The Government and Freedom

By Judge Andrew Napolitano | Oct 16, 2014

Earlier this week, FBI Director James Comey gave an interview to "60 Minutes" during which he revealed a flawed understanding of personal freedom. He rightly distinguished what FBI agents do in their investigations of federal crimes from what the NSA does in its intelligence gathering, when the two federal agencies are looking for non-public data.

The FBI requires..... articulable suspicion to commence an investigation and probable cause to obtain a search warrant.  It does this because its agents have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution ….Yet..... his agents can and do write their own search warrants -- just as British agents and soldiers did....[these] national security letter[s] is a search warrant in which one federal agent authorizes another federal agent to search for and retrieve data held by third parties....Five federal judges have held this section of the Patriot Act to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.... The Patriot Act also prohibits the recipient of an agent-written search warrant from telling anyone about it -- that includes a lawyer in confidence, a priest in confession, a spouse in the home, even a judge in open court.... Two federal judges already have found this section of the Patriot Act to be violative of the First Amendment.... Comey's agents have written more than half a million of their own search warrants… the Constitution was written to keep the government from interfering with our rights even when it does so in secret…. no government violation of rights is harmless....Much More Here.....