General Warrants

"You want the truth? The plain truth? You're over."
--Keith Nelson (Some Kind of Wonderful)

Small victory on the path to liberty last week as the Second Circuit ruled that bulk records collections by the NSA are illegal. This is a step in the right direction to declare that the Patriot Act itself is unconstitutional.

Essentially, the Patriot Act enables government agents to write general warrants. A general warrant, for instance, could be written by an NSA agent and served to Verizon, authorizing the government to collect all phone records that it wants for any purpose deemed important to 'national security.'

General warrants are tools of repression because they enable the invasion of person and property at the issuers discretion. Our founding ancestors were quite familiar with the restrictions on liberty posed by general warrants and wrote the Fourth Amendment expressly to forbid them.

The Fourth Amendment clearly states that warrants must be specific as to the person and place to be searched, that warrants must be accompanied by evidence of 'probable cause' to motivate the search, and that warrants must by issued by a judge who weighs the evidence and decides whether the probable cause argument justifies the warrant.

The Patriot Act depends on general warrants. If the Supreme Courts, which is where this issue is ultimately headed, declares these general warrants as unconstitutional, then the Patriot Act is over.