Daniel Doherty
Townhall
2/12/2014
Does the Fourth Amendment mean anything anymore? That is essentially the question Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posed in a promotional video on Tuesday — the day before he formally filed, along with the organizationFreedomWorks, a class action lawsuit against President Obama and top officials at the National Security Agency (NSA). He cited the U.S. government’s ongoing collection of Americans’ phone records as the “modern equivalent” of British lawlessness and overreach during the Revolutionary War era. Back then, he argued, representatives from His Majesty’s Government would routinely and illegally search the homes and property of British subjects without their consent. How is what the NSA is doing today, he argued, any less tyrannical?
“The Constitution is not a negotiable piece of parchment to be ignored or abused at the president’s whim,” he said. “Washington leaders are expected to obey and protect what they took an oath to uphold. And if this means taking them to court over it — so be it.”
Watch the video of Senator Paul’s announcement at Townhall.
Related: Utah lawmaker floats bill to cut off NSA data centre’s water supply
…Making it illegal to supply the water will cripple the data center, already beset with electrical problems, before it opens and complicate the NSA’s plans for expanding its storage capacity. For an agency that hoovers up a wide swath of the data communicated across the internet, not to mention the phone records of Americans that it can store for up to five years, it’s a problem.
But Utah is only the latest of about a dozen states to consider measures designed to restrict the NSA’s activities.
In the NSA’s home state of Maryland, eight lawmakers are backing a bill to stymie the provision of water and electricity to the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. A similar measure, based off an initiative Maherrey’s organization calls the 4th Amendment Protection Act, has been introduced in California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana, Mississippi, Washington state and Vermont…
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