Warrantless State Scrutiny Is Always Unlawful

   Righteous outrage has erupted across the country over recent revelations about the NSA and FBI Hoovering-up everyone’s phone-calls, email, “social media” posts and so on.  This widespread ire is being met with predictable political-class nonsense: lies about the extent of the violations, efforts to downplay the significance of the violations, and arguments that it’s all for a good cause anyway, so everyone should just get over it.
   But the real assault is on our sensibilities and on the frayed sinew of our Constitutional structure -- the repeated assertion by the perpetrators of these assaults that they are “lawful.”
They are not.
   As much battering as the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution has taken over recent decades -- and it has taken a lot -- battering is just battering. It is not transformation.
   A court may refuse to hold the government accountable for violation of the amendment prescriptions and proscriptions, and it may even explain that it found approval for that refusal in a construction of the amendment. But that refusal, and any such explanation, doesn’t change those prescriptions and proscriptions.  The pretense that it does is just that -- a pretense. Until it is expressly changed by amendment, any part of the Constitution retains the meaning it had when first written and as understood by those who wrote and ratified it.
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