This time Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is planning on filing a class-action lawsuit against the federal government over the National Security Agency’s surveillance of phone records and Internet data. “I’m going to be seeing if I can challenge this at the Supreme Court level. I’m going to be asking the Internet providers and all of the phone companies; ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit,” he said, adding, “If we get 10 million Americans saying, ‘We don’t want our phone records looked at’ then maybe someone will wake up and things will change in Washington.”
Former Rep. Ron Paul, Rand's father, has been a vocal supporter of Snowden, saying he’s done a “great service for telling the truth” about government surveillance. Going on to say, “When you have a dictatorship or an authoritarian government, truth becomes treasonous and this is what they do if you are a whistle blower or you’re trying to tell the American people our country is destroying our rule of law or destroying our constitution, they turn it on and they say oh, you’re committing treason. For somebody to tell the American people the truth is a heroic effort.”
Three days ago Senator Rand Paul announced new legislation to "ensure that no government agency can search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause." He calls the bill the Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013. "The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution," Paul wrote on his web site.
And in a Guardian editorial Friday, Rand Paul invited his colleagues to join him in supporting a new phone records protection law, saying, "We shall see how many join me in supporting a part of the Bill of Rights that everyone in Congress already took an oath to uphold."
In the end, both Pauls - known as a strong proponents of civil liberties - agreed this intelligence-gathering strategy is simply a step too far. "I think the American people are with me and I think if you talk to young people who use computers on a daily basis, they are absolutely with me. We fought a revolution over behavior like the NSA's." Rand Paul said.
There many many issues i totally disagree with the Rand Paul on. IMO Rand, like his father, should simply apply the same libertarian freedom philosophy to the all the issues like they do to 4th Amendment Rights, drug legalization, defense policies, the Federal Reserve and Foreign Relations. IMO, if Rand were to have an epiphany and see that abortion is a personal decision outside the purview of government, that homosexuality is too, that the right to health care is the same as the right to an education, that a true libertarian philosophy encompasses the fact that every individual has the right to clean air and water and that corporations aren't people and so have no right to poison the water and air of real people, he could be elected President as a 3rd party candidate in 2016.
