Andrew Napolitano on Drones: Scary

The government’s Orwellian use of spy drones is not limited to foreign nations. If B.H. Obama’s secretary of the Air Force has his way, we will all be potential targets of illegal spying. Here are Andrew Napolitano’s comments:

Don’t believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the “recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function” in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel inside the United States and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them “to collect information about U.S. persons.”

It gets worse. If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or “military commander” for permission to conduct a physical search of the private property that intrigues them. And any “incidentally acquired information” can be retained or turned over to local law enforcement. What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?

The quoted phrases above are extracted from a now-public 30-page memorandum issued by President Obama’s secretary of the Air Force on April 23, 2012. The purpose of the memorandum is stated as “balancing … obtaining intelligence information … and protecting individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution….” Note the primacy of intelligence gathering over freedom protection, and note the peculiar use of the word “balancing.”

When liberty and safety clash, do we really expect the government to balance those values? Of course not. The government cannot be trusted to restrain itself in the face of individual choices to pursue happiness. That’s why we have a Constitution and a life-tenured judiciary: to protect the minority from the liberty-stealing impulses of the majority. And that’s why the Air Force memo has its priorities reversed — intelligence gathering first, protecting freedom second — and the mechanism of reconciling the two — balancing them — constitutionally incorrect. (Read more…)

Nobody is saying that the government is actively persecuting Catholics with this technology. Not yet, anyway. If it ever does, keep in mind what is written in the Roman Martyrology of many of its subjects: “He was accused of being a Christian.”

If they accuse us, let’s make sure we’re actually guilty of the crime.