On Sunday's
Face the Nation, Sen. Rand Paul was asked about President Trump’s
accusation that President Obama ordered the NSA to wiretap his calls.
The Kentucky senator expressed skepticism about the mechanics of
Trump’s specific charge, saying: “I doubt that Trump was a
target directly of any kind of eavesdropping.” But he then made
a broader and more crucial point about how the U.S. government spies
on Americans’ communications — a point that is deliberately
obscured and concealed by U.S. government defenders.
Paul
explained how the NSA routinely and deliberately spies on Americans’
communications — listens to their calls and reads their emails —
without a judicial warrant of any kind:
The way
it works is, the FISA court, through Section 702, wiretaps foreigners
and then [NSA] listens to Americans. It is a backdoor search of
Americans. And because they have so much data, they can tap — type
Donald Trump into their vast resources of people they are tapping
overseas, and they get all of his phone calls. And so they did this
to President Obama. They — 1,227 times eavesdrops on President
Obama’s phone calls. Then they mask him. But here is the problem.
And General Hayden said this the other day. He said even low-level
employees can unmask the caller. That is probably what happened to
Flynn. They are not targeting Americans. They are targeting
foreigners. But they are doing it purposefully to get to Americans.
Paul’s
explanation is absolutely correct. That the NSA is empowered to spy
on Americans’ communications without a warrant — in direct
contravention of the core Fourth Amendment guarantee that “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”
— is the dirty little secret of the U.S. Surveillance State.
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