Neither Freedom Nor Safety

The feds give the false impression that spying means security

By Andrew P. Napolitano - - Wednesday, June 3, 2015

In their continuous efforts to create the impression that the government is doing something to keep Americans safe, politicians in Washington have misled and lied to the public. They have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have created a false sense of security. And they have dispatched and re-dispatched 60,000 federal agents to intercept the telephone calls, text messages and emails of all Americans all the time.

In the process, while publicly claiming they only acquire identifying metadata — the time, date, location, duration, telephone numbers and email addresses of communications — they have, in fact, surreptitiously gained access to the content of these communications.

On June 1, one of the three claimed legal authorities for all this, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, expired, as Congress was unable to agree on either its reinstitution or the enactment of a substitute. At the time that Section 215 was about to expire, President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey warned that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) computers would go dark and the American public would be at the mercy of our enemies. Their warnings were nonsense.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news...-spying-does-not-mean-security/#ixzz3cJms8YGZ
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TSA has no excuse to continue the groping:

Thieving agents, racial profiling and excessive pat-downs haven't made us safer.

Last August, Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole attacked an article I wrote, stating that it was "Misleading, inaccurate and unfairly disparages the dedicated (TSA) workforce. … We will not sit back and allow misinformation and conjecture to malign our employees."

Pistole resigned last December — in time to miss the uproar this week about TSA agents failing to detect 95% of the weapons and bombs smuggled past them by Inspector General testers. While Pistole is leading the PR pushback to absolve his former agency, the I.G. report is the latest confirmation that TSA continues blindly blundering and pointlessly abusing Americans' rights and privacy.

Shortly after TSA was created in late 2001, one of its early mottoes was "Dominate. Intimidate. Control." From the start, the TSA put more focus on browbeating hapless travelers than intelligently focusing on actual aviation hazards.

Read More: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/06/05/tsa-failure-security-abuses-column/28490923/