The Constitution is dying a slow death at the hands of the federal government.
And now, one amendment to the Bill of Rights is effectively gone.
The consequences of this are going to be huge and catastrophic.
You wouldn’t have known it by listening to the mainstream media, but on January 3rd, a website called Lexology.com reported about a ruling that was handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
This ruling received very little publicity, and few people paid attention to it. But the consequences of it are going to be incredibly far-reaching, and will change the face of American society.
According to the report, “A panel of three judges for the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has issued a split 2-1 ruling affirming the conviction of a US resident who had been prosecuted using information collected from warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).”
The defendant’s name is Jamshid Muhtorov, and he was targeted by the DOJ after being illegally spied on without a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment, of course, prohibits the government from spying on anybody without an individualized warrant.
This means that under the Constitution, the government must name the person they are attempting to spy on, and provide probable cause for why they are targeting that person.
They can’t just target anyone they please.
But that long-standing Constitutional principle has been dying a slow death ever since the Bush administration used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to destroy civil liberties and massively expand the federal government.
And now, with the Biden administration taking away even more liberties in the name of fighting COVID and “domestic terrorism,” illegal mass surveillance is becoming standard practice for the U.S. government.
One judge dissented from the ruling. Judge Carlos Lucero wrote in his dissenting opinion that the decision “creates the potential for the evisceration of Fourth Amendment protections for U.S. persons.”
This case is yet another example of the U.S. courts refusing to protect the Fourth Amendment, perhaps under threats and intimidation by security state agencies.
One prominent example is the case of Jewel v. NSA, which involved an AT&T customer named Carolyn Jewel who found out that her communications had been read by the NSA.
She sued the NSA for this illegal practice.
For more than 10 years, the case weaved its way through the courts, who refused to take action against the NSA even though the case was obvious on its merits.
One judge, Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, dismissed the case, saying that it would require the “impermissible disclosure of state secret information.”
That “state secret information,” of course, is the actions the government has taken against its own citizens.
Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the dark secrets of the NSA in 2013, the security state agencies have made “window-dressing” changes to their policies.
But at its core, nothing has changed. The U.S. surveillance state is still thriving, and exercising enormous amounts of power over the federal government.
No matter what the Left tries to say, the surveillance state is the true threat to American democracy.
