Govermental Eavesdropping and Collecting Phone Records

I still haven't arranged all the facts and reports to come to a conclusion on the NSA phone and e-mail collections. From a plain liberty point of view I am troubled by it.  But Rand Paul (R-KY) certainly has an opinion. 

From Rand Paul:  "The National Security Agency's seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon's phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution.  After revelations that the IRS targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters' phone records, it would appear that this Administration has now sunk to a new low."

"When Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and I offered an amendment that would attach Fourth Amendment protections to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill last year, it was defeated."

"And FISA passed by an overwhelming majority of the Senate.  At the time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid remarked that FISA was "necessary to protect us from the evil in this world."

"The Bill of Rights was designed to protect us from evil, too, particularly that which always correlates with concentrated government power, and particularly Executive power. If the President and Congress would obey the Fourth Amendment we all swore to uphold, this new shocking revelation that the government is now spying on citizens' phone data en masse would never have happened."

I (Rand Paul R-KY) put together a video last fall to explain that exact point.