U.S. court confirms C4L: Mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal

For years, Campaign for Liberty has fought government spying on American citizens, the overreach of government agencies like the NSA that facilitates the spying, and the lies that follow (see former Director of National Intelligence Director James Clapper and his blatant lie to Congress under oath about government spying programs). Now, according to a Reuters’ news story, “In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.” This program the court said was unconstitutional is the same NSA program exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Evidence that the NSA was secretly building a vast database of U.S. telephone records – the who, the how, the when, and the where of millions of mobile calls – was the first and arguably the most explosive of the Snowden revelations published by the Guardian newspaper in 2013. Up until that moment, top intelligence officials publicly insisted the NSA never knowingly collected information on Americans at all.

This confirms what Campaign for Liberty has been fighting since day one. As our Chairman Ron Paul says, “We are told that the government must be allowed to operate in secret in order to keep us safe, but how much security do we really have if we allow the government to deprive us of our liberty? “If we are to be a free society, we must demand the right to know about government malfeasance. We must reject the anti-American notion that the government has the right to know everything about us, but that we have no right to know anything about the government. We cannot entrust our life, liberty and happiness to an unelected shadow government that operates in secret and is accountable to no one. “History teaches of the horrors that result when a people are willing to sacrifice their liberty for the false promises of government-provided security. Totalitarianisms of the left and right have thrived in such an environment. “Whistle-blowers are the truth-seekers, and we must demand the truth. Who does not want to know the truth? Sadly, in an empire of lies, the truth has become treason.”