Our Freedoms Are Being STOLEN From Us By The US Government, In America And Around The World, But Where Is the OUTRAGE? - Former New Jersey Supreme Court Judge Andrew Napolitano Every American who values the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, every American who enjoys the right to be different and the right to be left alone, and every American who believes that the government works for us and we dont work for the government should thank Edward Snowden for his courageous and heroic revelations of the National Security Agencys gargantuan spying operations. Without Snowdens revelations, we would be ignorant children to a paternalistic government and completely in the dark about what the government sees of us and knows about us. And we would not know that it has stolen our freedoms. When I saw Snowdens initial revelation -- a two-page order signed by a federal judge on the FISA court -- I knew immediately that Snowden had a copy of a genuine top-secret document that even the judge who signed it did not have. The NSA reluctantly acknowledged that the document was genuine and claimed that all its snooping on the 113,000,000 Verizon customers covered by that order was lawful because it had been authorized by that federal judge. The NSA also claims that as a result of its spying, it has kept us safe. I reject the argument that the government is empowered to take our liberties -- here, the right to privacy -- by majority vote or by secret fiat as part of an involuntary collective bargain that it needs to monitor us in private in order to protect us in public. The governments job is to keep us free and safe. If it keeps us safe but not free, it is not doing its job. Since the revelations about Verizon, we have learned that the NSA has captured and stored in its Utah computers the emails, texts, telephone conversations, utility bills, bank statements, credit card statements and digital phone books of everyone in America for the past two and a half years. It also has captured hundreds of millions of phone records in Brazil, France, Germany and Mexico -- all U.S. allies -- and it has shared much of the seized raw American data with intelligence agencies in Great Britain and Israel. Its agents have spied on their girlfriends and boyfriends literally thousands of times, and they have combed the collected raw data and selectively revealed some of it to law enforcement. All of this directly contradicts the Constitution. And, if all of this is not enough to induce one to realize that the Orwellian future is here thanks to the secret governments of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Snowden also revealed that the NSA can hack into anyones mobile phone, even when it is turned off, and use each phone as a listening device and as a GPS to track whoever possesses it. This is maddening. The government breaks the law it has been hired to enforce and violates the Constitution its agents have sworn to uphold; it gets caught and lies about it; and no one in government is punished or changes his behavior. All of this -- which is essentially undisputed -- leads me to the question: Where is the outrage? I think the government has succeeded in so terrifying us at the prospect of another 9/11 that we are afraid to be outraged at the government when it claims to be protecting us, no matter what it does. C.S. Lewis once remarked that the greatest trick the devil has pulled off is convincing us that he does not exist. The governments greatest trick has been persuading us to surrender our freedoms. Will we ever get them back? The answer to that depends upon the fidelity to freedom of those in whose hands we have reposed the Constitution for safekeeping. At present, those hands are soiled with the filth of totalitarianism and preoccupied with the grasp of power. And they seem to be getting dirtier and their grip tighter every day. - Reason (Oct. 24, 2013)
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 23:20:00 +0000
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