In a stunning smackdown of the NSA surveillance machine a federal judge ruled today that the mass collecting of the phone records of millions of Americans was likely unconstitutional. Judge Richard Leon of the D.C. District Court and an appointee of George W. Bush not only denounced the activities of the American Stasi as “almost Orwellian in scope” and opined that founding father James Madison would be “aghast” at the magnitude of the government surveillance program but also skepticism of NSA claims that such spying has prevented terrorist attacks. In a 68 page opinion Judge Leon challenged the bread and butter argument that massive data mining programs keep Americans safe daring to challenge the claims of NSA Commandant Keith Alexander at a time when the public relations campaign to get citizens to accept funding their own enslavement is kicking into high gear. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack” wrote Leon and taken to the next step would such collections of metadata if truly used as advertised why did they not prevent the Boston Marathon bombing last April?
This is somewhat uncharted territory and legions of government lawyers ensconced in the rotten to the core Justice Department will be working around the clock to find some arcane legal argument that will allow the NSA to continue to ignore what remains of the Constitution. It is a nice bit of hope today but don’t forget that the same ‘legal’ apparatus found a way to justify former Bush-Cheney figure John Yoo’s statement that the chief executive could order the crushing of a child’s testicles on a whim and also failed to effectively halt the torture state that rose out of the smoking ashes of the World Trade Center. While the ruling came out in favor of conservative activist Larry Klayman, the founder of watchdog group Judicial Watch there should be no victory laps taken just yet. While the DOJ will be working overtime for the holidays (unlike the traitors and leeches in congress) so will the spooks at the NSA as they pore through their data center collection on Judge Leon trying to find some sort of past statement or affiliation which they will then feed into their state media smear machine to discredit him.
The ruling was a bit of a stunning blow to the new surge of positive media puff pieces fed into the propaganda mills seeking to burnish the image of the NSA. CBS 60 Minutes aired a segment on Sunday night to a national television audience that was so inherently dishonest and rife with conflicts of interest that it is now obvious that the network along with it’s flagship ‘news’ show have now been completely captured by the corrupt government. Not that this should come as a surprise considering the recent revelations that the now infamous Benghazi “Embassy House” segment aired in October and featuring ace bimbo Lara Logan was total bullshit and that her husband was a professional operative who worked on psy ops in Iraq. The reverberations against the NSA piece are already starting to percolate and I will be writing on this in detail tomorrow. Now that a federal court has actually come out and challenged the constitutionality of Commandant Keith Alexander’s Stasi activities it is the proverbial turd in the holiday party punchbowl.
The online version of Judge Leon’s ruling can be found here.
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