies foreign and domestic.  I am all too aware that our intelligence community did not catch/ prevent the Boston bombing, the underwear bomber, or the Ft Hood killing.  I strongly suspect policial correctness was at least partially at fault and have so stated.  But bankruptcy is certainly one of our greatest threats.  That seems to come from Congress, the White House and ultimately the American people.

I give you both sides of the story ... see what YOU think.

******

 

NSA chief lied to Congress on domestic surveillance?

WND by Aaron Klein

Did Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, mislead Congress last year when he claimed the NSA does not intercept Americans’ phone calls or online information?

In March 2012, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga, questioned Alexander in response to a Wired.com article that month quoting several ex-NSA staffers describing phone and data surveillance of Americans. [....]

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Rand Paul’s ‘Here’s to Crime’ Act
His interpretation of the Fourth Amendment would be a boon for lawbreakers.
By Andrew C. McCarthy

The notorious “civil rights” lawyer William Kunstler, in addition to his work on “political” cases (i.e., anti-American radical-leftist and terrorist cases), gladly made himself available to mobsters, too — after all, someone had to pay the bills. Invited to a dinner once after a job well done for a mafia don, he hoisted a glass to the assembled capos and button men, toasting them, “Here’s to crime!”

Gleeful crooks across the country could be giving the same toast if Senator Rand Paul gets his way. The self-styled libertarian Republican from Kentucky, firmly in his father’s tradition of overreaction to imagined constitutional violations (or, perhaps I should say, violations of an imaginary Constitution) is outraged by reports that the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting “metadata” on phone calls of millions of Americans. He has responded by introducing an absurd piece of legislation he calls the “Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013.”

Naturally, the bill is unacquainted with the Fourth Amendment — either the one given to us by the Framers or even the one enlarged over time by Supreme Court jurisprudence. I use the word “naturally” advisedly. Senator Paul’s proposed law asserts: “The collection of citizen’s [ACM: I take it he means citizens’] phone records is a violation of the natural rights of every man and woman in the United States.” A citizen’s “natural right” to telephone-usage records that are actually the property of third-party service providers? I wonder what St. Augustine would have made of that.

Not content to contort natural law, Paul then works his magic on positive law. He alleges that collection of records of telephone activity (but not the content of phone conversations) is somehow “a clear violation of the explicit language of the highest law of the land.”

By “highest law of the land,” Paul is referring to the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The senator apparently did not read the Fourth Amendment before cutting and pasting it into his bill. It requires (in relevant part) that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, shall not be violated.” Perhaps Senator Paul will edify us on how it is “clear” that a phone record, owned and possessed by a telephone service provider (not the customer), qualifies as the person, house, paper, or effect of the customer, such that the government’s acquisition of it violates the Fourth Amendment. The federal courts have consistently, emphatically rejected this implausible suggestion, holding that government’s collection of phone records does not even implicate the Fourth Amendment, much less violate it.

Maybe Senator Paul would tell us that this is just the muck those crazy left-wing judges have made of the Constitution. But what Paul is advocating is a Constitution even more warped than the “organic” one progressive jurists have contrived. His proposal bears no resemblance to the Constitution of the Framers.

In last year’s United States v. Jones decision, Justice Scalia explained (not for the first time) that the animating idea behind the original Fourth Amendment is protection of personal property. The Constitution was not deemed to be violated absent some form of government trespass. That is why, under the Fourth Amendment as originally understood, it would be a violation for police, without a valid judicial warrant, to attach a GPS tracker to a person’s car and monitor his movements (the situation in the Jones case). On the other hand, it would not be a violation to wiretap a person’s conversations by physically attaching a monitoring device to the phone company’s line on a public street, without any entry into the person’s home or trespass on his property. (See Olmstead v. United States [1928].)

This changed because the Supreme Court deviated from the original Fourth Amendment’s bright-line focus on the physical person and his property to embrace the vague concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy.” The original Fourth Amendment preserved the proper constitutional order: It instructs us on what the government must protect, while the people’s representatives in Congress are free to enact additional safeguards beyond this irreducible constitutional guarantee. By contrast, were we to rewrite the Fourth Amendment consistent with its modern understanding — assuming the written word means anything when we could evolve again at any moment — it would say: “The right of the people to be secure in whatever expectations of privacy we judges think are reasonable shall not be violated.”

Unfortunately for Senator Paul, even this new Fourth Amendment that progressives have erected on the remains of the original one has never protected third-party business records. That, in particular, includes “metadata” — customer telephone activity (not the content of conversations, but numbers dialed, time and duration of calls, etc.), records of which are maintained by service providers.

To give such third-party business records constitutional status, Senator Paul would have to get the judges to invent a newer, more expansive Fourth Amendment. So could we please drop the bunkum about how Senator Paul and his anti-government followers are “constitutional conservatives” crusading to “restore” the Fourth Amendment? If Senator Paul were actually trying to “restore” the Fourth Amendment, he’d be calling not for phone-usage records to be shielded from government but for phone conversations to be more easily monitored by government.

