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President Trump did not campaign as a civil libertarian. On the trail in 2015, he went hard in the other direction, making clear he "tend[s] to err on the side of security" and endorsing a full restoration of the NSA's Patriot Act-authorized bulk data collection, which was partially curtailed by that year's USA Freedom Act.

But now, in an apparent reversal, Trump is angling to be the president who dismantles some key parts of the post-9/11 surveillance state.

It's not because he suddenly cares about privacy at least, not your privacy. The evidence suggests Trump has become an unlikely champion of Americans' privacy rights for the simple reason that he is an American and would like his personal communications to be safe from federal snoops. This is possibly the stupidest scenario under which surveillance reform could happen, but let's not look a gift Trump in the tan line.

The president met Tuesday night with leading Republicans from both houses of Congress, reportedly directing them to craft a bipartisan bill that will not simply extend Patriot Act features (like the demonstrably useless phone metadata collection) ahead of a March 15 deadline. "The president made it exceedingly clear he will not accept a clean re-authorization ... without real reform," Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said after the meeting. "He was told by the attorney general, 'We can massage around the edges, and we can fix this through regulation,' [but] the president didn't accept that, pushed back very vigorously and said, 'We're not doing this.'"

For Paul, a longtime mass surveillance critic, this is a matter of constitutional principle. He was the sole Republican to vote against Attorney Gen. William Barr, his rival in the present battle for Trump's will, on the grounds that Barr is a "chief advocate for warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens." Paul regularly speaks against metadata collection, calling it a "bullshit" security measure, and wants to end the use of warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) court originally intended to monitor foreign spies to surveil U.S. citizens.

"FISA warrants should not be issued against Americans. Americans shouldn't be spied on by a secret court," Paul argued this past Thursday. "I think [Trump] agrees completely with that."

I think that's true, if by "Americans" we mean "Donald J. Trump."

The president has tweeted the word "privacy" precisely twice ever, both times reducing big topics NSA metadata collection and Fourth Amendment rights into entirely Trump-centric concerns. And we know exactly why the FISA court came on his radar as a Bad Thing: It was used to spy on his campaign with incompetent and unethical practices by the FBI, as the Justice Department's inspector general reported in December.

The DOJ report identified 17 "serious performance failures" in the FBI's process of obtaining of FISA warrants connected to the Trump campaign. This isn't the partisan malfeasance Trump has railed about for months, nor is it the unique conspiracy he seems to imagine. It's just how the FISA court operates. From 1979 to 2013, the court rejected only 11 of nearly 34,000 surveillance requests, a rate of 0.03 percent. In the last few years, the court has grown comparatively stringent, increasing its rejection rate all the way to 0.11 percent.

And it's impossible to say exactly what the FISA court has permitted thanks to its secretive organization. "FISA's inherent secrecy causes a chain reaction," explains cybersecurity reporter David Ruiz at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Because the [court's] surveillance orders are kept secret, it is hard to know if they are ever improper. Because criminal defendants are kept in the dark about what evidence was used to obtain a FISA order, they cannot meaningfully challenge if the order was wrongly issued."

With numbers and conditions like these, it's inconceivable the Trump-related application was the first to be approved with "serious performance failures." Indeed, we have every reason to think there's nothing wildly unusual about what happened to Trump's campaign. Still, if that's the case which gets us to meaningful surveillance reform well, I'll take it.

The president is interested in privacy right now because he thinks he's been subjected to special harassment. That's at best partially correct, and it has not produced a broader ethic of civil libertarianism in Trump, no matter how hard Paul tries to push him there. In a sense, Trump's demand for reform here isn't a reversal at all: He's changed his stance on the policy, but his core commitment to himself is as consistent as ever.

Continued here:
The most unlikely champion of privacy rights - The Week

A three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled on Tuesday that the smell of marijuana from inside a residence meant police officers in Richmond, Virginia were justified to search a mans entire house, including any locked boxes or safes.

Melvin Lee Jones appealed his conviction for possession of a firearm by a felon and lost.

All of this goes back to May 2016, when police say they got an anonymous tip that Jones was selling weed and crack out of his residence. The unnamed individual claimed that Jones had a gun. Police didnt investigate this tip until August, 24, 2016.

