This revelation, that Obama's NSA, obviously at his explicit or tacit direction, had violated the Constitution three times and engaged in a pattern of misrepresentation to even the court, much more the American people, underscores why Edward Snowden, now holed up in Russia, is not the real villain here. Instead, it is the president himself, who bears responsibility for the NSA and who surely must have been informed, at least as early as the first admonition by Judge Bates, that the privacy rights of American citizens were being systematically violated. But where were the Republican senators and congressmen? Republican Peter King, who has been rabid toward Snowden, to protect his own derriere since he supports these illegal intercepts by the NSA, must also have been privy to the court's rulings. Even anti-establishment, Republican "heavyweight" Sen. Rand Paul has let the matter essentially drop after he complained early on and promised his own legal action to address this scandal.
It is thus more than obvious that official Washington – that is the government establishment – sat on the knowledge that the NSA was spying on Americans without cause, and covered it up to suit their own ends. The real question now is how many Americans have had their private information misused for coercive government purposes; in Watergate parlance, "What did the government know about ordinary citizens and when did they know it?" Adding one other necessary question, how was the information then used?
Surely the Obama administration and the NSA have to be held legally accountable and so too do those Republicans and other Democrats who have gone along with this outrage. A thorough investigation needs to be undertaken into this gross abuse of the rights of privacy of We the People.
Lots of blame to go around, among the usual suspects.
You decide, whether Larry later goes off the deep end:
The nation is now in the hands of despots of all political stripes and, as I have said many times before in these columns, our current state of affairs, while regrettably not yet apparent to the majority of citizens, is much worse than it was in the years leading up to the first American revolution. King George III did not have the technological capability to spy on all who inhabited the colonies. Today, we live in a world where our Founding Fathers would have had their communications intercepted and then been rounded up and imprisoned and executed, before they even had a chance to debate and sign the Declaration of Independence at Constitution Hall in Philadelphia. Couple this with the Obama administration's access to drones, its stockpiling of guns and ammunition and its obvious plans to one day confiscate our guns and thus our means of self defense, and you have a totalitarian state on the present or near horizon.
Yes, the time has come for the American people to rise up and legally rid the nation of Obama and his Democrat and Republican collaborators. As a prelude to this, perhaps we need a government in exile, much like Charles de Gaulle implemented when the Nazis seized control of his country during World War II. Like Vichy France, our nation in 2013 has indeed been seized by modern-day Nazis, whose methods of enslaving us are far less transparent and potentially equally effective as those of Adolf Hitler.
Let us appreciate that Judge Bates ruled that our constitutional rights have been violated, but let us also be aware that he kept his rulings secret as the NSA and the government establishment continued to invade our privacy for likely coercive and totalitarian purposes. Indeed, this will make proving our class-action cases that much easier. However in this context, the citizenry must still ask the question why the political elite seek to burn Edward Snowden at the stake, and whether the legal guillotine should instead be reserved for this establishment, many of whom not only furthered Obama's evil actions, but also failed to sound the clarion call that the NSA was systematically abusing our constitutional rights.
Last, if you read anything among the two links of the opening paragraph, I advise you to read the Times. It is more a report there than an editorial. More objective, less judgmental, less rhetorical.
Also, excerpting above largely covers the gist of the Klayman item.