By Robert Sarvis
The Daily Press picked up my recent Facebook post about Warner’s record of supporting intrusive surveillance against innocent Americans and asked Warner’s office for comment.
Their response was revealing — and demonstrates the need for my inclusion in the debates.
Warner’s response cited his membership on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and some limited reforms the Committee endorsed.
But as I noted in the very Facebook post Warner’s office was responding to, Warner supported those reforms only as part of a bill (the FISA Improvements Act) that would actually make things WORSE, according to civil libertarian groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, Campaign for Liberty, and Electronic Freedom Foundation.
Joining those groups in opposition to the bill were some Senators in Warner’s own party — including fellow Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden, who tried to warn the American people about the government’s “secret interpretation” of the “Patriot” Act long before the disclosures started one year ago.
“In our judgment, writing a law that permits the government to engage in this massive dragnet collection as long as there are rules about when officials can look at these phone records does not begin to solve the problem of overly intrusive domestic surveillance. When the Framers of the Constitution wrote the Bill of Rights, they did not say that government officials were allowed to issue general warrants as long as they had rules about when they could look at the papers they seized. They believed that government officials should not seize the records of individual Americans without evidence of wrongdoing, and they embodied this principle in the Fourth Amendment,” Senators Wyden, Udall, and Heinrich wrote in the minority section of the Committee report.
“The FISA Improvements Act does not offer real reform to stop the NSA’s mass collection of our communications and communications records. Instead, S. 1631 seeks to entrench some of the worst forms of NSA surveillance into US law and to extend the NSA surveillance programs in unprecedented ways,” the civil libertarian organizations explained (see their letter here).
I am the only candidate in this race who will fight to protect Americans’ civil liberties. Neither incumbent Democrat Mark Warner or Republican Ed Gillespie wants to talk about civil liberties. Mark Warner only did so this time because my campaign called him out on his hypocrisy, and an enterprising reporter followed up.
The vast majority of Americans oppose the government’s intrusions into our civil liberties. Virginia voters deserve more than spin and half-truths on such a vital issue.
Virginia voters deserve a real debate.
Robert Sarvis is the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate
