Big Brother Really Is Watching Us
By Senator Rand Paul
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| Photo by the Associated Press |
When Americans expressed outrage
last week over the seizure and surveillance of Verizon's client data by the
National Security Agency, President Obama responded: "In the abstract, you
can complain about Big Brother . . . but when you actually look at the details,
I think we've struck the right balance."
How many records did the NSA seize
from Verizon? Hundreds of millions. We are now learning about more potential
mass data collections by the government from other communications and online
companies. These are the "details," and few Americans consider this
approach "balanced," though many rightly consider it Orwellian.
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.
Monitoring
the records of as many as a billion phone calls, as some news reports have
suggested, is no modest invasion of privacy. It is an extraordinary invasion of
privacy. 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.
I also believe that trolling through
millions of phone records hampers the legitimate protection of our security.
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. Perhaps instead of treating every American as a
potential terror suspect the government should concentrate on more targeted
analysis.
To protect against the invasion of
Americans' privacy, I have introduced the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act. I
introduced similar Fourth Amendment protections in December and again just last
month. Both measures would have prevented the data-mining we're now seeing, but
both bills were rejected by the Senate. We will see if this time my colleagues
will vote to support the Constitution that they all took an oath to uphold.
I am also looking into a
class-action lawsuit to overturn the decisions of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court that allowed for this to happen. I will take the fight all
the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. My office has already heard much
enthusiasm for this action.
The administration has responded to
the public uproar by simply claiming that it is allowed to have unlimited
access to all Americans' private information. This response is a clear
indication that the president views our Constitutional "right of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" as null
and void.
If this is the new normal in
America, then Big Brother certainly is watching and it's not hyperbolic or
extreme to say so. Nor is it unreasonable to fear which parts of the Constitution
this government will next consider negotiable or negligible.
Mr. Paul, a Republican, is a senator
from Kentucky.
A version of this article appeared
June 11, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with
the headline: Big Brother Really Is Watching Us.
Source: Wall Street Journal
