Shepard Smith says the government is chipping away out our liberty and that all of this activity is unconstitutional as he grills former NSA Deputy Director Cedric Leighton.
Here is a partial transcript:
NSA OFFICIAL: …There are some very strict guidelines internal to NSA that are followed. Those guidelines are not made public.
SHEP: You’d forgive us if we didn’t even believe you right? Because representatives of the government have testified before Congress that they certainly don’t data-mine people from all across the country and of course we know that’s a bold face lie.
NSA OFFICIAL: …They shouldn’t have made the statements that they made. They shouldn’t have couched them in the way they did.
SHEP: They shouldn’t have lied to us like they do all the time about matters of secrecy and privacy.
NSA OFFICIAL: Right, you never lie. First of all you never lie.
SHEP: Yeah but they did and they continue to lie to us. And what they’re doing is chipping away at our liberty and it seems to me that the Constitution has regulations about how much liberty you can take away while trying to make us secure. There’s a line there. Can’t you look at this objectively and say, ‘man, we’re over the line’?
NSA OFFICIAL: …It would be much better if the system were directed at very specific people that you knew were actually suspected of that.
SHEP: No, actually no, that would not just be much better, that would be constitutional.
NSA OFFICIAL: Well, that’s why it’s better.
SHEP: It certainly is and what we have now is unconstitutional.
