Senators To Obama: Hey You Can End Bulk Phone Data Collection Today; Obama: Ha, Ha, Ha, Nope!

[JDPriestly]

56. The argument is about the interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act and whether

that section if interpreted as the Obama and Bush administrations have interpreted it conflicts with the Constitution and is therefore illegal.

As it stands, the Obama administration's interpretation of it permits the executive branch to collect the data on the overseas (and perhaps strictly domestic) calls of members of Congress.

That is an obvious violation of the separation of powers doctrine that is the very basis of our constitutional government.

Thus, members of Congress disagree with Obama and the Clapper department at NSA on the meaning of Section 215 of the Patriot Act in light of those portions of the Constitution, especially the First and Fourth Amendments that protect our privacy from the government.

The American Revolution was, in part, fought so that we could have privacy from the warrants of assistance that permitted British troops to terrorize American colonists.

The objection to the British warrants of assistance and to the NSA surveillance program are the same: the warrants do not identify with enough specificity what is to be searched and seized. They are not specific or particular enough to comply with the Fourth Amendment.

Here, once again, is the text of the Fourth Amendment.

Amendment IV

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.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment

Here. The Electronic Frontier Foundation tells it well:

The NSA's "General Warrants":
How the Founding Fathers Fought an 18th Century Version of the
President's Illegal Domestic Spying
By David Snyder

The technology powering the National Security Agency’s illegal domestic spying program would have amazed James Madison and the other framers of the Bill of Rights. In a time when the steamboat was a technological marvel, it would have been unimaginable for the government to collect millions of innocent Americans' private communications and use computers to look for "suspicious patterns."

But aside from the technology, the government’s ongoing violation of fundamental civil liberties would have been very familiar to the men who gathered in 1791 to adopt the Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers battled an 18th century version of the wholesale surveillance that the government is accused of doing today – an expansive abuse of power by King George II and III
that invaded the colonists’ communications privacy.

Using "writs of assistance," the King authorized his agents to carry out wide-ranging searches of anyone, anywhere, and anytime regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. These "hated writs" 1 spurred colonists toward revolution 2 and directly motivated James Madison's crafting of the Fourth Amendment.

We’ve now come full circle. The president has essentially updated this page from King George's playbook, engaging in dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime. The founders of this country took steps to limit precisely this sort of unfettered executive power. Will we?

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/generalwarrantsmemo.pdf