Lindsey Graham Would Censor Your Snail Mail If He Felt It Was "Necessary"

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-Behind Enemy Lines) will do whatever he must to keep you safe. He'd even read your snail mail if he thought it'd help him catch terrorists. Yahoo!'s Chris Moody reports: 

"In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we're all in. We censored the mail. When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy," Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. "If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don't think it is."

"The First Amendment right to speak is sacrosanct, but it has limits," Graham added. "In World War II, our population understood that what we say in letters could be used against [us by] our enemies. It was designed to protect us and ensure that we would have First Amendment rights because under the Japanese and Nazi regime, they weren't that big into the First Amendment. We don't need to censor the mail, but we do need to find out what the enemy's up to."

What Graham is (maybe) trying to say is that there's a precedent for the NSA's intrusion into the private lives of innocent American consumers. While that might not make sense–reading snail mail from the front and collecting metadata from millions of American right here at home are not similar at all–it does speak to Graham's paranoid belief that "the homeland is the battlefield."