If she wants to amend it, she should propose an amendment. But the Fourth Amendment is clear about our privacy rights. We have the right to privacy in our papers, effects and things until the law enforcement agency obtains a warrant based on probably cause.
If it were just a matter of a record of telephone calls, if the government was not collecting all of our correspondence with virtually anyone in the world, maybe the decision in the 1970s would actually give the NSA the authority and right to collect that data. But today we do all of our banking, many of our meetings, nearly all of our personal business electronically. If the NSA is collecting that data, it might as well just put a camera on us in our bedrooms, boardroom, heck even in our bathrooms. There isn't much about our lives that can't be read just from our metadata, to say nothing of the records they are keeping of the content of our calls.
(Yes, they are keeping the content. According to the knowledgeable whistleblowers who spoke in the press conference after Obama's speech, they would not need such a huge complex in Utah if they were not also collecting the content of our communications. And Obama spoke the program in the singular. There are multiple programs run by the NSA at this time.
Which one was Obama talking about?)
With friends like Feinstein, who needs enemies? She will damage us at least as much as any terrorist could. She needs to take a good course in Constitutional law. I don't think she understands how the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights make up the fabric of our freedom. She seems to think that we can cut a little chunk out of this one or that one and the fabric will those very excesses cages Americans in and makes them feel that they are trapped and justified in desperate conduct and rebellion. That is not Feinstein's goal, but that is where she is going with her disregard for the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is the fence that makes us good neighbors. Feinstein wants to tear down that fence and pit us against each other in a fight over whose is what. That is foolish.
My e-mails, phone calls and other electronic records belong to me. The government should not read them and only subpoena information on them or them if I am suspected of a crime. Sorry, but that is the basis for our free society. If that basis is destroyed, our society is living on a sandy beach waiting for the tide to come in and sweep us away.
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