American civil rights activist Sherwood Ross says US intelligence agencies are not punished for their violations because they are probably running the government.
“There is an outcry in the heads of the intelligence agencies go before the Senate, but that time they claim that they’re going to reform their practices, but they never do,” Ross told Press TV on Tuesday.
“They go back and continue to commit their crimes. This has happened over and over again in recent American history and the intelligence agencies are not punished and that is probably because they’re probably running the American government,” he added.
On Monday, a US federal judge ruled against the National Security Agency’s massive collection of phone records, saying the program “almost certainly does violate” the Constitution.
Richard Leon, a judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia, called NSA’s intrusive surveillance program “almost Orwellian.”
He suggested that James Madison, the author of the US Constitution, would be “aghast” to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way.
“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” Leon said.
“Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” the judge said.
Leon ordered the government to stop collecting data on two plaintiffs’ personal calls and destroy the records of their calling history.
AGB/AGB
With permission
Source: Press TV