On that day, three officers went to Joness home for a so-called knock and talk. When Jones responded to the knock and opened the front door, police immediately smelled a strong odor of marijuana smoke coming from inside the house.

Jones was arrested, and police entered the residence. Once inside, they found a still-smoldering marijuana cigarette sitting on top of the trash in an open trash can in the kitchen. A responding officer proceeded to apply for a search warrant so they could search the rest of Joness house.

That warrant, much to Joness dismay, gave cops permission to search safes and locked boxes as part of an investigation that began with the smell of marijuana. During the search, cops found a pistol, marijuana, crack cocaine, and items commonly used for packaging an weighing narcotics.

Jones tried to get this evidence thrown out at the district court level, saying that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated by an extremely overbroad search warrant. That motion was denied, and Jones wasnt successful at the appellate level either.

Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote that the bottom line here was that the warrant was appropriately authorized.

We conclude that because the officers had probable cause to believe that a crime was being committed in Joness house, the warrant appropriately authorized the search of the house for evidence of that crime. We find Joness argument that the warrant should have been limited in geographic scope because the smoldering marijuana cigarette in the trash can was the likely source of the marijuana odor to be unpersuasive, he wrote. Put simply, the presence of one marijuana cigarette in the kitchen did not negate the fair probability that other evidence of the crime of marijuana possession would be found in the house. Accordingly, we affirm.

You can read the ruling below.

United States v. Melvin Jones by Law&Crime on Scribd

[Image via Richmond Police Department/Facebook]

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Federal Court: Smell of Marijuana Justified Police Search of Entire House, Including Safes and Locked Boxes - Law & Crime

U.S. Border Patrol agents conduct a training exercise in front of the wall that divides Sunland Park, New Mexico, from Mexico, on Jan. 31.

Herika Martinez/AFP viaGetty Images

Back in 2010, 15-year-old Sergio Hernndez was hanging out along the Mexican side of the Southern border with his friends, playing a game where they would touch a fence on the border and then run back. A Border Patrol agent on the U.S. side named Jesus Mesa saw them and, when Hernndez ran again, shot and killed him in front of everyone in the middle of the day.

A civil suit was the only option for Hernndezs parents. The case, Hernndez v. Mesa, wound up at the Supreme Court, because the Department of Justice refused to prosecute Mesa, and when the Mexican government charged the agent with murder, the United States refused to extradite him. But just last week, the court decided the parents couldnt seek damages for their childs death. This case may seem singular and specific, but it really isntits part of a pattern at the Supreme Court that shows how the conservative majority is remaking immigration law, one ruling at a time.

On Mondays episode of What Next, I spoke with Slates Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the Supreme Court, about why this case is such a big deal and what the consequences could be. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: The decision in the Mesa case rests on a precedent called Bivens. How would you explain that case to people who arent familiar with it?

Mark Joseph Stern: The full name of the case is Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. This was a case where six narcotics agents committed horrible abuses against a source: broke into his house with no warrant and strip-searched him. And Bivens thought, That was definitely illegal, that was definitely unconstitutional, that was a huge Fourth Amendment violation.

But heres the wrinkle: There is a federal law that guarantees you the right to sue a state law enforcement officer who violates your constitutional liberties, but there is no law that creates the same guarantee for federal law enforcement officers. If a state police officer abuses your constitutional rights, you can easily sue them under this statute. If a federal police officer violates your constitutional rights, it gets a lot trickier. And thats where Bivens comes into play.

Bivens is the only thing that establishes the right for anyone to sue a federal law enforcement officer when they behave badly. But Bivens is a rule, not a law, so a judge can overturn it. Since the 80s, conservative justices have seemed eager to do just that. Whats the argument against holding federal employees accountable when something goes wrong?

The argument, which I dont agree with, is laid out pretty clearly by Justice Samuel Alito in his decision. The Constitution has a separation of powers: There is the legislative power that Congress gets to exercise and theres the judicial power that the courts get to exercise. Alito says that when a court is figuring out how much money victims should get when Congress hasnt said anything about it, the court is usurping legislative power.

Theres also another argument made by conservatives, which is that with great power comes not so much the responsibility, but the necessity to use it. And they dont want to take away the power of these federal agents to be able to shoot first and ask questions later.

