Essay On The Fourth Amendment

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The amendments are over 200 years old, yet to this day they are up to debate by both American citizens and the government. Normally it is the first amendment that starts discussions but in the past decade the fourth amendment has become a headliner. The fourth amendment states that: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...” (“The Bill of Rights,” Amendment 4) This is reasonable enough, but a 2013 article published by news reporter The Guardian revealed that the NSA (National Security Agency) had been collecting phone records of those using the Verizon wireless service since April (Greenwald par. 1). After discovering the government was collecting phone records, some citizens felt that their fourth amendment rights were being violated.…show more content…
Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, believed that: “Collecting this data about every single phone call that every American makes every day would be a massive invasion of Americans' privacy.” (Ackerman and Roberts par. 15) In relation to the fourth amendment, data collecting would violate the right to secrecy in the household or anywhere that the person is. The deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Jameel Jaffer, compared it to Orwell’s “1984”: “It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies.” (Ackerman and Roberts par. 17) Not all members of the NSA felt that they were doing the right thing, siding with the citizens who had data collected unknowingly. In light of the scandal, fears have surfaced that the NSA may begin monitoring the calls themselves very soon if they had not secretly been already. Doing so would truly being a violation of American

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