Earlier this month a panel of experts appointed by President Obama issued a 300 page report with over 40 recommendations to protect Americans’ privacy as well as the country. The report noted that mass collections of phone records had not actually helped to prevent attacks.
Now we get Judge William Pauley III who issued a decision approving mass surveillance. He wrote: “The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed.” Well, yeah, it can.
Pauley used as precedent a 1979 Supreme Court case “Smith v. Maryland.” In that case the Court ruled that a robbery suspect had no Fourth Amendment protection in the telephone numbers he dialed. OK, I can go along with that. What I can’t do is make the leap from that case to daily sweeps of millions of phone calls.
The judge also said that government almost always acts in accordance with the law and corrects itself when it doesn’t. Sure it does. It’s so benign and trustworthy that we could eliminate the 4th Amendment entirely.
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