Judge Andrew P. Napolitano: Now the Post Office is spying on Americans -- will our government ever behave?

Last week, the USPS revealed that its postal inspectors have been monitoring social media at random, looking for troublemakers...

The modern American security state -- the parts of the federal government that spy on Americans and do not change on account of elections -- received an enormous shot in the arm in 1978 when Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That naively misguided and profoundly unconstitutional law was sold to Congress as a way to control the security state’s spying in the aftermath of Watergate. Watergate had revealed that President Richard M. Nixon used the FBI and the CIA to spy on real and imagined domestic political adversaries. FISA set up a secret court that authorized domestic spying by issuing warrants not based on probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires, but on probable cause of communicating with foreign agents. Never mind that communications about noncriminal matters are protected speech; the FISA court issued tens of thousands of these warrants.