"Shouldnt this be a straightforward example of a law enforcement officer goingoverboard?" Mark Joseph Stern

That is tragically a persuasive argument at this Supreme Court: that federal agents need to make split-second decisions, that they need to be able to act quickly to protect the peace and protect lives. Sometimes theyll make mistakes, and they shouldnt be overly punished for those mistakes, because that comes with the territory. This court believes that about all law enforcement officers. So even when victims of police violence come to this court and are seeking justice for constitutional violationseven when Congress has allowed that to proceedthis court will often say, Were not going to let you do that because we dont want to tie the hands of law enforcement officers and make them afraid to use force when they really need to.

You were there for oral arguments for Mesa. Now that we have the decision, what do you think about how both sides presented their cases and how those arguments were received by the justices?

I think it was really clear during oral arguments how this case was going to come down, and that is because there was this massive gulf between the two different sides of the court.

For this family, this is not a difficult case. This is, in constitutional terms, an unreasonable seizure. This case involves a cross-border shooting, but the agent was standing on U.S. soil. He was a U.S. agenthe was vested with the power of the U.S. federal government. What the liberals were really asking was, why does it matter that the killing was at the border, that Mesa was an immigration officer? Shouldnt this be a straightforward example of a law enforcement officer going overboard? This belongs in federal court and the victims deserve to have their say.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was a major character in these oral arguments. She asked, why is it a problem that we hold this agent accountable?

She cited this amicus brief that was filed by former high-level officials at Customs and Border Protection who said, We used to work at CBP, and this agency has a huge problem. This agency is violent, lawless, and unaccountable. There is no discipline here. If you dont let victims of CBP officers sue them in federal court, there will be no justice for the victims, because the U.S. government is never going to punish these officers. Sotomayor cited that and talked about how the agency has high rates of corruption and misconduct. Basically, the courts are the only ones who can step in and hold these people accountable. Nobody else is going to do it.

Sotomayor was saying that the play here is to make this agency accountable to no one.

Absolutely no one. There cannot even be a grieving parent of a victim coming into court and asking for modest damages. The agents are free to do whatever they want, anytime they want. No ones going to punish them.

This massive gulf between the liberal and conservative justices during oral arguments, you can see it in the final decision the majority handed down. For the conservatives, Bivens now seems very far from sacred.

Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch have now come out and said they want to overrule Bivens. John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Alito have not admitted that yet. But reading between the lines of this decision, I get the sense that what theyre saying is: We will let you have your Bivens claims, but if you try again to expand this, then were going to overturn this precedent because weve never liked it.

If we look at the immigration decisions that have come down to the Supreme Court over the past couple of weeks as a test for how this jurisprudence will move forward in the future, what do they tell us?

They suggest to us that Trump, being unleashed and unrestrained after impeachment, is going to have more victories at the Supreme Court. Theres all of this reporting suggesting that his advisers and Cabinet secretaries and lawyers dont worry about legal challenges anymore. They now have total faith in the Supreme Court. Its going to be a pretty frightening run, because if Trump wins in November and shores up that majority, then he will have captured another branch of government. And nobodys going to step up to him and say, youve gone too far.

Listen to the full episode using the player below, or subscribe to What Next on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Supreme Court Just Gave the Border Patrol a License to Kill - Slate

It only takes one picture for Clearview AI to start its search. The interface is simple: all you have to do is take a picture of a face, upload it, and the facial recognition app takes it from there, scanning as many as three billion pictures on the web for matching images. In seconds, it provides the resulting pictures along with links to where they were found.

Your face, more likely than not, is included somewhere in those three billion pictures, alongside people like Heather Reynolds.

Heather Reynolds had more reason than most to worry about facial recognition technology. In November last year, she somehow managed to steal two grills and a vacuum cleaner out of an Ace Hardware store in Lake County, Florida, making away with something like $12,000 worth of goods.

She would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadnt been for the surveillance footageand Clearview AI. Law enforcement didnt have Reynoldss name, address, or phone number, but with one blurry capture from a security camera, that all changed. Two days later, Reynolds was identified and apprehended.

