Fourth Amendment Quotes

There is no fear exception to the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.

I will not let the patriot act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.

If National Security Agency (NSA) heads fundamentally lack an understanding of what constitutes constitutionally protected communications, or worse, chose to disregard those directives, then it's time for the appropriate heads of these agencies to resign.

The government can still conduct clandestine searches of innocent people's private information such as library, medical, and financial records. This is wrong and should have been addressed in a true compromise.

What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that.

For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden's motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and misinterpretations.

With the Patriot Bill in place, the NSA no longer needed to get a warrant from a judge to tap into anybody's electronic information. A Surveillance State that would have boggled the mind of Orwell was born.

I believe there is significant overreach by the NSA in how it monitors American citizens.

I want to stand up and cheer until I realize what he told me was all the great things about my privacy except that he really told me between the lines is that he is going to continue to collect all my private records without a warrant.

Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

The Fourth Amendment is quite clear on the notion that search and seizure must not be unreasonable. It is difficult to think of something more unreasonable than searching the private phone records and digital information of citizens who are suspected of nothing.

Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.

Experience has taught me that privacy truly is the touchstone of our criminal justice system.

My own dream is that we discover that the NSA has been secretly keeping files on members of the National Rifle Association.

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.

The federal government has no right to treat all Americans as criminals by spying on their relationship with their doctors, employers, or bankers.

The Fourth Amendment was what we fought the Revolution over!

Has President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority or acted illegally in authorizing wiretaps without a warrant? Benjamin Franklin would not have thought so.

Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

I would have never signed the Patriot Act. I would have never signed the National Defense Authorization Act allowing for arrests and detainment of you and me as U.S. citizens without being charged.

The United States Intelligence community collects too much information.

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.

There is no drug exception to the Constitution.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.