"The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States Government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause."
http://www.paul.senate.gov/files/documents/EAS13699.pdf
("Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013")
Seems extremely narrow-scoped and with no terms defined. IIRC, the ongoing spying is not even warrantless - they're operating under a broad-scope warrant issued by FISC, so this bill would do absolutely nothing.
It's true the Verizon spying had a secret-court FISA warrant, but was that warrant required to have "probable cause"?
Doesn't matter though, the proposed law talks about search of American phone records which the NSA is already forbidden (even with PRISM) from looking at.
In other words the new content of this law would be exactly zero, if that's all it purports to add.
What's lacking is particularity which is entirely missing in the text of that law.
These guys are hellbent on finding every possible loophole in the Constitution, and (ab)using it to the extreme. They've forgot all about the spirit of the Constitution.
It must help that they have a Constitutional lawyer in office helping them discover all these loopholes. And here we thought that because he was a Constitutional lawyer, he was going to use that knowledge to uphold the Constitution. The joke's on us, I guess.
It seems like it is not a piece of legislation, but rather an interpretation of the amendment; where I thought that interpreting the constitution was the job of the court. If this wording works, than wouldn't it give Congress the ability to work around the constitution simply by passing laws saying that <insert clause here> shall be interpreted to make <insert law here> constitutional.
It got on Hacker News.
Nice try, Rand, but some people still read the text of bills.