Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) might be a little harder to reach these days, now that he’s leaving his phone at home.
The Kentucky Senator joked with CBS ‘This Morning‘ that he’s not taking his phone with him, after it came to light that the National Security Agency’s was secretly collecting phone records.
“I’ve been jokingly saying I’m leaving my phone at home when I go to Republican leadership meetings because the President does not need to know where I am all day long,” he said.
The Senator explained that the NSA’s access to hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone records allows the government to constantly track people’s movements and know who they are calling and where they are calling them from.
Paul added that the President is a “hypocrite for wanting to look at our phone records all the time.”
In 2005, then-Sen. Obama was against extending wiretapping provisions of The Patriot Act — the same provisions that he condoned last week at a press conference, calling the NSA’s surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone records “the right balance” between government oversight and freedom.
“The bill of rights are being violated, our rights are being violated and really no government should do this,” Paul stated in the interview.
He also stated that in a digitized world where everything that he buys can likely be surveilled, “government has no right to this knowledge unless you’re accused of a crime” and “unless there’s probable cause.”
The Republican Senator has been one of the leading figures in the push back against the government’s overreach, which has been manifested by the numerous scandals that have rocked the nation recently.
Opinions of the NSA’s surveillance program of Americans’ phone records are not separated by a partisan divide, however.
This morning, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) called Edward Snowden — the whistleblower who leaked the documents revealing the NSA’s surveillance program — a “traitor” on ABC’s Good Morning America and justified the constitutionality and legality of the program, stating that “there’s no American that’s going to be snooped on in anyway unless they are in contact with some terrorists somewhere around the world.”
“He’s a traitor,” Boehner said. “The President outlined last week that these were important national security programs to help keep Americans safe and give us tools to fight the terrorist threat that we face. The disclosure of this information puts Americans at risk. It shows our adversaries what our capabilities are and it’s a giant violation of the law.”
