We knew this administration didn’t like the Second Amendment. We knew it has reservations about the First Amendment, and now we learn that it has dispensed with the Fourth Amendment. The only amendment the administration really likes is the Fifth. The more we learn about the government’s extraordinary ability to read emails, listen to telephone calls and track individual movements, the more frightened everyone should be. New code names, such as Prism, the National Security Agency program that directly mines all information from Gmail, Facebook and other services, have replaced Echelon and Carnivore as scare words.
The government has clearly set out to create a total surveillance society, something that in a rational world would be prevented by the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. But disclosures of the administration’s telephone-tapping schemes, frightening as they are, have overshadowed something even worse, the creation of zones within the United States where the Fourth Amendment specifically does not apply.
This is not “hype,” as President Obama called the surveillance disclosures on Friday. They’re real. Agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been seizing and copying the contents of laptops, iPhones, iPads and other electronic devices from American citizens coming from or traveling to international destinations based on nothing more than the whim of agents who have no probable cause to believe that any crime has been committed.
Read more: http://p.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/10/total-surveillance-society/#ixzz2VrR2lRZA
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