You’re a police officer walking through your beat neighborhood and you look and see a man beating his wife in his front yard. Do you:
A. Stop and apprehend this violent criminal? Or,
B. Conclude that you’ve just conducted an illegal search of his property with your eyeballs and mournfully continue on your way?
No one has a reasonable expectation of privacy if in public view whether on their own property or public property. But further in the case of an attack on another person, your rights get trumped by the victim’s rights not to be molested and the police are/would be required by law to act in their defense.
A better example of privacy rights would be something illegal left on your coffee table in your front room. A police officer walking past your front door looks in through a door you left open and sees it and then arrests you. This would be legal as you left your door open and have no reasonable expectation of privacy from public eyes that look in through the open door.
If the door is closed however and the officer walks up and opens the mail slot to look in or goes to a window, then he has violated your privacy as you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such a case and the officer has no probable cause to explain his intrusive surveillance of your property.
Phone and mail communications have been upheld time and again by the courts as private communications and are some of the hardest things to get warrants to break into for law enforcement.
An NSA computer anonymously scans your email for Jihadist keywords, or
An NSA computer anonymously scans your email for gang-related keywords, or
It is not anonymous, they are collecting everything they can and doing it without regard to your constitutionally protected rights. Filtering on computers is easy to do if you want to do it. I doubt it would be very difficult for them to filter out US based IP addresses if they really wanted to, but they don’t want to and didn’t even try.
Sure the people who set up this over-reaching surveillance may have done it with noble intent, then again perhaps not given everything else they have done. Either way history has shown, at some point someone will come along and use powers like these to oppress their rivals.
Our rights are supposed to be inviolate. Our founders set it up this way because they understood perfectly that governments are simply systems of control and people who get into government usually have an agenda they want to impose on others against their will and the government allows them the power to impose.
Limiting government power by spelling out rights that could not be touched was supposed to protect all Americans from these kinds of people. The fact this administration has already used the IRS to oppress their rival’s shows that they are more than willing to do whatever they can do with whatever power available to them to oppress whomever they wish.
Giving them a pass on our privacy rights simply because they say they are fighting terrorism is a certain path to the loss of the freedoms Americans enjoy. Once the public says it’s ok, they will go hog wild and say goodbye to all your rights after that.
