Andrew Napolitano: Who Will Keep Our Privacy Safe?
Certain law enforcement, military, and intelligence, personnel can do as they wish-in hair-splitting defiance of the courts.
While the Western world was watching and grieving over the slaughter in Paris last week, the feds took advantage of that diversion to reveal even more incursions into our liberties than we had known about. The Department of Justice revealed that since the 1990s, the Drug Enforcement Administration has been monitoring the phone calls of selected Americans. Also last week, former federal agents revealed that more than 50 American law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, possess a new handheld radar device that sends sound waves through walls and receives back images on a screen of persons on the other side of the walls.
None of these flagrant violations of privacy, dignity, and basic American constitutional values was enacted by a majority vote of any representative body of lawmakers, notes Andrew Napolitano. And yet none has been stopped by those lawmakers. That's because we have a deep state system in American government, whereby certain law enforcement, military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel can do as they wish, no matter which party controls the legislative and executive branches and in hair-splitting defiance of the courts.