A Conspiracy So Vast: Judge Andrew Napolitano

Judge Andrew Napolitano * Lew Rockwell

Readers of this page are well aware of the revelations during the past six months of spying by the National Security Agency (NSA). Edward Snowden, a former employee of an NSA vendor, risked his life and liberty to inform us of a governmental conspiracy to violate our right to privacy, a right guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

The conspiracy he revealed is vast. It involves former President George W. Bush, President Obama and their aides, a dozen or so members of Congress, federal judges, executives and technicians at American computer ISPs and telecoms, and the thousands of NSA employees and vendors who have manipulated their fellow conspirators. The conspirators all agreed that it would be a crime for any of them to reveal the conspiracy. Snowden violated that agreement in order to uphold his higher oath to defend the Constitution.

The object of the conspiracy is to emasculate all Americans and many foreigners of their right to privacy in order to predict our behavior and make it easier to find among us those who are planning harm.

A conspiracy is an agreement among two or more persons to commit a crime. The crimes consist of capturing the emails, texts and phone calls of every American, tracing the movements of millions of Americans and foreigners via the GPS system in their cellphones, and seizing the bank records and utility bills of most Americans in direct contravention of the Constitution, and pretending to do so lawfully. The pretense is that somehow Congress lessened the standard for spying that is set forth in the Constitution. It is, of course, inconceivable that Congress can change the Constitution (only the states can), but the conspirators would have us believe that it has done so.

The Constitution, which was written in the aftermath of the unhappy colonial experience with British soldiers who executed general warrants upon the colonists, forbids that practice today. That practice consists of judges authorizing government agents to search for whatever they want, wherever they wish to look. By requiring a warrant from a judge based on probable cause of criminal behavior on the part of the very person the government is investigating, however, and by requiring judges to describe particularly in the warrants they issue the places to be searched or the persons or things to be seized, the Constitution specifically outlaws general warrants.

This is more than just a constitutional violation; it is a violation of the natural right to be left alone. When that right is violated, when all of our private movements are monitored by the government, the menu of our free choices is reduced, as we surely alter our private behavior to compensate for being watched. And just as surely, the government expands its surveillance, knowing that it is not being watched.

continue article at LewRockwell.com:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/andrew-p-napolitano/a-conspiracy-so-vast%e2%80%a8/