Its an incredibly useful piece of software. Finding someones identity, who hes affiliated with, and where hes present online has never been so easy. For law enforcement, the app has been a boon. According to the New York Times, police at a station in Clifton, New Jersey said the app was able to identify a suspect in a matter of seconds.

While Clearview AI might be the most recent development in the industry, facial recognition technology (FRT) isnt new. It didnt first show up a month ago when The New York Times reported the capabilities and uses of Clearview. It didnt begin back in 2016, when Clearview was first developed.

In fact, facial recognition software has been around for almost 20 years, growing in proficiency and proliferation. Chainalysis, Affectiva, FaceFirst, Sensory Inc., and TrueFace.Ai, to name a few, are all U.S.-based software companies working on developing facial recognition technology.And its being rapidly implemented.

In a study titled Body Worn Camera Technologies, the National Institute of Justice found that one-in-five body camera manufactures were adding FRT to their products. Law enforcement is only the tip of the iceberg. Marketing, gaming, and networking are all areas facial recognition technology could be used. In 2016, a study from the Pepperdine Law Review found that FRT could even be applied in medicine to find genetic conditions by evaluating the structure of a face.

Heres the simple truth: facial recognition is powerful and useful. It works. And if the conversation were to stop there, its rapid progress might seem like an inherently good thing. But heres another reality: the development and the uses of this technology are growing faster than the laws defining its proper use. To many, thats a serious concern.

There is no clear line in the sand about how FRT should be used. There is no federal law that tells facial recognition users that they can go only so far and no furtherat least not yet, anyway.

What we do have is a number of Supreme Court cases that provide basic guidelines for the governments use of invasive technology. The 1968 Wiretap Act, stemming from decisions in Katz v. United States and Berger v. New York, prevents law enforcement from wiretapping a suspects phone. In the 2017 case of Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the government couldnt track citizens phones without a warrant. As far as FRT is concerned, the Privacy Act of 1974 lays down limiting rules specifically for facial recognition software as used by the FBI.

There are others.Many tech companies, organizations, and even states have started to restrict the uses of FRT software. New Jersey, for instance, has banned its police force from using Clearview AI, and Facebook has demanded that Clearview stop using Facebook pictures as part of its search database.

But according to the University of Boston, the US congress has not yet established federal privacy law regulating the commercial uses of FRT, and all the potentially relevant laws currently on the books do not fully address the privacy core issues of FRT.

Last May, the Electronic Frontier Foundation looked at FRT in the context of law enforcement and found that: the adoption of face recognition technologies is occurring without meaningful oversight and without the enactment of legal protections to prevent internal and external misuse.

After a look into the legal precedent about FRT, Boston University Journal authors Sharon Nakar and Dov Beenbaum concluded that US courts seem at best split as to whether there is even a right to anonymity that would protect people from being tracked [by facial recognition technology] New efforts are needed to develop a consensus among all stakeholders before this technology becomes even more entrenched.

New Jersey, the EFF, and these authors are all concerned about the same thing: how FRT will affect the future of privacy.Who gets to use facial recognition technology? And can users have access to it whenever theyd like? What happens if you dont want your face in a searchable database?

Those are a lot of different components to consider. But they all hinge on the same struggle: balancing citizens right to privacy with the potential goods FRT could bring.

The phrase right to privacy never appears in the U.S. Constitution. Yet the concept of a right to privacy has been a central legal component in the lives of millions of Americans.

So if it doesnt come from the Constitution, where does a right to privacy come from? In the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found that instead of being an explicit right, a right to privacy was instead implicitly contained within the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth amendments.

Their reasoning went something like this: If citizens have a right to congregate to use their free speech, if the government may not station the military in peoples homes, if citizens have a right to have secure their persons, papers, and homes against unreasonable searches and seizures, and if the rights in the Constitution might not be exhaustive, the Constitution does suggest there is a space between citizens and the state that the government may not cross.

Its the reason the government cant often tap your phone without a warrant, even if they think you might be doing something illegal. Its the reason the government cant use thermal imaging to look inside your home to obtain a warrant. And, as mentioned earlier, its the reason the government cant use your phone data to track you.

But what about a face? Can the government use a face to find the identity and online information of someone suspected of a crime?That depends on where you are.

