Mr Paul, NSA and the Fourth Amendment

(Before It's News)

I think Senator Rand Paul has a case. He has started a class action lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the US administration. Mr Paul is a leading figure in the tea party movement, which perhaps we Europeans generally associate with a reactionary philosophy. However even reactionaries love freedom and some of their political philosophy is driven by love freedom.

Mr Paul thinks that the habit of the national security agency (as disclosed by Edward Snowden) of collecting metadata relating to the phone calls of ordinary citizen in America is contrary to the Fourth Amendment of the American Constitution. The Fourth Amendment states:

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.

Mr Paul thinks the issue is simple. He does not think that a single warrant can be taken to allow the government to collect telephone of 250 million people forever. I suppose the question is whether metadata relating to telephone calls is “effects”. The Fourth Amendment does protect privacy and the wording of the amendments related to the technology of the day. Technology has truly changed and searching people’s metadata can be much more intrusive (and much more potentially dangerous to freedom) than searching their homes and papers.

It is interesting that in the United States Mr Paul has to proceed by way of a class-action. In England the process would have been to seek a declaration or judicial review of the decision to collect metadata, but there is no Fourth Amendment to the British constitution and there is no written British constitution.

In 1967 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Fourth Amendment applies to telephone wiretapping; it simply construed the intention behind the fourth Amendment and applied that intention to the technology of the day the case of Katz v. United States.

I hope that Mr Paul wins his class-action lawsuit. If he does it becomes difficult to understand what crime Edward Snowden has committed unless, of course, it is a crime to expose wrongdoing and illegal behaviour of the National Security Agency.

Filed under: climate change Tagged: Edward Snowden, Fourth Amendment, metadata collection, Rand Paul, US Constitution

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