U.S. CONSTITUTIONAL? DNA, NSA, Fed's SLOBS-BLOB/S IT/S Etc ?!

Sweeping DNA Collection Law Unsettles Federal Appeals Court, Matthew Heller 12/13

The law takes DNA from people never charged with a crime or who are discharged for lack of probable cause and keeps it on file in perpetuity.  CLICK >>

http://www.mintpressnews.com/sweeping-dna-collection-law-unsettles-federal-appeals-court/175053/

CLICK >>http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/11/13/judge-could-torpedo-nsa-surveillance-programs-monday

"I don't think the court should have any problem taking jurisdiction over this," Dranias said. "I would think you could make a pretty plausible argument that a genuine full-fledged Article III court would have primary jurisdiction over constitutional issues, particularly when you have real litigation going on, as opposed to a more administrative judicial role."

Double-talk by Obama administration lawyers clearly annoyed Leon. Arguing that the plaintiffs could not prove the NSA had their phone records because they subscribed to Verizon Wireless, while the FISC order named “Verizon Business Network Services,” Judge Leon wrote: “The Government asks me to find that plaintiffs lack standing based on the theoretical possibility that the NSA has collected a universe of metadata so incomplete that the program could not possibly serve its putative function. Candor of this type defies common sense and does not exactly inspire confidence!”

Leon explained that the Fourth Amendment prohibits a search that “violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.”

“The threshold issue,” Leon wrote, “is whether plaintiffs have a reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the Government indiscriminately collects their telephone metadata along with the metadata of hundreds of millions of other citizens without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing, retains all of that metadata for five years, and then queries, analyzes, and investigates that data without prior judicial approval of the investigative targets.”

Leon’s response to his own rhetorical question is worth quoting at length: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed, I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison, who cautioned us to beware ‘the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,’ would be aghast.”

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http://www.globalresearch.ca/federal-judge-holds-nsa-telephone-surveillance-unconstitutional/5361855