Fourth Amendment arguments against the NSA surveillance programs are plentiful these days. The general perception by the public, and numerous government officials, is that warrantless surveillance and data mining is an unconstitutional search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. However, the existence of secret FISA courts could prove to be an impediment to Fourth Amendment challenges, which is why it’s time to dust off the often neglected and forgotten Third Amendment.

Top Ten Reasons to Reform Digital Privacy Rights By Scott Alford

Another day, another scandal. Since President Obama has taken office, government bureaucracies have taken part in systematic campaigns to silence liberty minded groups. While these partisan shenanigans are outrageous, Noble Prize winner James Buchanan explains they are to be expected.  Dr. Buchanan developed a field of economics built around the idea that bureaucrats are merely human (surprise!). In other words, bureaucrats respond to incentives.

Tapping the News -- Civil Liberties -- July 29"Today on "This Week," Glenn Greenwald - the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs - claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans.

The last time legislators updated the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) was when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a toddler. With new technological innovation and new privacy concerns, Congress must cooperate to bring the laws into the 21st Century. Reforming the ECPA is necessary to guarantee our Constitutional protection against warrantless digital searches and seizures. The answer is the Leahy Lee-Amendment.

Tapping the News -- July 26th -- Civil Liberties"The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

Yesterday afternoon a bold, potentially groundbreaking amendment to a defense appropriations bill was narrowly defeated. The amendment sponsored by Representative Justin Amash sought to curtail the highly criticized NSA surveillance program.

America prides itself on being a society in which all are created equal. A country in which we are, as Martin Luther King, Jr. had hoped, people who are not “judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Still, though, there is one major frontier in which all is not equal, and that is in education. Public education in America is such that, in many instances, the quality of a child’s education is determined by where that child lives.

The House is expected to vote today on the Fourth Amendment. The outcome is in doubt. How far we've drifted from the letter of the Constitution and the spirit of liberty!