Can we truly
trust our government to protect us from our foreign and domestic enemies? Can we trust the government to execute
justice fairly when we know that the IRS treated conservative and liberal
individuals and groups differently? The
government knows everything about our finances now and will soon know all our
health information under Obamacare. Now
we learn that the government has our telephone records and reads our e-mails. Can we trust the government to use our “data”
for our best good or do we need to worry about the government using our
information against us? Can we trust a
President and his administration that repeatedly lies to us?
Columnist Charles Krauthammer explained the situation with NSA: “Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts
ruled that the Postal Service may record `mail cover,’ i.e., what’s written on
the outside of an envelope – the addresses of sender and receiver.
“The National Security Agency’s
recording of U.S. phone data does basically that with the telephone. It records who is calling whom – the outside
of the envelope, as it were. The content
of the conversation, however, is like the letter inside the envelope. It may not be opened without a court order.
“The constitutional basis for
this is simple: The Fourth Amendment
protects against `unreasonable searches and seizures’ and there is no
reasonable expectation of privacy for what’s written on an envelope. It’s dropped in a public mailbox, read by
workers at the collection center and read once again by the letter
carrier. It’s already openly been
shared, much as your phone records are shared with, recorded by, and emailed
back to you by a third party, namely the phone company.
“Indeed, in 1979 the Supreme
Court (Smith v. Maryland) made the
point directly regarding the telephone:
The expectation of privacy applies to the content of a call, not its
record. There is therefore nothing
constitutionally offensive about the newly revealed NSA data-mining program
that seeks to identify terrorist networks through telephone-log pattern
recognition.”
Krauthammer is more concerned
with the “other NSA program … PRISM.”
This program is “designed to read the emails of non-U.S. citizens
outside the United States. If an
al-Qaeda operative in Yemen is emailing a potential recruit, it would be folly not to intercept it” since the
Constitution is there to protect American citizens and not everyone in the
world. Besides, all nations “spy” on
other nations.
Krauthammer considers the real
problem to be “practicality” rather than “constitutionality.” “Legally this is fairly straightforward. But between intent and execution lies a
shadow – the human factor, the possibility of abuse. And because of the scope and power of the
NSA, any abuse would have major consequences for civil liberties.”
The bottom line according to the
article is whether or not we can trust our President and his administration. Krauthammer explained that the President
“issued a major foreign-policy manifesto” three weeks ago; the major theme of
this manifesto was that the “War on Terror is drawing to a close and its very
legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force,
should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent `keeping America on a
perpetual wartime footing.’"
Krauthammer pointed out that
while the President was telling us that the War on Terror was ending, the
“government was simultaneously running a massive, secret anti-terror
intelligence operation.” He questioned
why we have the “vast, ever-expanding NSA dragnet whose only justification is
an outside threat” if there is no need for it.
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