On Fox News Channel’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto,” conservative talk show host Mark Levin reacted to recent revelations that the National Security Agency had been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers.
The Daily Caller (video & column) -- He said that the NSA news in addition to other openings for intrusion by the federal government are the makings of a “police state.” “I tell you what I make of this — we have the elements of a police state here, and I’m not overstating it,” Levin said. “When you step back and realize the Supreme Court the other day ruled 5-to-4 that law enforcement can take DNA from you even if you’re arrested — by the way, you’re arrested even when you’re stopped for a speeding ticket, and Scalia was right, concerned about a national database. That goes way over the line of our traditions.”
Levin listed the areas where the federal government has the opening to exploit private information through its various agencies under the guises of welfare, law enforcement and national security.
“You look at the Internal Revenue Service, what’s going on there today, and they collect extensive financial and personal information, and they put it on a database,” he said. “This Obamacare is a massive data collection as well of our private personal medical conditions, procedures, drugs, mental, physical illnesses. The Transportation Department, people forget, has proposed black boxes in all of our automobiles to track how they function and how far they go in accidents. We now have domestic drones from EPA to make sure farmers aren’t stepping out of line.”
“The Department of Homeland Security now is checking laptops and iPhones and other data, making copies of it and keeping it, and now we have this,” he continued. “And some of my brothers and sisters in law enforcement, prosecutors, are saying, ‘Look, look, this is permitted. We need to be able to go through and match —’ wait a minute. You don’t throw a whole net on the entire country and everybody’s phone numbers and check the duration and see if you can come up with some overlaps. That’s not law enforcement. That’s not how national security works. I don’t care what the hell the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizen.”
Entire column...
Blog author's comments - Mark Levin said "we have the elements of a police state here, and I’m not overstating it.” He is correct...the entire infrastructure is already in place...put there by Barack Obama and his corrupt administration. Obama is doing much of what he planned to accomplish when he became president in 2009.
There has to be some limitations as to what Obama can do which is why the Republican Party has to hold the House and attempt to pick up some Senate seats in the midterm elections in 2014. I harped for many months that the election of 2012 was the most important in the history of the United States and I still believe this. But if the Democratic Party wins the House, Obama will again have total power as he did during his first two years in office. Obama will have the chance to do whatever he wants which is why we now have Obamacare.
Gun control is still on the agenda and also immigration reform legislation during his second term. But if the Democrats control the house these will become law and the American people will lose so many of the rights we currently have. The country will never recover.
Mark Levin is a lawyer, author, conservative commentator, and the host of The Mark Levin Show. Levin served in the administration of President Reagan. He is president of the Landmark Legal Foundation and has authored bestselling books and contributes commentary to various media outlets.
