{"id":45319,"date":"2013-06-26T05:00:41","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T04:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/freedom-in-the-garbage-can\/45319\/"},"modified":"2013-06-26T05:00:41","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T04:00:41","slug":"freedom-in-the-garbage-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/freedom-in-the-garbage-can\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom in the Garbage Can"},"content":{"rendered":"

by
\n Dom Armentano<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Recently
\n by Dom Armentano: In
\n Praise of TV’s Pawn Stars<\/a><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n \"\"<\/a>
\n <\/p>\n

All of our
\n elected representatives in Washington, including the President,
\n swear a sacred oath to “uphold the Constitution of the United
\n States.” Yet in the wake of the on-going NSA snooping scandal,
\n one wonders whether any of them have ever bothered to read that
\n founding document. \u00e3\u20ac\u20ac<\/span><\/p>\n

Amendment #4
\n of the U.S. Constitution states, in part, that “the right of
\n the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects,
\n against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
\n and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause\u2026and particularly
\n describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to
\n be seized.” <\/span><\/p>\n

Some liberals,
\n conservatives and even some “libertarians” are in disagreement
\n over whether the NSA collection of domestic <\/i>telephone and
\n email data is, in fact, unreasonable. I assert that it is<\/i>
\n unreasonable precisely because we now know that the NSA has gone
\n far<\/i> beyond its Patriot Act or FISA (Foreign Intelligence
\n Surveillance Act, 1978) authorization. Revelations to come will
\n make this conclusion even clearer. <\/span><\/p>\n

These laws
\n allow the collection of intelligence information between “foreign
\n powers or agents of foreign powers” in the U.S. and elsewhere.
\n Yet even with the gathering and use of foreign intelligence, these
\n laws prescribe certain legal procedures that must be followed to
\n ensure that NSA spying serves a legitimate and legal purpose. On
\n the other hand, the dragnet collection and storage of general domestic<\/i>
\n data such as phone records and email information (“metadata”)
\n on U.S. citizens, either by the NSA, the FBI or any governmental
\n intelligence agency, has never<\/i> been specifically authorized
\n by any law (although some secret FISA court may have signed off
\n on such an outrage). Individuals under suspicion can be “searched”
\n electronically but only with “probable cause” and then
\n only with the issuance of a warrant specific <\/i>to the place
\n or person to be searched. None of this, I assert, has been followed
\n in the recent disclosures about NSA spying. <\/span><\/p>\n

Thus it appears
\n that the NSA has been involved in an activity (apparently approved
\n by the Department of Justice and the President) in likely violation
\n of the 4th<\/sup> Amendment of the Constitution. The ACLU will
\n test this theory with its legal suit that challenges the constitutionality
\n of this broad based domestic data collection program. <\/span><\/p>\n

The retort
\n to all of this, of course, is that the threat of terrorism can justify
\n almost anything that the government chooses to do in the name of
\n “national security.” Nonsense. This theory has almost
\n zero legal credibility. Our history contains a fair number of examples
\n of government over-reach during alleged “emergencies”
\n (President Truman\u2019s attempted nationalization of the steel industry
\n during the Korean War, for example) that have been sternly rebuffed
\n by the Supreme Court as blatantly unconstitutional. And the reason
\n should be obvious: Constitutional protection for individual rights
\n is even more necessary when times are precarious than when they
\n are not. After all, what are we fighting this alleged war on terror
\n to preserve<\/i>?<\/span><\/p>\n

Which of course
\n gets to the larger question of whether our government\u2019s alleged
\n war on terror and the preservation of individual rights under the
\n Constitution are in any way compatible in the long run. There is
\n a solid historical reason why the Founding Fathers, especially George
\n Washington, argued that the U.S. must steer clear of any “foreign
\n entanglements.” They knew based on the imperial British and
\n Spanish experience, that foreign military interventionism must
\n <\/i>lead to an overall increase in governmental power and, thus,
\n endanger the very liberties that the Constitution was created to
\n protect. They also knew that interventionism abroad must invite
\n retaliation and even repression at home and that “civil society”
\n would always be endangered by expanding militarism. <\/span><\/p>\n

The government
\n surveillance infrastructure put into place after 9\/11 can now capture
\n almost every electronic communication (personal, financial, medical)
\n between almost everyone on the planet. This development is unprecedented
\n in human history and is an absolute litmus test for those who believe
\n that a government with absolute power (over information) must eventually
\n be corrupted. We are getting perilously close to the point where
\n we must decide as a society whether adopting a technology for facilitating
\n the U.S. mission as the world\u2019s policeman is somehow more important
\n than personal privacy, individual liberty, and perhaps even the
\n Constitution itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

June
\n 26, 2013<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Dom
\n Armentano is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hartford (CT)
\n and the author of <\/span><\/i>Antitrust
\n and Monopoly<\/a><\/span>
\n (Independent Institute, 1998) and <\/span><\/i>Antitrust:
\n The Case for Repeal<\/a><\/span>
\n (Mises Institute, 1999). <\/span><\/i>He
\n has written hundreds of op\/ed articles for dozens of newspapers
\n over the last 45 years. He lives in Vero Beach.<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Copyright
\n \u00a9 2013 Dom Armentano<\/span><\/p>\n

The
\n Best of Dom Armentano<\/a><\/span><\/b>
\n \n <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Dom Armentano Recently by Dom Armentano: In Praise of TV’s Pawn Stars All of our elected representatives in Washington, including the President, swear a sacred oath to “uphold the Constitution of the United States.” Yet in the wake of the on-going NSA snooping scandal, one wonders whether any of them have ever bothered to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-45319","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}