In interviews Monday and Tuesday, Judge Andrew Napolitano explains the Monday United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruling that certain US National Security Agency mass spying activities are “almost certainly unconstitutional”—a ruling that buttresses Napolitano’s column last week describing such mass spying as a criminal conspiracy to violate rights guaranteed by the US Constitution.
In a Fox and Friends interview with Elisabeth Hasselbeck Tuesday, Napolitano, an RPI Advisory Board member, explains conclusions of the court ruling he believes the US Supreme Court will ultimately review:
So not only is this unconstitutional because it violates the Fourth Amendment, not only is this wrong because it permits the government to listen to all phone calls and keep copies of them forever, but there isn’t even any evidence that it works.
Speaking Monday with Stuart Varney on Fox Business’s Varney and Company, Napolitano expresses how beyond the pale the NSA’s mass spying activities are by comparing the NSA’s dragnet surveillance to Napolitano’s experience with search warrant requests in his former career as a New Jersey state judge. Napolitano explains:
You know I sat on the bench in our home state for many years. I probably signed hundreds, maybe thousands, of search warrants. If the police came to me and said, “We want a search warrant for everybody in this zip code because we are looking for one bad guy,” I wouldn’t have signed it, and no judge in the state would have signed it.
Watch the Fox and Friends interview here and the Varney and Company interview, with the portion regarding mass spying starting at time marker 2:24, here.
Napolitano describes in his column from last week the criminal conspiracies behind mass spying in the US, involving conspirators from US presidents to telecom employees to local police. The column begins with the following:
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.
Read the rest of Napolitano’s column here.
With the new court decision providing support, will we next see prosecutors seeking indictments of mass spying conspirators?
Flickr/Gage Skidmore
