Andrew P. Napolitano

Last week, the Biden administration asked Congress to permit its agents to continue to spy on Americans without search warrants. The actual request was to re-authorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. FISA requires warrants from the FISA Court for all domestic spying. Section 702 is a 2008 amendment to FISA. It expressly authorizes warrantless spying of foreign persons. The Supreme Court has characterized spying as surveillance and surveillance as a search under the Fourth Amendment. That amendment requires search warrants issued by judges and based upon probable cause of crime demonstrated to the judges. . .

Last week in a federal courtroom at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an American physician hired by the Pentagon testified about the CIA’s use of rectal “feeding” tubes on prisoners it detained and tortured in Thailand from 2001 to 2006. The physician, Sondra S. Crosby, M.D., an expert on tortures and other trauma, described the painful repeated insertion of plastic tubes into the anal cavity of the defendant in the case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, over a period of four years. Al-Nashiri is on trial for conspiracy to bomb the USS Cole. . .

Can the president fight any war he wishes? Can Congress fund any war it chooses? Are there constitutional and legal requirements that must first be met before war is waged? Can the United States legally attack an ally? These questions should be front and center in a debate over the U.S. involvement in Ukraine. Sadly, there has been no great debate. The media are mouthing what the CIA is telling them, and only a few websites and podcasts -- my own, “Judging Freedom” on You Tube, among them -- are challenging the government’s reckless, immoral, illegal and unconstitutional war. All. . .

Which is more destructive to personal liberty, a government that engages in secret acts of war or a public and news media that are indifferent to it? In the current American toxic stew of anti-Russian hatred and beating the drums of war -- in President Joe Biden’s America -- we have both. Here is the backstory. The war in Ukraine is now in its 12th month. It has become a slow, inexorable movement westward for Russian military forces and painful migrations of 5 million Ukrainians out of their country, to say nothing of the losses of between 130,000 and. . .

“Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction.” -- Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) In December 1776, just six months after the Declaration of Independence had been signed and a year and a half into the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine sensed a desperation throughout the colonies. It prompted him to write a candid and now iconic essay entitled “The American Crisis,” which began with the famous line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” He made a similar argument as Ronald Reagan would 188 years later. The essence of that argument is that our personal liberties are fragile. Since. . .

In the days and months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating the attacks on Osama bin Ladin. Then, after bin Ladin was murdered in his home in Pakistan in 2011, the government decided that the true mastermind of 9/11 was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. By the time of bin Ladin’s death, Mohammed had already been tortured by CIA agents for two years in Pakistan and charged with conspiracy to commit mass murder, to be tried before an American military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Throughout the entire existence of the U.S. . .

This column has recently outlined the specious arguments offered by the feds when they have been caught spying on ordinary Americans. They argue that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution -- which requires a search warrant prior to spying -- only applies to law enforcement and not to domestic surveillance. This argument not only defies the plain language of the amendment; it defies history and common sense. The language of the amendment protects the privacy of all “people” by affirmatively declaring that the right to privacy in “persons, houses, papers, and effects” may only be violated by the government by the use. . .

Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the “wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The wall was intended to prevent law enforcement from accessing and using data gathered by America’s domestic spying agencies. Those of us who monitor the government’s destruction of personal liberties have been warning for a generation that government spying is. . .

I have often thought that after Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson was our worst president. By worst is meant least faithful to the Constitution and most destructive of personal liberty. With the exception of Lincoln’s dictatorship -- during which the federal government used violence to crush the states’ natural right to secede from a compact they had voluntarily joined, and instead brought about the systematic murder of 750,000 persons -- America from its founding to the early part of the 20th century more or less enjoyed the James Madison model for the federal government. Under this model, the federal government could. . .

During the course of an FBI written response to a Freedom of Information Act request asking about the trade names and suppliers of surveillance software the FBI had purchased, and in a legal brief submitted to a federal judge, the government has yet again quietly acknowledged its antipathy to constitutional provisions that all of its employees have sworn to uphold. Since we are dealing with software used to spy on Americans in the U.S. and abroad, the constitutional right being transgressed is the right to privacy. This is the ancient natural right to be left alone, which the Supreme. . .