NAPOLITANO: Hopping from liberty to tyranny

NSA disregard for the Constitution threatens innocent Americans

In what appears to be one of Edward Snowden’s final revelations, the former CIA and NSA agent has demonstrated conclusively that the National Security Agency has collected and analyzed the contents of emails, text messages, and mobile and landline telephone calls from nine Americans for every one foreign person it has targeted.

This puts the lie to the government’s claims that it has only collected metadata — identifying markers such as phone numbers and email addresses — and not content from unsuspecting and unsuspected Americans. It puts the lie to the government’s claims that it has studiously avoided prying into the private lives of Americans, in whom it has no intelligence-related or lawful interest. This also puts the lie to the government’s contentions and the opinions of judges of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the NSA’s spying is somehow lawful, constitutional and helpful.

We now know that the government has failed effectively to refute the Snowden claims that it has collected and maintained for future access massive amounts of personal materials about nearly all people in America since 2009. This includes the metadata and content of nearly every telephone call, email and text message made, sent or received in the United States, as well as nearly every credit card bill, utility bill and monthly bank statement of nearly every person in the nation.

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