I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter, so help me God.All government workers and officials take that same oath.
That oath is not to "obey orders," that oath is not to "follow the President," the oath is to the Constitution, not only to defend it, but to bear true faith and allegiance to it.
The 4th amendment of the US Constitution states:
4th Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.Where is the probable cause against each and every individual citizen that warrants individually a progam like PRISM against them. This is the program that Edward Snowden exposed. A program run by the NSA to take and search every citizen's emails, their phone calls, their postings on the internet, or any other of "their persons, houses, papers, and effects"?
There is no such propbable cause, and there are no incdividula warrants as proscribed by the constitution.
So, who is ther traitor?
Is it the man who exposes government officials and agencies who are abjectly violating this part of the Constitution a traitor?
No, he most certainly is not!
Are the people who are secretly planning and carrying out these progerams like PRISM, which involves searches and violations of every coitizen's personal effect traitors? , Are those who support them in the commission of the same traitors?
The answer is clear to any liberty loving, God-fearing upholder of the Constitution.
All of you politicians and officals who are lining up to call this man, Edward Snowden a traitor. Let me tell you something. You have completely forgotten who you serve, and the oath that you have taken...if it ever meant anything to you in the first place...and what the word "traitor," means.
Somehow, you have gotten a notion in your minds, that in your plush, regular golfing appotiments, being attended to by as many pages and interns as you can get, your planning meetings where you think it is your job to plan all of our lives...what we can and cannot say...which sites we can and cannot visit, etc., etc., I say, you have gotten this notion that you are somehow a breed above the rest of uis. That somehow you are more enlightened than the people you serve.
Well, I hate to burst you bubble and your over inflated impression of yourselves, but you are not.
Any American citizen who looks at these facts...at what is actually happening here, and the oaths you all took (and that I have taken as well), and who will be honest with themselves, can see clearly what is going on. You folks have been caught with your hand in the PRISM cookie jar clear up to your shoulder blades. And you do not want to take them out.
We have a government, and agencies of government who have been proven to abuse the rights of the people for their own political, material, and ideologicla gain. Whether the IRS scandal, the scandal of the Department of Justice infringing these rights and threatening members of the press because they do not like their avenue of research, the pervers overreah of government taking over entire private sector uindustries because we are told that the government can run it better (when it is documented that the exact opposite is true)...the list of usurpation and abuses is long...and now, this huge issue of personal data and habits being secretly gathered on virtually all citizens! My God, just what is becoming of the United States of America?
It is clear to any thinbking person that this data will be used against the people. Either for taxation purposes, the providing or denying of government run healthcare, the suppression of free speech, the threatening of people...and ultimately for the abject incarceration (disappering) of people simply because the people who hold the reigns of power want to supress the activities of those who do not agree with them, or who will not follow in lock-step to their wishes and decrees, and now they have created the means of unconstitutionally securing such data so as to feed their hunger and craving of power..
As God is my witness, NOT IN AMERICA! You folks and your ilk had best change. You has best return to the constitutional confines of your offices. You had best truly serve the people who elect or place you in ofdfice and keep your oaths, rather than seek to rule over us as some form of vasslas or chattel.
If you will not, then We the People will find those who will. Or, failing that, ultimately you will see what the founders of this nation and framers of the Constitution meant when they said,
"...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their (the people's) right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Never allow yourself to believe for an instant that in this country, where our ancestors shed their blood to provide for the liberty of rising generations, that those words cannot apply to you and your ilk if you continue such usurpations and infringements. And the "new Guards," will simply be a return to the Constitution which has enumerated them so well for over 200 years..
Look up 'mail cover' ~ the laws are written to deal with INTENT, not the fact but strictly intent since, after all, a postal employee ~ a gub'mnt agent ~ will touch that letter and read the information on the cover and deliver it, send it back, or whatever.
The cover information is an open book to be read by all ~ and the call, email and other telecommunications bric a brac packed in and around the message, whatever it is, is also equally open BUT, as open as it is the Congress wrote laws to regulate mail covers and electronic meta data.
I find it absolutely amazing you guys read these articles and skip on by the fact that today the USPS actually makes an electronic image of the front and back of each and every mail piece that requires initial sortation ~ in effect, they do a mail cover ~ and all without a warrant anybody knows about. Still, they do it confident they'll never be called to account ~ do you imagine there is a broad spectrum FISA court warrant in place?
Frankly, I have no idea ~ but it is still amazing people don't seem to care about these covers but once, not long ago, they wanted to bust Nixon's chops over them.
The problems you mention: overtaxation, government-run healthcare, denial of rights and threats are all due to the enlargement of government by Bush, Congress and outright abuses by Obama. The solution is not more Ed Snowdens, but less government.
A couple of things. First call records are not the same as listening in on phone calls. Second - phone records are NOT YOUR PROPERTY. They are the property of the phone company.
I am in total agreement with you, Jeff.