Jack Smiths Arctic Frost spies snooped on Congress time to rein in the spooks

Advocates for government surveillance often argue that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.  I’m sure Jack Smith, the special counsel President Joe Biden appointed to do whatever it takes to bring down Donald Trump, took solace in that bromide as he rifled through the personal data of 10 members of Congress, illegally attempting lawfare to implicate these elected officials in some contrived insurrection.  Arctic Frost is the chilly name the FBI gave its unconstitutional fishing expedition.  How could such an abuse of power occur in a nation famous for its protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, enshrined in the Fourth Amendment?Well, the story of government’s abuse of search-and-seizure power is long — and in the modern era, it largely begins with litigation concerning the privacy of one’s phone.In 1928, the Supreme Court in Olmstead v.United States ruled that federal agents who installed government wiretaps on an alleged criminal’s phone did not violate the Fourth Amendment, because the wiretap did not involve a trespass on his property.Justice Louis Brandeis dissented, famously writing that our Founders “conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men.“To protect that right,” Brandeis continued, “every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.”Olmstead governed the constitutional treatment of phone calls until 1968, when the Supreme Court changed the standard.In Katz v.

United States, the justices ruled that the Fourth Amendment includes an expectation of privacy in the content of one’s calls, and that a physical intrusion was unnecessary to claim its protections.Yet in the 1979 case Smith v.Maryland, the court ruled that Americans can claim no legitimate expectation of privacy in the phone ...