BREAKING: Federal judge rules NSA data gathering on all US telephone calls is unconstitutional

[JDPriestly]

212. I have to add that it isn't the proponents of privacy that have to prove that they have the right

to privacy when it is guaranteed in the Constitution in several provisions beginning with the First Amendment right through to at least the Seventh. The authors of the Bill of Rights did not just include the Third Amendment in order to save American citizens the cost of feeding soldiers in their homes. They put it there so that soldiers could not camp out in our living rooms. And that is what the NSA is doing when it collects the data on our personal communications with our friends, our business partners and co-workers, our doctors, our pastors and our lawyers. Just camping out in our living rooms. It is disgusting and perverted quite frankly.

Third Amendment -- the one nobody thinks really means anything. I didn't until I learned of the NSA surveillance and collection of metadata.

Amendment III

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/third_amendment

I very much agree with the court that stated that considering the new developments in technology and the vast sweeping surveillance that the NSA has instituted in recent years, Smith v. Maryland, decided in the 1970s before the high-speed computers to analyze our telephone information, should not be the deciding precedent. We need a decision that fits the facts of our time.

And the collection of all this data since sometime in 2001 possibly as early as February of 2001 has not brought sufficient benefits, not prevented terrorist attacks in numbers big enough to justify the terrible intrusion on our right to privacy.

It is not those of us who are defending the Constitution who should be required to defend our viewpoint. It is those who are defiling the Constitution with their dirty surveillance who should prove that the surveillance is truly justified. They haven't. And I do not believe that they ever will.