Think back to Reynolds. Before her decision to steal two grills and a vacuum cleaner from an Acre Hardware store, Reynolds was a regular, innocent Floridian. Even then, there was one thing that made her face searchable.She did something illegaland she did it in public.

The fact that she did something illegal gave the police a reason to search her face, but thats not the important part. What makes all the difference is that Reynolds wasnt in a private space. The moment Reynolds stepped into a public area, she lost the right to privacy that might have otherwise protected her face against an FRT search.Heres why.

In the 1967, the Supreme Court decided in Katz v. United States that what a person knowingly exposes to the public is no longer subject to Fourth Amendment protection. In other words, what you bring out for everyone to see is fair game. You cant claim a right to privacy in public. Normally, thats not really an issue. After all, people dont generally take their address, name, and online information and hand them out on fliers.

But every time you walk through a mall, or an Ace Hardware store, or alongside a busy street, you willingly bring your face into the public. And with one picture, or a recording from a security camera, anyone with FRT capabilities in that public has a chance at finding wherever that face may show up online. Short of wearing a mask, how exactly are citizens supposed to keep their faces private in public?

For now, there isnt a clear answer. Outlawing picture-taking and security cameras really isnt an option. Outlawing facial recognition isnt going to happen, either. Theres no way for the government to simply ban private companies from using FRT, and its too powerful a tool to remove from law enforcement.

From a policy standpoint, finding the balance between the benefits of FRT and privacy is something that will have to be hashed out in years to come, mostly likely through trial and error. It pits the interests of the individual against a potential good for a larger community. Sadly, for people like Alim, its a balance thats been abused before.

(Alim is a fake name provided by National Public Radio to protect this individuals privacy. The information he told reporters about surveillance happening in China could have landed him in serious legal trouble if it hadnt been for these measures.)

Meeting up with a friend to grab some lunch at the mall sounds like a straightforward way to spend a Saturday afternoon. That might have been the case for Alim, if it hadnt been for two details. Alim happened to be a Muslima Uighur Muslimand a Chinese resident in the Xinjiang province.

To get into a Chinese mall, you have to pass through a security checkpoint that, according to NPR, looks like a combination between a metal detector and entrance to a subway terminal. You swipe your government-issued ID, have your face scanned by a security camera, and go. To American audiences, it might sound excessive, but government oversight and surveillance is a central component of many areas of Chinese life, including shopping.

Alims friend scanned in and passed through without a problem. But when Alim swiped his ID, he got a very different result.

I scan my IDand them immediately, an orange alert comes on, Alim told reporters at NPR.Orange alert is a designation reserved for potential terrorists and criminals.

For a moment, a bewildered Alim stared at the orange light in disbelief before police came to escort him away. After a brief interrogation, Alim was released with the suggestion to stay home if he didnt want another detention and interrogation at some other security checkpoint.

But the government doesnt need a checkpoint to find him. With the use of FRT, Chinese law enforcement can locate Alim at a traffic intersection, a convenience store, the bank, or an airport. Alim cant really leave Xinjiang without the authorities knowing about it. As long as hes in range of a camera, Alims orange alert status will follow him wherever he goes.

But why the surveillance?According to the police department in Xinjiang, Alims home province, there are three great evils: extremism, terrorism, and separatism. To the Chinese, the Uighurs, an ethnically and religiously distinct Turkish minority group, present exactly that kind of threat. Theyre different. Theyre Muslims. They have a very distinct cultural identity. Theyre not the version of Chinese the government wants to see. Uighur Muslims are seen as a challenge to the homogeneity of China.

Using FRT to keep an eye on people like Alim is a part of Chinas version of the war on terror, according to The Guardian. Its targets are not foreigners but domestic minority populations who appear to threaten the Chinese Communist partys authoritarian rule, they stated in a story from April of last year.

Even though hes never been to jail, been arrested, or broken the law, Alims ethnic and cultural identity makes him a target of round-the-clock surveillance.

Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about Xinjiang and the surveillance state, says this kind of surveillance is used for a very specific reason. The goal here is instilling fearfear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life, Lixiong told The New York Times.

China is ahead of curve with facial recognition technology. Some of the worlds leading artificial intelligence and FRT software companies, like SenseTime and Megvii, are located in China and financially supported by Chinas online social media behemoth, Alibaba.

