Op-ed
Fourth Amendment violations and Big Brother all rolled into one
By: Diane Sori
A computer geek just might have put the key into the lock of Obama’s downfall.
Edward Snowden, the much heralded NSA (National Security Agency) leaker,
was one of thousands of analysts hired by the Obama government to
manage and go through huge amounts of personal data collected through
monitoring our personal phone calls and internet usage.
Blowing the lid off what in reality is the Obama government’s spying on
Americans through what’s known as PRISM…a covert government electronic
surveillance program operated by the NSA and originally designed to identify
terrorists, PRISM has now become a collaboration between the NSA, the FBI,
and major tech companies that allow government access to your personal
information...Obama and crew are unconstitutionally and without warrants
spying on private citizens who have committed NO crime, who belong to NO
terrorist groups, who are just going about their daily lives…in a
direct and flagrant violation of rights afforded us under the Fourth
Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable search and
seizures (phone and internet snooping meets this definition), yet the
Obama government is listening in on…spying on…half the country which was
NOT the intention of the policies (the Patriot Act most specifically)
George W. Bush put in place immediately after 9/11.
But laws passed since then have given authorities the ability to request
judicial approval through a special National Security court, to
basically troll for all sorts of records under the premise that the
searching and accumulation of citizen’s phone and internet records could
be analyzed for patterns of suspicious behavior while not involving a
specific focus on any specific individual or group.
And this is where the violation of our Fourth Amendment rights come into play.
The Fourth Amendment requires that searches meet a ‘reasonableness
standard’. This means that ‘reasonableness’ can be judged on the
circumstances surrounding the search, and then weighing the search’s
overall intrusive nature against the legitimate interests of the
government.

However, the government must show that there was ‘probable cause’ for
the search, meaning some form of evidence must be brought forth showing
that there’s good reason to suspect an individual of a particular
transgression, and only then can said search be deemed Constitutional.
A search will be constitutionally ‘unreasonable’ when the government can’t prove the search was necessary.
And listening in on…intruding on…spying on…collecting data
on…law-abiding American citizens engaged in NO activity harmful to this
country or its citizens is indeed ‘unreasonable’. And just because our
government has the technical ability to conduct such searches on such a
large scale does NOT mean the government should conduct such
searches…legally or otherwise.
So how did Obama and crew justify their spying when exposed…by using the
totally ridiculous justification that since terrorists have cell phones
and internet access that they use to plot and carry out acts of
terrorism, and because millions of American citizens have cell phones
and computers with internet access, government
surveillance…NO…government spying…is necessary to weed out suspicious
activity. This means that every citizen is under suspicion until they
are cleared by an Obama sanctioned look-see at their records.
So now we are NO longer innocent until proven guilty but guilty until the Obama government deems us innocent.

And to make this worse the fact is that every American who uses a cell
phone or logs onto the internet is being tracked to some degree on a
daily basis. And the Obama controlled NSA is building a massive cyber
intelligence data center, dubbed The Dark Star, in Bluffdale, Utah
(scheduled to be operational this fall) that can analyze, in real time,
the actual voice content of phone calls and ‘see’ what people are doing on the internet. In fact, it’s the largest of a network of
data farms which include sites in Colorado, Georgia, and Maryland.
And it’s Fourth Amendment violations and Big Brother all rolled into one.
So with Edward Snowden now fearing retaliation against him for blowing
the whistle on this operation, he is out of the country and on the
run…and who can blame him with Obama’s thugs after him…and with the
Obama government’s very defense reaction to the lid being blown off
their doing what they knew was unconstitutional to begin with, this
gives much credibility to the supposition that the Obama government
actually did spy on and continues to spy on 'We the People' NOT to weed out potential
acts of terrorism as they claim, but to ‘tag’ those of us who oppose
this miserable excuse of a president and his equally miserable
administration.
And I can bet one of those ‘tags’ is most assuredly on me...and damn proud of it.