More NSA 4th Amendment Violations

This morning the USA Today reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting data from most of the major telephone companies. The NSA now has a database that includes all the phone calls made by millions of Americans over some period of time that has not yet been disclosed.

Now undoubtedly this data can be very useful in looking for patterns of phone calls and associating specific phone numbers with the phone numbers of known or suspected terrorists. There are just two major problems with it.

First, the U.S. Government is not allowed to gather this type of personal information without a court ordered warrant. In order to get such a warrant, the government is supposed to present evidence to a judge that justifies the specific search and the evidence collected is supposed to be narrowly focused on evidence that relates to the crime that the government suspects has occurred or is about to occur. The act of gathering this information without a warrant is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment - an unlawful search and seizure.

Second, the NSA's charter is supposed to be limited to foreign intelligence. Throughout the whole controversy that erupted earlier this year (which still has not been satisfactorily explained) about the NSA intercepting phone calls between US citizens and people allegedly outside the US who might be involved in terrorist activities, the Bush Administration kept making the point that the NSA was not listening in on conversations between two people in the US. That would have violated the NSA's charter. So my question is - how can this be justified since it is clearly the gathering of information about millions - probably billions - of US citizens' phone calls with each other.

It is amazing to me that the President has not been impeached for authorizing this action. You can bet that if Clinton were doing it the Republican Congress would have had him on the ropes.

This news just reinforces the ongoing Bush Administration's hypocrisy of holding ourselves out as the defenders of freedom and liberty while committing acts worthy of the despotic regimes it claims to despise.