Police State Supreme Court Ruling Further Erodes Fourth Amendment Privacy Rights

[babsbunny]

Police State Supreme Court Ruling Further Erodes Fourth Amendment Privacy Rights

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sun, 05/22/2011 - 2:16pm.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12715

Guest Commentary

JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT


The right to privacy is the right to be let alone-Justice Louis D. Brandeis

The right to privacy, it seems, is what makes us civil.-Caroline Kennedy

No film can truly reconstruct the horrors that occurred under Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Years of Terror, but we have testimonies from survivors, films and photographs that have furnished us with searing impressions that should have been a final warning to the world: a government that legalizes invasions, torture, murder and genocide ought never to rise again. The question of how easily a democracy can be transformed into a police state begins when a government abolishes individual rights without the people's knowledge or consent. It began when Stalin established a comprehensive spy network that turned every citizen into a suspect. Those actions taken together, spying and abolishing inalienable rights, are the foundation of a police state.

The New Yorker's investigative writer, Jane Mayer, described in her critically acclaimed article, The Secret Sharer, how the Obama administration is targeting ethical whistleblowers, in this case, Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency, "who faces some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen" because he objected to NSA's domestic spying technology program that was designed to secretly monitor the American people through a wide variety of illegal wiretapping systems. The illegal wiretapping is bad enough, but to prosecute the whistleblowers for revealing the truth, for essentially doing the right ethical thing is draconian and shameful.

[crickets]

1. K&R -nt