While the strength and abilities of Chinese FRT software continues to improve, their concept and respect for the individual degrade. As a result, China has failed to protect against FRTs blatant misuse and encroachment on privacy.

The New York Times coverage of Clearview AI has opened a number of doors to a conversation about privacy and facial recognition technology in the United States.On one hand, the good FRT can do has been clearly demonstrated by police departments that use it.More importantly, however, it seems that Clearview AI and its recent appearance on the national scene will force legislators to take a look at the realities of facial recognition technology in the light of existing legal guidelines.

On March 3, Sen. Ed Markey from Massachusetts released a letter addressed to the creator and owner of Clearview AI, expressing concerns about its use and demanding further transparency from the software company.He states: I am equally disturbed by new reports about other alleged Clearview business practices that may threaten the publics civil liberties and privacyReporting also suggests that Clearview has been developing live facial recognition in surveillance cameras and augmented reality glasses targeted at the private sector. Your website requires that consumers submit sensitive information to have their images deleted from your database. These practices point to a dangerous neglect for privacy at Clearview AI.

While clear parameters may be lacking to clearly define what companies like Clearview AI and other FRT software developers may not do, lawmakers may have to start clarifying the boundaries.

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Should Gov't Be Able To Track Your Every Move Outside Your House? - The Federalist

Attorney General William Barr wants the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to be renewed pronto with no questions asked. If any reforms are needed, he promises to take care of them himself: Dont worry yourself, America.

Is Barr kidding?

First, a short history lesson. Due to the officials within the government, including Presidents Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and no doubt many before them, using federal resources to spy on citizens and political opponents, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978. The law set up rules and a court designed to protect our Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

The goal was noble: FISA and its court would give the green light on going after terrorists while, ostensibly, protecting U.S. citizens from unconstitutional intrusions. Then, in the wake of 9/11, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which lowered FISA standards. This, too, was supposedly for the sole purpose of targeting terrorists.

But by 2003, according to the New York Times, The Bush administration, which calls the USA Patriot Act perhaps its most essential tool in fighting terrorists, has begun using the law with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism.

The newspaper reported, The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders.

Obviously, what was originally promised concerning the scope of the Patriot Act has changed significantly. This point was driven home in the 2006 movie The Departed, in which Boston police officers and the FBI are surveilling gangsters, and the police captain exclaims, The Patriot Act! I love it! I love it! I love it!

Far from just focusing on terrorists, the Patriot Act has become an extraconstitutional law enforcement tool. It has overwhelmingly been used to catch drug dealers more than terrorists. The Washington Post reported in 2011 that after a decade, the Patriot Act ha[d] been used in 1,618 drug cases and only 15 terrorism cases.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world that the U.S. government was spying on everyone in every way imaginable. Former President Barack Obama attacked Snowden and insisted that government agents were "not abusing [their] authorities to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails."

In fact, the government was doing all of these things. By 2019, many wondered if the U.S. government had spied on President Trumps campaign exactly the kind of Watergate-style corruption that inspired FISA in the first place.

Obviously, FISA is badly in need of reform.

With FISAs expiration looming in mid-March, Barr held a lunch briefing on Tuesday that most Republicans came out of agreeing to pass a clean extension, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell leading the pack. Barr assured them that any changes that needed to be made to prevent Trump or citizens from being spied on illegally again are actions he would take internally.

Yeah, right. It should be noted here that Barr believes the Patriot Act doesnt go far enough.

When libertarian-leaning Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee voiced their objections to what essentially amounts to a reformless FISA extension, Barr reportedly told them criticizing U.S. government surveillance was dangerous. Why? Because it supposedly helps terrorists. This debate is just about terrorism. Nothing else.

Sound familiar?

In a series of tweets, Lee laid out what reforms he believed needed to be made before FISA should be renewed and added in a later tweet:

Its a safe bet that most Americans would agree. Sadly, the attorney general could care less about FISA reform. After all, Barr is asking citizens to entrust him with protecting the same constitutional rights he has abused for decades.

Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.

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Bill Barr can't be trusted to reform unconstitutional FISA surveillance - Washington Examiner