Our prosperity hinges on effective law enforcement

Andrew McCarthy demolishes Senator Rand Paul's bill to restore the Fourth Amendment. He calls it the "Here's to Crime" bill.

Moreover, it is equally wrong to imply, as Paul’s bill does, that the metadata collection is of a piece with other scandals involving Obama’s abuses of power. As Senator Paul well knows, the IRS scandal, spying on the media, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, etc., involve unilateral executive-branch lawlessness, stonewalling, and/or overreach. In contrast, the ongoing phone-record collection is the lawful, statutory retention component of a program with extensive civil-liberties protections. Significantly, these protections prohibit the government from inspecting the retained records without judicial approval based on a demonstration of reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity.

Perhaps the worst aspect of Paul’s irresponsible proposal is how it would cripple law enforcement.

Records of telephone usage are not constitutionally protected under any credible construction of the Fourth Amendment — not the original Fourth Amendment described and applied by the Supreme Court in the aforementioned Jones case, not the Fourth Amendment as enlarged by the “reasonable expectation of privacy” jurisprudence beginning in the mid 20th century. As a result, criminal investigators and grand juries routinely obtain telephone-usage records by issuing subpoenas and applying for “pen registers” — devices applied to phone lines that enable investigators to learn the time, duration, and subscriber numbers involved in telephone calls. This information, coupled with physical surveillance of suspects, is typically how police build probable cause that crimes are being committed. They need to meet that threshold because the Fourth Amendment has always protected a person’s property, and our jurisprudence (along with federal statutes) extends this protection to the content of telephone conversations and other electronic communications. Consequently, to search property or monitor conversations, police must obtain search or eavesdropping warrants.

If, as Senator Paul proposes, law-enforcement agencies had to have probable cause before they could get telephone-usage records and pen registers, there would be far fewer search and eavesdropping warrants. Were that to happen, the most culpable, most insulated members of criminal organizations could no longer be penetrated by investigative techniques that police have been using, lawfully and with great public support, for decades — for as long as there have been phone records. The most efficient, most threatening criminal organizations would operate with impunity.

Perhaps he does not realize the ramifications, but Senator Paul’s proposal will not protect Americans. Our prosperity hinges on effective law enforcement. We have thus derived great benefit, and suffered little discernible harm, from the fact that police have long been permitted to acquire third-party phone records without a warrant. The Paul proposal is, instead, a boon for lawbreakers. That it should be proposed under the guise of a “Fourth Amendment Restoration” is perverse.