Judge, hits the nail on the head! I hope he becomes Rand's VP. People should be concerned even about metadata collection though... it paints such incredibly detailed pictures about you even without the content itself included.
Once again showing his civil libertarian side, Fox News anchor Shep
Smith railed against the National Security Agency this afternoon with
the help of noted libertarian colleague Judge Andrew Napolitano.
Reacting to last evening's news that the NSA has secretly obtained the
phone records of millions of Verizon customers, most of whom are not
suspected of any crimes, and Sen. Harry Reid's (D-NV) assertion that
congressmen have known about the snooping for seven years and is
"routine," Smith and Napolitano tore into the "constitutionally
impermissible" nature of the government's actions.
"This is a
fishing expedition on the grandest scale we've ever seen in American
history," Napolitano said. "They're looking for a select group of people
and in order to find that select group of people the Constitution says
to present some evidence against them to a judge and get a search
warrant for their phones. Rather than doing that, they got a search
warrant for 113 million phones."
"Who would trust them after
this?" the judge continued, noting that the administration's defenders
have claimed the NSA hasn't actually listened to anyone's calls. "The
Constitution doesn't trust them."
Smith then played a clip from
this morning of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) saying he is "glad" the NSA
is snooping in order to protect Americans from terrorists threats,
prompting the judge's response:
"The whole purpose of the Fourth
Amendment is to prevent the government from doing this, to prevent it
from interfering with the privacy rights of a lot of innocent people in
order to find a few that may be planning something wrong. [...] Nobody
wants the wrong thing to happen but the idea that we would sacrifice
liberty in order to obtain safety is a canard. This is just a shortcut
to make it easier for American spies to spy on Americans."
He
concluded: "This is the most extraordinarily broad search warrant every
issued in the history of the federal courts of the United States."
A
clearly-incensed Shep Smith then spoke directly to camera: "Under this
logic, the government can send to people to all of our homes, put them
in a bed next to us, have them watch everything."
"The slippery
slope is covered in green," the host concluded. "We're not letting this
go. Not for a moment. We're not letting this go."
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