Blake Farenthold Quotes

In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in Smith v. Maryland that a few days' worth of phone records for a single individual were not protected by the Fourth Amendment. The NSA today, though, collects hundreds of millions of phone records from hundreds of millions of Americans without an individualized warrant.

Whether you breach the Fourth Amendment 20 percent of the time or 100 percent of the time, it's still not the point. The point is whether or not you still collect millions of people's information with a single warrant.

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.

Just because technological advances have made it easier for the federal government to collect information doesn't mean that our privacy rights can or should be violated on the ground or in the air.

The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency.

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen.

No one in their right mind can say to me with a straight face that the Patriot Act has not aggregated the Fourth Amendment.

What is the government doing or not doing in terms of tracking you, following you, investigating you? And if you're suspicionless, it should be none of the above.

The erosion of privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment, written to protect us against unreasonable search and seizure, began in earnest under President George W. Bush.

The Patriot Act unleashed the FBI to search your email, travel and credit records without even a suspicion of wrongdoing.

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 nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

There's nothing wrong with talking out loud in public, but there is something wrong with the government sucking up all those utter instances in a database just in case they maybe want to bust you in five years.

How will we defend ourselves if the Patriot Act expires? Well, perhaps we could just rely on the Constitution and demonstrate exactly how traditional judicial warrants can gather all the info we need - and how bulk collection really hasn't worked.

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

Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts.

The privacy and dignity of our citizens are being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen – a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.

Americans don’t need a big government to read their e-mail and track what else they do

Secrecy at the level of the individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret.

I can’t allow the U. S. Government to destroy privacy and basic liberties.

The evidence does not support the proposition that there is a significant measure of safety that is added as a result of collecting all these records on law abiding Americans.

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

The NSA has shown, time and time again, it will seize on any wiggle room in the law .

It would not be permissible for you to build a home and not let law enforcement in if they had a search warrant. If they think there's a crime ongoing, they go to court and get a warrant, and they're permitted to come in your home under the Fourth Amendment.

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America.