NSA’s domestic spying violates US Constitution: Journalist
The US Congress must take measures to end domestic surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) because it is against the Constitution, a journalist and political analyst says.
“It’s high time that someone in the US Congress took some direct action against the NSA for their intrusion into Americans’ privacy and violation of their Second Amendment rights,” said Mike Harris, the financial editor at Veterans Today.
“The NSA was never meant to be a domestic spy organization; the NSA was meant to gather foreign intelligence, not to spy on the American citizenry,” Harris told Press TV on Saturday.
“This is in direct violation against the Second Amendment of free speech and the Fourth Amendment to be safe and secure in one’s housing,” he added.
A couple of US lawmakers have called on the NSA to abandon its planned expansion of domestic spying.
Representatives Blake Farenthold and Ted Lieu, members of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, have asked the NSA chief to halt a plan for the expansion of the list of agencies that the NSA shares information with.
In a letter to NSA Director Michael Rogers, the lawmakers said the plan would violate privacy protections in the Fourth Amendment, since domestic law enforcement would not need a warrant to use the data acquired from the agency.
A New York Times report in February said the US administration was working with the spy agency to create new rules for sharing intercepted private communications with domestic law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
In 2013, former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked classified intelligence documents showing massive collections of phone records of Americans and foreign nationals as well as political leaders around the world.
Snowden, who lives in Russia where he has been granted asylum, has said that US government surveillance methods far surpass those of an ‘Orwellian’ state, referring to George Orwell’s classic novel “1984,” which describes a society where personal privacy is continuously invaded by spy agencies.
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