Back in December 2007, before he was US President, Senator Barack Obama joined Senator Chris Dodd in threatening to filibuster the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Obama opposed provisions granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies which shared private client information with the government.

At that time Obama's office issued this statement: "Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill …."

A year later, in February 2008, supporting an amendment which he believed repealed retroactive immunity from FISA, Obama said: "We can give our intelligence and law enforcement community the powers they need to track down and take out terrorists without undermining our commitment to the rule of law, or our basic rights and liberties."

Obama was rightly concerned that telecommunications companies might get away with sharing clients' private information without legal scrutiny. Now, in June 2013, we learn that President Obama's National Security Agency has compelled Verizon, the American broadband and telecommunications giant, to hand over all of its client data records.

Back in 2008, Obama wanted to track potential terrorist activity without undermining US commitment to the rule of law, or US basic rights and liberties. Today, the Obama administration is actively undermining the US rule of law, US basic rights and US core liberties, ostensibly in the name of tracking "terrorists".

There always needs to be a mature balance between security and liberty. The American tradition has long been to err on the side of liberty. America's founders feared a government powerful enough to commit unreasonable searches and seizures and were careful to craft a constitution designed to protect citizens' privacy.

Under the current Obama administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has targeted political dissidents, the Department of Justice has seized reporters' phone records, and now the NSA has seized an unlimited amount of Verizon's client data. An all-out assault on the American constitution is under way.

In the past, Obama was keen to join the Democratic chorus against the warrantless wiretapping of the 2001-2008 Bush administration. Now that chorus has gone strangely mute. A defining attribute of the Obama legacy is the transformation of what was until recently a symbol of rightwing radicalism – warrantless eavesdropping – into meekly accepted bipartisan consensus.

But not every Republican or Democrat is part of that consensus. When the Senate rushed through a last-minute extension of the FISA Amendments Act over the holidays late in 2012, Senator Rand Paul (Republican, Kentucky) and Senator Mike Lee (Republican, Utah) offered an amendment requiring stronger protections on business records that would have prohibited precisely the kind of intrusive data-mining the Verizon case has revealed. In addition, Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon) introduced an amendment to require the provision of estimates from intelligence agencies of how many Americans were being covertly surveilled. Both these measures were voted down.

In May 2013, Rand Paul introduced the Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act, which, if enacted, would have protected Americans from exactly the kind of abuses seen recently in proto-Nazi America. It was voted down.

On Thursday 6th June 2013, Rand Paul announced his Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013, which ensures that no government agency can search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause. It will be interesting to see how many US Senators join him in supporting a part of the Bill of Rights which everyone in Congress has already taken a solemn oath to uphold.

If the US President and Congress would simply obey the Fourth Amendment, this new shocking revelation that the US government is now spying on citizens' phone data en masse would never have happened. That Rand Paul has to keep reintroducing the Fourth Amendment – and that a majority of US Senators keep voting against it – is a good reflection of the political arrogance which dominates the Washington DC private corporation.

During Rand Paul's filibuster, he quoted Glenn Greenwald: "There is a theoretical framework being built that posits that the US government has unlimited power. When it comes to any kind of threats it perceives, it makes the judgment to take whatever action against them that it warrants without any constraints or limitations of any kind."

If the seizure and surveillance of Americans' phone records – across the board and with little to no discrimination – is now considered to be a legitimate security precaution, there is literally no longer any protection of any kind guaranteed to American citizens. In its actions, more outrageous and more numerous by the day, the Obama administration continues to treat the US constitution as a dead letter.

In 2008, Obama himself said of President George Bush Jnr and FISA: "We must reaffirm that no one in this country is above the law." Obama's affirmation now appears to have morphed into something rather different: "No one in America should be above the law, except me, my administration and my corporate backers within the Rockefeller syndicate."

The full text of Rand Paul's article in the Guardian newspaper (London, UK) can be found here (07.06.13).

More background on the NSA and PRISM can be found here (08.06.13), here (08.06.13), here (08.06.13) and here (08.06.13). More background on the DHS and PRISM can be found here (21.03.04).

And some developing commentary is usefully broached here (10.06.13), here (10.06.13), here (10.06.13), here (10.06.13), here (09.06.13), here (09.06.13), here (09.06.13), here (09.06.13), here (07.06.13), here (07.06.13), here (06.06.13), and here (06.06.13).

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