Besides its other demerits, Paul’s proposal is an exercise in naked partisanship. Indications are that the collection of telecom metadata began during the Bush administration. Yet, Senator Paul’s bill states: “Media reports indicate that President Barack Obama’s Administration has been collecting information about millions of citizens within the borders of the United States and other countries.” Republicans are quite right to point out that the Obama administration has abused its powers in several contexts; they are equally right to complain that President Obama’s default position when something goes wrong (as it often does with his administration) is to blame President Bush. It is sheer hypocrisy, though, to pretend, as Paul’s bill does, that telephone-metadata collection is an Obama innovation. It started as a Bush program, rooted in the PATRIOT Act’s business-records provision, which was strongly and appropriately supported by Republicans.

Moreover, it is equally wrong to imply, as Paul’s bill does, that the metadata collection is of a piece with other scandals involving Obama’s abuses of power. As Senator Paul well knows, the IRS scandal, spying on the media, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, etc., involve unilateral executive-branch lawlessness, stonewalling, and/or overreach. In contrast, the ongoing phone-record collection is the lawful, statutory retention component of a program with extensive civil-liberties protections. Significantly, these protections prohibit the government from inspecting the retained records without judicial approval based on a demonstration of reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity.

Perhaps the worst aspect of Paul’s irresponsible proposal is how it would cripple law enforcement.

In its précis, the bill professes its objective “to stop the National Security Agency from spying on citizens of the United States.” That in itself is ridiculous — the NSA is not “spying” on Americans; again, it is lawfully retaining records that it is not permitted to sift through absent court approval — in a program that also includes an exacting regimen of legislative oversight. But that’s not the half of it. After Paul gets through bloviating about natural rights and botching the Fourth Amendment, his bill gets down to brass tacks. The target is not merely the NSA but the entire government. The proposed law states: “The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States Government to search phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause” (emphasis added).

Hate to break this to you boys and girls, but “any agency of the United States Government” includes the FBI, the DEA, and every other agency performing everyday law enforcement — the police work that provides law and order, without which there can be no liberty. I do not know what, if any, familiarity Dr. Paul has with how law enforcement works, but it would be next to impossible for police to make cases against organized-crime groups, drug cartels, and other large-scale criminal enterprises if they had to have probable cause of crime before they could obtain phone records.

Records of telephone usage are not constitutionally protected under any credible construction of the Fourth Amendment — not the original Fourth Amendment described and applied by the Supreme Court in the aforementioned Jones case, not the Fourth Amendment as enlarged by the “reasonable expectation of privacy” jurisprudence beginning in the mid 20th century. As a result, criminal investigators and grand juries routinely obtain telephone-usage records by issuing subpoenas and applying for “pen registers” — devices applied to phone lines that enable investigators to learn the time, duration, and subscriber numbers involved in telephone calls. This information, coupled with physical surveillance of suspects, is typically how police build probable cause that crimes are being committed. They need to meet that threshold because the Fourth Amendment has always protected a person’s property, and our jurisprudence (along with federal statutes) extends this protection to the content of telephone conversations and other electronic communications. Consequently, to search property or monitor conversations, police must obtain search or eavesdropping warrants.

If, as Senator Paul proposes, law-enforcement agencies had to have probable cause before they could get telephone-usage records and pen registers, there would be far fewer search and eavesdropping warrants. Were that to happen, the most culpable, most insulated members of criminal organizations could no longer be penetrated by investigative techniques that police have been using, lawfully and with great public support, for decades — for as long as there have been phone records. The most efficient, most threatening criminal organizations would operate with impunity.

Perhaps he does not realize the ramifications, but Senator Paul’s proposal will not protect Americans. Our prosperity hinges on effective law enforcement. We have thus derived great benefit, and suffered little discernible harm, from the fact that police have long been permitted to acquire third-party phone records without a warrant. The Paul proposal is, instead, a boon for lawbreakers. That it should be proposed under the guise of a “Fourth Amendment Restoration” is perverse.

Here’s to crime!

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

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Is 1984 Now?  The first video was published on November 13, 2012

 

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Mark Levin: Who’s Done More Damage To This Nation, Edward Snowden Or Barack Obama?

These surveillance programs work perfectly… against Americans! Have you noticed these NSA spy programs did not catch/ prevent Boston bombing, underwear bomber, Ft Hood killing? But did you notice how quickly Generals Petraeus & Allen, Eliot Spitzer, Chief Justice John Roberts all rolled quickly?! Take note of people who quickly change their tunes on the Hill or in government. I have to tell you I’m starting to wonder what “they” have on Marco Rubio for him to be such a tool for the progs on immigration reform!

That said, I’d say the NSA spy programs work perfectly in blackmailing anyone who goes against the machine!

 

 

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Mark Levin explains the Framers’ perspective on search and seizure

Mark talks about the Founding Fathers, the beginnings of the Constitution and the importance of secrecy, the 4th Amendment and other rights that were given to us. We can't give government too much power because it will restrict the individual and the individual's rights. Mark says he wants to know how the data mining program actually stopped terrorist attacks as Senator Feinstein claims it has. The program didn't stop the Boston bombings, it didn't stop the Mumbai attacks, it didn't stop the Fort Hood shooter, yet we're told we need it even when the average citizen hasn't done anything wrong.



