The Fourth Amendment and the personal rights it secures have a long
history. At the very core stands the right of a man to retreat into his
own home and there be free from unreasonable government intrusion. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart
The tremendous explosion in surveillance-enabling technologies,
combined with the ongoing weakening in legal restraints that protect
our privacy have us drifting toward a surveillance society. The
tensions between the need for intelligence agencies to protect the
nation and the danger that they would become a domestic spy agency have
been explicitly and repeatedly fought out in American history. The
National Security Act of 1947 contained a specific ban on intelligence
operatives from operating domestically. In the 1970s, America learned
about the extensive domestic political spying carried out by the FBI,
the military, the CIA, and the NSA, and Congress passed new laws to
prevent a repeat of those abuses. Surveillance laws were debated and
modified under presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton.
But, President Bush would sweep aside this entire body of
democratically debated and painstakingly crafted restrictions on
domestic surveillance by the executive branch with his extraordinary
assertion that he can simply ignore this law because he is the
Commander-in-Chief. Government eavesdropping on Americans is an
extremely serious matter; the ability to intrude on the private realm
is a tremendous power that can be used to monitor, embarrass, control,
disgrace, or ruin an individual.
If you feel your privacy rights have been violated, call our
complaint line at 314-652-3111 or File a Complaint with our office.
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