I didn't say they weren't.
So you guys are crying not to have mass cell phone data listened to while it is obviously stopping some murder.
No, it is not obviously stopping murder. Terrorists have been fairly careful to become as untraceable as possible, this is why cell phones (moreso, SIM cards) were important for intel when they were captured, This I know because I worked the property-room in Iraq doing detainee ops.
Come on now...and yes, I think Lincoln took similar measures in order to win the war. I think you guys sound bit ridiculous and reacationary.
You don't understand: it's not just the 4th amendment here. It's the 4th, 5th, and 6th. Arguably the 1st, too.
If this is acceptable then we have a government that is totally out of control, oh there might be show-trials but there will be no real chance to defend yourself from an accusation — and it will come to the point where opposing political viewpoints are grounds for such accusation.
Seriously, read this and you see the future if such unlawful government activity is allowed to stand:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There’s not going to be trials from talking on your phone and expressing your opinions. Even if you were talking about a terror plot but had not put anything to action, there is no threat. Right now I think you guys are sort of peeing in the wind wasting time on this while while Ombama is doing his best to transform the nation by further taxing us to death.