Appearing June 8, 9:15 p.m. on Fox News about Obama’s spying-gate
Appearing June 8, 9:15 p.m. on Fox News about Obama’s spying-gate
Challenging Obama’s spying-gate. (Fox News, June 8, 2013).
Fox News is a right wing darling. My own agenda when accepting or declining a media interview invitation is whether the interview will further my own agenda of spreading the gospel of justice. With that goal in mind, I accepted an invitation from Fox News to discuss the Obama Administration’s rampant suspicion-less domestic spying. My interview will be Saturday, June 8, around 9:15 p.m., on Justice With Judge Jeanine. I will post any link to the interview that gets uploaded to the Fox News website.
ADDENDUM: June 9, 2013. My television interviews run from several minutes to just one or two questions. My Fox News interview last night ended up with the following two question, as host Jeanine Pirro — with whom I agree about the illegality of this spying — also gave some equal time to co-interviewee Cedric Leighton, a former National Security Agency official who knows how to disagree agreeably, as I found while we waited together to be brought to our respective interview rooms:
Question 1 to me: Is this government activity violating the Fourth Amendment?
Answer: Yes. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and the issuance of search warrants without probable cause. Here, the government is spying on millions of people without any individualized suspicion that they have committed crimes.
Also, responding to Cedric’s claim that Congress has been kept informed about such spying, I pointed out that the information is only being supplied to certain Congressional committees, thus depriving the rest of the members of Congress to share such information with their constituencies. (Qualification: If the information is classified, I hope that a mechanism exists to exempt Congressional members from disclosing the information, so that the balance of power among the three branches of government will have real meaning.) Cedric responded that all Congressional members may have access to such information, but how do they know to ask for information on spying that they do not know about?
Question 2. Should the government be trusted to properly handle the information being gathered through this spying?
Answer: Of course not. Thousands of government employees are collecting, storing, analyzing and using such data. They should not be trusted in handling this information any more than the IRS employees who violated the rights of right-wing groups.Â