And, didn't they first get a warrant (a court order) from a court before they got the phone records?
Doesn't the issue become whether it is "unreasonable" for the government to get the records of phone calls from the phone companies and, if so, that the court is wrong to order the production of the phone company's records?
Are these really your records or the phone company's records? Would it be illegal for the phone company to create a public database of these records?
They private sector companies were given a court order to turn over records of ALL customers.
ALL customers does not constitute reasonable search and seizure, since you can’t suspect EVERYONE who has a phone.
The companies should have refused the order on Constitutional grounds.
But the companies’ Boards of Directors and corporate officers are all globalists, as is the Judge issueing the Order and the government attorneys who requested the Order.
If I’m a gun retailer, and you and all your friends buy rifles from me, do you see how it might be a problem for me to say “THE BILLS I SEND MY CUSTOMERS ARE PUBLIC INFORMATION”. And then I put all your invoices on my website for the government to see. What gun you bought, what bullets, where you live, etc.
If over the years I buy all sorts of equipment and supplies because I tinker with cars, boats, guns, baseball equipment, stoves and ovens (I like to cook), regrigeration, fertilizers (I like to garden), and I keep all my records, I would have boxes of old records. They would contain invoices for all the strange combinations of things I’d bought over the years. No doubt, if you wanted to, and you could get your hands on my boxes of old invoices that I paid, you could prove I had the material to build all sorts of bombs and booby traps and was running a gun repair business for terrorists.
George Washington & Co. realized that unreasonable search and seizure was often used by despotic governments, where they simply burst in one day, grabbed boxes of records and took them back to their office where they combed through them and some other evidence they gathered elsewhere, and combined it with some witness testimony where they fabricated cases against innocent people.
Having every person’s phone bill is exactly this kind of unreasonable a) seizure and b) search (they comb through the bills they’ve unconstitutionally seized without individual, valid search warrants, looking for evidence).
Saying everyone in the town is suspect, we’re seizing all their records from their homes, does not make the seizure Constitutionally valid.
They must a) for each single person b) have suspicion based on evidence c) enough to convince a judge to issue a search warrant then they can d) search and/or seize e) according to the search warrant for f) that single person.
There is no such thing as a Constitutionally valid blanket court order for search/seizure of a whole class of persons, everyone, etc. But there can be an order against a group that is a legal entity. Any group that is incorporated, a partnership, etc. Like a mosque. Or a business front that is run by the mafia. Or a business front that is run by the CIA. Such organizations, and their leaders, can have warrants issued for their books and records if there is evidence which satisfies a Judge that the entity could be suspected of doing what the petitioning persons accuse it of.