Obama's EPA & IRS Are Violating Our Rights

Discussion in 'Politics' started by pspr, Apr 13, 2013.

  1. pspr

    pspr

    Big Brother: The government we entrust our medical records to under ObamaCare has its EPA sharing confidential data on farmers with green groups and the IRS reading your email. Smile and wave at the EPA drone.

    The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, violating their privacy rights and acting in collusion with private groups with private political agendas.

    In Nixonian fashion, the EPA has provided these environmental groups with the dossiers of farmers it has gathered to help them create an enemies list of potential polluters. The agency acknowledged the information included individual names, email addresses, phone numbers and personal addresses.

    The EPA claimed the data were related to farms in 29 states with "concentrated animal feeding operations" and that the released information was part of the agency's commitment to "ensure clean water and public-health protection."

    How? By giving environmental groups the identities and addresses of those they need to pressure?

    "This information details my family's home address," J.D. Alexander, a Nebraska cattle farmer and former president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, told FarmFutures.com. "The only thing it doesn't do is chauffeur these extremists to my house."

    Recently we editorialized on how Nebraska's congressional delegation had sent a justifiably angry letter to then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson complaining that her agency had exceeded its legislative and constitutional authority by conducting drone surveillance flights over Nebraska and Iowa farms looking for Clean Water Act violations.

    "They are just way on the outer limits of any authority they've been granted," said Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb.

    The EPA argued that the courts, including the Supreme Court, has already authorized aerial surveillance, such as taking photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility. But nobody has their family home in a chemical plant, and such surveillance observes not only the farm, but also the farmers and their families who rightly have an expectation of privacy.

    Such warrantless surveillance has found its counterpart in the claim by the Internal Revenue Service that it does not need a warrant to read our emails and that doing so does not violate the Constitution.

    Incredibly, IRS attorneys have asserted in documents that the Fourth Amendment — which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures — does not protect email and that a warrant is not needed to plant a GPS location tracker on a car in its owner's driveway.

    "The Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on server, because Internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications," says a 2009 "Search Warrant Handbook" by the IRS Criminal Tax Division's Office of Chief Counsel.

    The IRS claims that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, government officials only need a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old.

    The American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request and released the information on Wednesday, begs to differ.

    It cites the 2010 Warshak decision by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled the Fourth Amendment's provisions trumped the provisions of the 1986 ECPA law. That means a warrant is required to read email — no matter where it is stored or how old it is.

    In an October 2011 memo obtained by the ACLU, an IRS attorney explained that the Warshak decision applies only in the 6th Circuit, which covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. Since when do our constitutional rights depend on geography?

    The Obama administration's war on the Constitution knows no bounds, whether it be our First Amendment right to religious liberty, our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms or our protection against the government grabbing our possessions unreasonably.


    http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...mails-while-epa-shares-farmer-data.htm?p=full
     
  2. Odd, don't you think? Especially since in his oath of office he swears to "uphold the Constitution..."
     
  3. wjk

    wjk

    Oaths have no value if they are sworn by liars.
     
  4. pspr

    pspr

    He had his fingers crossed behind his back. :mad:
     
  5. Lucrum

    Lucrum

    Obama Bin Lyin