U.S. Intel Community Probably Has Dirt on Members of Congress: NAPOLITANO

House Speaker Mike Johnson was the deciding vote on a bill that turns your cable guy into James Bond

Judge Andrew Napolitano spoke to The Trends Journal’s Gerald Celente on Wednesday to discuss his new column: “Killing the Constitution,” and noted how members of Congress — who take an oath to uphold the document — seem to change their tune when it comes to spying on the American public.

Napolitano said Congress’s decision to extend Section 702 of the FISA Act allows the feds to spy on foreign persons in the U.S. and outside the U.S. without search warrants. The law also allows the feds to spy on the Americans “with whom they communicate.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson was the deciding vote to keep the law in place.

He “left the chair to come down and vote and break the tie. What was the issue that he voted against? Requiring a search warrant before the FBI can get their hands on what the intelligence community scoops up when they're surveilling communications between Americans and foreign persons,” Napolitano said.

“So the FBI does not need a search warrant. They just cut a hole in the First Amendment, in the Fourth Amendment… This statute also requires your cable installer to spy on you by connecting the feds to your cable system, and if he tells you that the feds have asked him to do that, and he's done it, he can be prosecuted for revealing it to you. So in one vote, they attacked the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment, the right to privacy.”

He noted that the bill passed with one vote in the House of Representatives and by one vote in the Senate.

“It's disgusting,” he said. “Congress took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. I have often thought – you and I have talked about this on air and off —that the intelligence community has dirt on members of Congress and subtly reminds them of that when it comes time uh to cast these votes.”

Elizabeth Goitein, the senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, wrote in The Hill:

What does that mean in practice? Almost any business that provides wifi to its customers could be conscripted into service. Although the provision has a few carveouts for places like libraries, restaurants and hotels, it would apply to countless other establishments: laundromats, barber shops, fitness centers, dentist’s offices and hardware stores, for instance. It would also include commercial landlords that lease the office space where tens of millions of Americans go to work every day. 

Indeed, even house cleaners, repair persons and wifi or cable installers — service providers with access to laptops and routers in our homes — would fall within this provision. And they would be barred from telling anyone about the surveillance they helped conduct.