On the recordMay 20, 2015
I thank the Senator from New Mexico for that great question. I think there is no way we can square this bulk collection with the Fourth Amendment. I think part of the problem, though, is that we, over a long period of time, diminished the protections of records held by third parties. And I think one of the debates we need to get hopefully to the Supreme Court sometime soon is whether you give up your privacy interest in records that are held by third parties. I think there will come a time that your papers, once held in your house--there are no papers in your house. There may not be paper. But there is still the concept of records. Records were traditionally on paper, and they were traditionally in your house. But now your most private papers are held digitally by your phone, and then by the people who are in charge of the different organizations such as phone, email, et cetera. I think there has to be Fourth Amendment protection of these. Those who look at the court cases, and go back to probably the last important case, the Maryland v. Smith case, often say there is no Fourth Amendment protection at all for these records. In fact, the government will tell you they can do whatever they want with email, with text, and with all of these things. And I am not convinced they are not using other programs, such as this Executive order program, to actually collect many other kinds of metadata other than phone calls. So I am very worried about it.…
