Transcript of the Edward Snowden portion of my show this week

[JDPriestly]

79. The essential thing to remember is that neither the Constitution nor the

government gives us the rights listed in the Bill of Rights. These are rights that belong to us no matter what our government says about it. The Supreme Court may curtail or abridge or diminish these rights in its decisions, but they still belong to us. When the Supreme Court defines the Fourth Amendment rights in a narrow way, the law will enforce that Supreme Court decision, but it is wrong because the right belongs to us. It is not even up to the government to recognize that right. The Supreme Court has, in my opinion, defined the First Amendment right too narrowly. And crazily. While it defines the right of corporations to spend money as speech and thus unlimited and not subject to regulation, it defines the right of people to speech, assembly and to petition the government as subject to reasonable regulation. There is a disconnect in the interpretation of the First Amendment. I am hoping that someone will notice the discrepancy. Unlimited campaign expenditures by the corporations but limited right to assemble, speak and petition the government for the rest of us. What?

The Fourth Amendment rights are some of the rights that are born with us, they are innate to us. (The Bill of Rights does not list all the rights that are born in us -- like marriage which has been recognized as a fundamental right.)

The problem is not whether any law or other constitutional provision can supersede or precede a right listed in the Bill of Rights.

The problem is how to apply the language of early America that is used in the Constitution to our modern technology. The Fourth Amendment recognizes our innate right to privacy in our lives and in our personal and real (real estate) property.

That cannot be changed. The executive branch of our government has to get a warrant based on probable cause with the specificity described in the Fourth Amendment before it takes or searches our private property. The NSA has not been doing that. The Court will have to decide how to apply the Fourth Amendment, how to reserve our privacy rights in the face of the technology we now have.

Because this is such an important issue and because the technology now at the government's disposal is so invasive, so capable of depriving us of any right to privacy without our even realizing that we have been violated, it will take a long time and many decisions before the Supreme Court comes to terms with its task.

Because we have so many conservatives on the Court, we may have to suffer a lot of grief, see a lot of overstepping by the executive branch (and maybe by Congress) before the country wakes up to the dangers that the use of that technology presents.

In a way, the potential in the surveillance technology and some of our other technology such as medical technology is as dangerous to our personal freedom and our country, maybe the world as nuclear weapons. We just don't realize it yet.