by Jayson Veley, Natural News:

The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution states that the people have a right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” It was originally included in the Bill of Rights because at the time of the amendment’s ratification, the Founding Fathers were extremely fearful of the rise of tyranny in the new world. Warrantless searches and seizures were common under the rule of the king, and the framers included language about privacy protection in the Constitution to ensure that the same practice didn’t continue. Sadly, over two centuries of progressivism and corruption within the federal government has made the Fourth Amendment all but irrelevant.

Earlier this week, Circa.com reported that the Obama administration violated its own surveillance guidelines by expanding Internet searches and essentially spying on millions of Americans for the past several years.

Since 2011, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act has prohibited the practice of querying the results of upstream Internet collections. According to Circa, the Obama administration self-disclosed the NSA rule violations during a closed-door hearing on October 26, 2016, just days before Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. The court, which was usually supportive of the Obama administration, declared that the Obama administration’s failure to disclose the massive amount of personal information previously collected amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and was a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a court document from April 26 of this year.

Some officials that served in the Obama administration, such as National Security Adviser Susan Rice, have argued that the data collection was legal under the minimization rule changes that Barack Obama made in 2011. However, even the NSA’s own watchdog group says that this argument is simply not true. “Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collections under Section 702,” the court ruling said. “The Oct. 26, 2016 notice informed the court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had been previously disclosed to the Court.”

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