 

Listen to

Some are using the Framers to justify the current NSA programs, but Mark Levin on 6/11/2013, in an excellent monologue, disagrees and sets the record straight on what the founders actually thought about search and seizure as they drafted and argued over the Constitution.


 

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Meta my Data -- Profiling With Metadata

PART II

 

PART I

 

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Napolitano: ACLU Lawsuit May Expose Gov’t for What It’s Done

The ACLU argues that the programs violates our rights to free speech, privacy, and association. The affidavit reads in part, “The practice is akin to snatching every Americans’ address book with annotations dealing with whom we spoke to, when we talked, for how long, and from where.”

Napolitano referenced Congressman Justin Amash’s appearance on Your World during which he discussed a classified briefing on the NSA’s program. “What kind of a democracy is this where the government tells our elected representatives what it is doing to violate our civil liberties and constitutional rights, and the elected representatives have to keep it to themselves?” he asked.

“The fact that this has been happening in secret, the fact that more than half the country is being watched by America’s domestic spies is potentially the greatest single violation of the Constitution by the federal government in the history of the country,” Napolitano said of the surveillance program.

“This lawsuit that the ACLU filed … may expose the government for what it’s done which is the opposite of what we hired it to do. We hired it to enforce the Constitution, to protect our freedoms, and instead it has done the opposite.”
 

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Why worry about NSA when Google already knows everything about me?

FoxNews - By John Stossel



 

This week, Sen. Rand Paul, (R-Ky.), said the National Security Agency’s data mining violates our Fourth Amendment right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers” and is “tyranny that our founders rebelled against.”

Good for him.

In an op-ed, he adds, “We fought a revolution over issues like generalized warrants, where soldiers would go from house to house, searching anything they liked,” and wonders “which parts of the Constitution this government will next consider negotiable.” Good for him. I’m glad at least one senator reminds Big Government that our Constitution limits federal power.

And many libertarians are furious at this latest intrusion of “Big Brother.”

So what’s wrong with me? I just can’t get that worked up about it.

I know Big Data now in NSA computers probably includes my phone calls. (I hope it’s just time, duration, location and recipients, not my words, too, but I’m not sure.)

I know the snooping may be unnecessary. Government’s claim that it prevents terror is weak: Officials say a terrorist was caught, but New York City police say he was caught via other methods.

I’m skeptical about the very claim that any terribly important “secrets” are held by unhappy 29-year-olds and 4.8 million other people (that’s how many Americans hold security clearance for classified material).

So it’s invasive, probably illegal and maybe useless. I ought to be very angry. But I’m not. Why?
I need to keep thinking about this issue, but for now, two reasons:

1. Terrorists do want to murder us. If the NSA is halfway competent, Big Data should help detect plots.

2. My electronic privacy has already been utterly shredded by Google, Amazon, YouTube and so on.

They know with whom I talk, what interests me and how much time I spend doing this or that. They creep me out with targeted ads. How did they know I want that?! Oh, right ... I spent an hour searching ...

Then I go outside in New York City, where 16 cameras record me on my way to work.
Greedy lawyers can subpoena my private records. My employer has a right to read my emails.

My privacy is already blown.

I’m angrier about other things Big Government does in the name of keeping me safe: forcing me to wear safety gear, limiting where I may go, stripping me at airports, forcing me to pay $2,300 for more military than we need.

Actually, $2,300 is the average Americans pay for our military. I pay more. The total for all of us is more than $700 billon a year, which is, as Chris Preble of the Cato Institute pointed out on my Fox Business show, "Stossel," “more than we spent at the peak of the Cold War … fighting the Soviet Union.”

The danger was greater then, when we had a nuclear Soviet Union threatening to “bury us.”

Much of America’s defense spending goes to defend our allies in Europe and Asia. They spend less because we spend more.

“We are suckers,” said Preble. “I don’t blame them. If I were in their situation, if someone else was offering to pay for my security, I’d let them do it.”

And it’s not clear that we do what we do efficiently. The U.S. Department of Defense is prone to the same sorts of inefficiency that plagues other parts of government. The department’s brownie recipe is 26 pages long.

Military officials say Al Qaeda has been weakened. Iran (someday) may build a nuclear bomb, but we managed to deter China and Russia when they had thousands.

Some people want the U.S. military to police the world: Contain China, transform failed states, chase terrorists, train foreign militaries, protect sea lanes, protect oil supplies, stop genocide, protect refugees, maintain bases in allied countries, police our southern border, stop drug trafficking and spread good through humanitarian missions. The list is endless, which is the problem.

The U.S. military can’t be everywhere. And we can’t hand the government unlimited power and unlimited money every time a potential crisis looms.

We must remain on guard against threats. But bankruptcy may be the greatest threat.


 



 

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