The Most Important Paragraph In Leon's NSA Ruling: The Time For Change Is "NOW"!

[kpete]

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” wrote Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nsa-program-gathering-data-unconstitutional-federal-judge-article-1.1549435

Which brings us to the single most important paragraph in Leon’s opinion. This one:

The question in this case can more properly be styled as follows:

When do present-day circumstances — the evolutions in the Government’s surveillance capabilities, citizens’ phone habits, and the relationship between the NSA and telecom companies — become so thoroughly unlike those considered by the Supreme Court thirty-four years ago that a precedent like Smith simply does not apply? The answer, unfortunately for the Government, is now.

https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2013cv0881-40

On the day Smith was decided, the Federal Communications Commission hadn’t even laid out the regulatory framework that would allow early cell phone networks. Many phones still had rotary dials. The IBM PC was still two years away from the market and this was one of Apple’s leading products:

Apple_I


As Judge Leon lays out, however, we no longer live in that world. The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the Government to store and analyse the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979. In Smith, the Supreme Court was actually considering whether local police could collect one person’s phone records for calls made after the pen register was installed and for the limited purpose of a small-scale investigation of harassing phone calls. The notion that the Government could collect similar data on hundreds of millions of people and retain that data for a five-year period, updating it with new data in perpetuity, was at best, in 1979, the stuff of science fiction.”

The central insight of Judge Leon’s opinion is that technology has so transformed our world that it requires an entirely different constitutional privacy regime. Whatever the wisdom of Smith on the day that it was decided, its conception of what constitutes a “reasonable expectation of privacy” imagined a world where government surveillance was relatively unusual and impossible to execute on a massive scale. New realities require new assumptions. And if the courts do not know the difference between science fiction and scientific fact, then we will forfeit our liberties as Americans.

..........................

But Leon is right about one thing, Smith is as obsolete as the rotary dial and the Apple I — at least when applied to agencies with the capabilities of the NSA.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/12/16/3072731/important-paragraph-court-decision-nsa/

[RC]

1. Edward Snowden started the snowball rolling and now it is gathering mass and momentum as it rolls

down hill to take out the true enemies of the state.

[countryjake]

2. K$R!