Ken Cuccinelli: Stop The Widespread Collection Of Americans Metadata
By Dom Giordano
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Ken Cuccinelli, a former candidate for Governor in Virginia, spoke with Dom Giordano today on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT, about a lawsuit he filed with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky against the National Security Agency.
"The NSA sweeping up all of our telephone metadata, the phone numbers we're calling, who we're getting calls from, how long those calls are, and all sorts of other things, Americans generally expect that information to be private," Cuccinelli said laying out his case for protecting what can and cannot be collected by the federal government.
"That expectation of privacy under the 4th Amendment is critical to determining whether the NSA is actually violating the Constitution which we have asserted in this lawsuit we filed," he said explaining his argument that current levels of data collection have crossed the line into illegality.
Cuccinelli dismissed criticism of his lawsuit that alleges this type of data collection is necessary by answering that "this hasn't been effective. Even if you want to take an 'ends justify the means' approach the President's own review commission said that this is not effective. In seven and a half years, it hasn't been instrumental in interdicting one single terrorist event, not one."
"If we win, they're going to have to purge their database of all this data, and they're not going to able to sweep up our telephone data on a daily basis. But what they will continue be able to do, which they can do today, is when they have probable cause to believe that particular information that they've identified as potentially bad guys, they can still get that using a traditional warrant, or in secret using the FISA court, but they've got to have reasonable suspicion," Cuccinelli said in describing how the government should be acting now to prevent terrorist attacks.