Rand Paul Promises to Shut Down NSA Data Center if Elected President

Desperately trying to remain relevant as he sinks in the polls, the amazing shrinking candidate Rand Paul has vowed to close down that massive NSA data storage center in Utah if he becomes president. Paul has proven to be an enormous disappointment to many who saw in him someone who would take a stand to restore our lost civil liberties and reign in the American Stasi and the surveillance of millions of law-abiding Americans. At this point it is hard to believe anything that comes out of Senator Paul’s mouth because he has spent all of his once bountiful political capital by flip-flopping, compromising and engaging in acts of Clintonian triangulation to the point where it is hard to tell where he stands on anything anymore.

Paul’s comments were reported by the website The Inquisitr in the story “Rand Paul Promises to Shut Down NSA Data Center if He Becomes President”:

Republican Senator Rand Paul has been one of the few vocal critics of the U.S. government’s spying programs. He’s the only presidential candidate that has made NSA spying a central topic of their campaign.

NSA spying is so important to Rand that he’s promised to shut down the NSA data center if he becomes president. After he stops the indiscriminate collection of Americans’ data, he’ll convert the data center into a “Constitutional Center” where the Fourth Amendment will be studied.

“I’m on my way to the airport, but we decided to stop by the NSA facility in Utah. When I become President, we’ll convert it into a Constitutional Center to study the Fourth Amendment! Bulk data collection must end!”

Questions of whether the spying programs were unconstitutional have been swirling since 2013 when Edward Snowden made details about the programs public. Snowden is the NSA contractor who copied large amounts of classified documents onto a thumbdrive and leaked the information to journalists.

For those that are bothered by the NSA spying programs, Paul seems to be the only candidate that would work to stop it. For the Senator, it’s a major problem that affects virtually all Americans.

Last year, Paul filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Paul hoped that his class-action lawsuit would bring the issue of bulk collection of phone records to the Supreme Court.

Paul also staged a filibuster to delay the renewing of the Patriot Act, which authorizes bulk data collection. He was only partially successful in his efforts. While Congress decided to let the Patriot Act expire, they replaced it will a very similar bill. The new bill, the USA Freedom Act, put a few more restrictions on how the government conducts its spying.

The federal government's snooping on Americans is indeed a travesty and a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment but it isn’t going away – especially after a federal appeals court just put the kibosh on a lawsuit brought against it's illegal spying on a technicality. The game is rigged and when it comes to controlling the NSA the horse has long since run off and it’s too late to close the barn door now. 

Talk is cheap, especially to Rand Paul who continues to be a disappointment to those who supported his father who was a man of deeply held principles unlike his flaky son with the hairdo that resembles Woodstock's nest. You can file this latest one of his promises under the moon is made out of green cheese category.

Rand Paul Sues the Bastards

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul just manned up big time and stepped to the plate, filing a class action lawsuit against President Barack Obama for his lack of control over an NSA gone rogue. It is about damned time that a national political figure showed a set of stones and demanded accountability from a flagrantly out of control administration and the ongoing assault against the Constitution that it is conducting.  The rank cowardice from the political class has been evident since the revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and has been not only an embarrassment to this country but also a violation of their oaths to uphold the Constitution that borders on treason. If we still lived in a land where the rule of law was upheld the entire Congressional leadership and their little gangs of eight and sixteen that operate outside the legal parameters would be removed from office and placed on public trial after which they would be thrown into the prisons in which they belong for the remainder of their miserable lives. They are all jackals and thieves and their war on the American people must be stopped. Thanks to Senator Paul the proverbial shot across the bow has been delivered.

The Washington based establishment went into their usual mode when the sanctity of their incestuous little bubble gets pricked, they unleashed the smear brigade. From the tip of the spear that is the neocon dominated Washington Post the scorn for Paul (but really for the country itself) erupted shortly after the suit was filed in the D.C. federal district court. The veteran house lackey Dana Milbank immediately accused Paul of plagiarism and hijacking the lawsuit from the seasoned conservative activist Bruce Fein. Charles Kraüthammer and Jennifer Rubin are likely well into their standard poison pen propaganda and will inveigh against Paul, the demon of the month libertarians, privacy rights and the Constitution itself come Friday. The winter storm that has hit the pox along the Potomac and resultant bad weather event closures will have many a blood-sucking leach that is dependent on the bloated fascist surveillance industry flying into action to denounce the lawsuit in print and on message boards.

