10 Great Points in Rand Paul’s Patriot Act Attack

[jct74]

10 Great Points in Rand Paul’s Patriot Act Attack
It’s not every day that a GOP presidential candidate talks about the drug war’s ‘disparate racial impact’ while trying to run the clock out on blanket surveillance

Matt Welch | May. 20, 2015 8:27 pm

I don't know whether Rand Paul's ongoing Senate talkfest will succeed in running out the clock on the Patriot Act, or (as he is seeking) opening up a debate and amendment process, but I do know that—just like his 2013 exercise—these have been some of the most invigorating hours on C-SPAN in recent memory.

1) Warrants need to be "individualized," because collective law enforcement is the root of much evil.

Paul's root opposition to the Patriot Act is that it is being used as the legal justification for the collection of bulk data against unsuspecting U.S. citizens who no one believes have committed a crime. His opposition to the reforming USA Freedom Act is that it still allows the government to compel third-party companies like Verizon to cough up 100 percent of its customer metadata.

Either way, Paul has stressed all day, this is antithetical to both the Fourth Amendment and the American tradition of individual rights. Collective guilt is what underpinned the segregationist horrors of the Jim Crow south, and of the indefensible internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The people who really need the Bill of Rights, he has said, are not the prom queens and homecoming kings, but people who are in a disfavored minority, whether ideological, religious, or racial.

2) Internet/telephone/data companies should put up "unified resistance" to federal compulsion to turn over user data.

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read more:
http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/20/10-great-points-in-rand-pauls-patriot-ac

[jct74]

Rand Paul's Senate 'filibuster': five great points he made about NSA surveillance
Paul spoke for more than 10 hours on the floor of the Senate – and he and his colleagues reminded us the Patriot Act can collect a lot more than phone records

Trevor Timm
Thursday 21 May 2015 11.11 EDT

Republican senator Rand Paul, with the help of Democrat Ron Wyden and several others, held court on the Senate floor for more than 10 and a half hours straight on Wednesday in an attempt to grind the Senate to a halt until the part of the Patriot Act used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance expires on 1 June. (Although by stepping aside before midnight, it’s unclear if Paul did, in fact, derail the extension of the act).

Paul spent a lot of his time eloquently explaining the dangers of secret and suspicionless spying on innocent Americans’ telephone records, but he and his colleagues also made a lot of other great points often lost in the current debate. Here are five:

1. The NSA can use the Patriot Act to collect in bulk a lot more than phone records

The controversy over Section 215 of the Patriot Act centers around the NSA’s massive phone metadata program, first revealed by Edward Snowden in the Guardian in 2013, which allows the spy agency to collect the phone records of millions of innocent Americans. But as Wyden emphasized during one of Paul’s short interludes, the NSA also thinks it can use the same law to collect in bulk the cellphone location information of Americans – and it has in the past. The NSA thinks it can essentially turn all our phones into tracking devices 24 hours a day, despite the law saying nothing of the sort.

While Wyden said the NSA claims it is not doing this today, he indicated the agency thinks it has the legal authority if it wants to. He strongly suggested the agency also believes it can collect in bulk millions of innocent Americans’ credit card records, medical records, financial and bank records, and gun records, using the same law as well.

2. The USA Freedom Act doesn’t cover everything

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read more:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/21/rand-paul-senate-filibuster-nsa-surveillance