Pour decourager les autres

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

That seems clear enough, doesn't it?

Edward Snowden did the nation a service by exposing the clear violation of American rights. The government has no right to listen to my phone calls, to find out who I called, or when I called. There is no "probable cause" to seize this information. And who has sworn an oath or affirmed that this information was needed in a warrant? We are not given those names.

But then why the fury and ever increasing anger of government officials as Snowden eludes them? First, of course, the NSA and the other spooks have nearly become unmanned by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden -their secrets, so assiduously kept from the American people, have been partially, I emphasize partially, exposed. And so our government must punish these miscreants, these "whistleblowers", lest they provide a model. Manning and Snowden must be punished "pour décourager les autres," to paraphrase Voltaire. And yet, the intensity of the chase gives rise to another suspicion: that Snowden may have evidence of even more egregiously illegal government snooping - after all, if NSA can intercept simple telephone information, it can certainly intercept the calls themselves. Those giant computers (they may be located in Fort Huachuca, Arizona) capable of millions of calculations per second can certainly "listen" to a phone call and determine, by voice print, who called and who was called. It is but a short step to recording the calls themselves. Then too, he may have evidence that the government has used the U.S. Census or other privileged information for its own purposes, whatever they may be.