The NSA Is Doing What King George Did to the Colonial Americans

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The NSA Is Doing What King George Did to the Colonial Americans

NSA Spying Is the Kind of Thing Which Caused the Revolutionary War Against King George
Georgetown professor of constitutional law wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:
With the NSA’s surveillance program, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has apparently secretly approved the blanket seizure of data on every American so this “metadata” can later provide the probable cause for a particular search. Such indiscriminate data seizures are the epitome of “unreasonable,” akin to the “general warrants” issued by the Crown to authorize searches of Colonial Americans.
David Snyder provides a must-read historical summary at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: 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” [another name for "general warrants"] 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”spurred colonists toward revolution and directly motivated James Madison’s crafting of the Fourth Amendment.
[The U.S.

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