Sweeping NSA Surveillance

"Careful, chief. Dig up the past, all you get is dirty."
--Lycon (Minority Report)

What would a week be without a new scandal surfacing about this administration? The scandal du jour is two massive NSA surveillance projects. One involves forcing Verizon (VZ), and likely other phone carriers, to hand over phone records of all its customers. The other involves a program that scours major Internet companies like Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) for data.

Once again, US mainstream media did not break this story. Instead, a reporter for the UK Guardian took the lead. This now makes at least five page one headline stories that Big Media in the US has whiffed on.

Yet, what could be a bigger story than a government that is hellbent on shredding the Constitution by violating people's rights on such a massive scale? This is the stuff of dictatorships, not republics.

As Judge Nap observes, the president, attorney general, and the judge who signed an open ended warrant are so blind to liberty that they are unworthy of their offices.

Many supporters of this administration are suggesting that Obama somehow does not own this problem because the Patriot Act was enacted under the Bush Administration. It's the juvenile 'He started it" argument that kids use to justify bad behavior on the playground.

We have said it before. If you inherit bad policy, you do not perpetuate or escalate it. You remove it.

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