re: #335 Absalom, Absalom, Obdicut

But you can’t just cite the 4th. The 4th amendment has been erodes for decades upon decades; like any Constitutional issue, you have to put it in the context of actual Supreme Court decisions on the topic.

he has zero idea of Context and if laws had been broken, then why hasn’t the data that was downloaded to illustrate that very point been published? After all, both Der Speigel and The Guardian have the data from the downloads (they claim) and they’ve published bupkis on this very point. Supposedly even the WaPo has this incriminating evidence in hand, then where are the articles that show how the program and the data collected have been abused. Everything initially claimed has been walked back, by various parties (even to some extent by GG himself, if you wish to sift through the tortured parsing of his tweets) You wanna throw the NYT (it would irresponsible of us not to speculate….) at me as a source of explaining the wrongdoing, fine, we also have people in the other corner who state that what has been alleged is total bullshit, the process doesn’t work that way and here’s how it does work. That’s fine if you wish to believe that our government is behaving badly (it certainly has before) but I’m sorry if I grant THIS administration a bit more latitude considering the political climate that we live in and the known agendas of the accusers. Context matters.

The other problem is, the data that was downloaded, isn’t what GG and Snowden say it is or what they initially presented it as, it’s most likely specific operational documents regarding ongoing projects that name actual assets in the field which is why they refuse to publish them.