Pity that the good Senator from the Bluegrass State had the audacity to float a turd in the punchbowl of the WAPO Snowden bashing party. The paper launched an asinine story today that will spread throughout the state media like ticks jumping from rabid dog to rabid dog that Snowden gained his access to the purloined data by stealing the password of a co-worker.  That this sordid little character attack has nothing to do with the proverbial price of rice in China that the NSA was the violator of the law is as pearls before swine to the masses of asses. It plays directly into the Mike Rogers-James Clapper war on the First Amendment argument that journalist Glenn Greenwald is a "thief" and so is Snowden so they cannot be held as any thing other than enemies of the state. In the corrupt den of star-spangled iniquity that is the post 9/11 Homeland the best way to defend oneself from their own criminal acts is to play the victim and go on the attack against the very people who exposed their illegality. It is so effective that even that the operatives of that corrupt fat bastard Governor of New Jersey Krispy Kreme  Christie are doing it.

Paul will be smeared six ways from Sunday and then some from the big five TV networks operating in unison during the regular state propaganda Sabbath vomit fests by the usual array of scum trotted out on NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, CNN's State of the Union, FOX News Sunday and CBS's Face the Nation and they will be looking to destroy him. That is the way that it works in this country anymore, it is far more sophisticated than just unleashing hordes of brownshirt thugs on those who question and even worse fight the criminal acts of the government that have so effectively served the interests of history's despots.

In an opinion piece written by Paul (along Matt Kibbe and Ken Cuccinelli) that is a CNN Exclusive the challenger to Leviathan states his case and I excerpt the following:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.

This is the beginning of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and defines one of the most important rights we have against a potentially tyrannical government.

Throughout history, governments have used the confiscation of private property, as well as bullying and surveillance techniques, to keep populations under control and maintain a continuous threat against those who would dare criticize them.

AND

In recent years, however, this right, like so many others, has come under attack by the overzealous powers that be in Washington, eager to sacrifice liberty in the name of security, and using fear as a weapon to make us forget the importance of being free.

In 2013, the revelation that the National Security Agency was collecting and storing the metadata from the phone calls and e-mails of millions of American citizens -- without any suspicion of criminal activity -- served as a striking wake-up call for the country.

Americans do not like to think of their government as some Orwellian leviathan, engaging in surveillance tactics that we only expect to see in oppressive autocracies. That such surveillance could be going on in what is ostensibly the freest nation in the world is a chilling thought indeed.

Since 2006, the NSA has been spying on us, treating American citizens as no more than common criminals, casting suspicion on honest people with not even a whisper of criminal activity about them. These are not the actions befitting a country that was once held up as a paragon of freedom and a model for the rest of the world.

AND

It's time to hold government officials accountable for their habitual trampling on the Constitution and on our rights as individuals. Our case will be an important step down the road of restoring our Constitution and reining in our own overreaching federal government.

Bravo to Senator Paul. I must admit that I have never been much of a supporter although I greatly admired his father Ron Paul for his courageous stand against the criminal Bush administration during the darkest years of the civil liberties destroying "War on Terror" when it wasn't easy to denounce the establishment and get away unscathed. Today in 2014 however, the same advances in communications and social networking technology that allow the NSA to conduct their unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining against us also has a flip side in that millions who lacked that capability in the early years of the New American Century can now organize and fight back. I support the efforts of Senator Paul to bring these criminal bastards to heel and so should any decent American.

Rand Paul is not the first person to sue Obama over the excesses of the permanent and fraudulent “War on Terror”. Journalist and author Chris Hedges, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and others filed suit against the latest imperial president over the NDAA Act. The Obama administration and his savage, unprincipled attack dog of an Attorney General Eric Holder brought all the state power to bear against Hedges and the same corrupt courts packed with politically appointed judges that fought him will only increase their efforts versus Senator Paul and the rest of us whose civil liberties have been shit upon by an entrenched fifth column.

As patriotic Americans it is of the utmost in importance and urgency to do what you can to get behind Senator Paul's lawsuit. To my liberal and progressive friends I ask that you please put aside any ideological differences to stand in unity against the greatest menace to freedom in the history of the planet - the NSA oppression machine and the corrupt elite that it serves and protects against the rabble. I have long been a proponent of a libertarian-progressive alliance based on these most important of matters and there is now way to fight this threat unless petty differences are set aside before we ALL end up in those internment camps that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia just waxed nostalgic over where we will be pitted against each other for the amusement of our captors.

There is nothing else that is going to matter in the long run if we can't stop fascism.