Administration Claimed Immunity To 4th Amendment

Time to wax political here - after all, it is the election season...

I know that people want to feel safe, but I for one am also concerned about privacy. It's easy to think that we have nothing to worry about - after all, we don't live in China, right? But a few things have happened in recent years that have me a bit concerned.

It was barely more than 50 years ago that McCarthyism was prominent - jailing, blacklisting, and otherwise ruining people for totally legal political beliefs. Just a decade before that, during WWII, we were putting American citizens into domestic prison camps because their ancestors came from Japan, Germany, etc.

The point is that these things can - and do - happen in the US. Unfortunately, several things have happened recently that that could open the door for this type of government action again. Here's a recent one:

In 2001, the Bush Administration asserted in the footnote to an opinion that domestic military operations are not covered by the 4th amendment. This could mean that the Administration believes the NSA's warrantless wiretapping and data mining programs are not governed by the Constitution and could clear the way for things like offline surveillance of political groups within the United States.

The Constitution is what makes our government work - the thing that makes the USA different from most other countries in the world. When our political leaders try to go around it, we should all be concerned, no matter how good the reason seems to be at the time.