Look who voted for more spying
Look who voted for more spying
The most important rights established by the Founding Fathers are enshrined in the Constitution under The Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment prohibits a search without a warrant. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillence court, without any public debate, decided to secretly define Section 215 of the Patriot Act as unfettered access to all our data. The way Section 215 is currently defined, the FBI has the right to investigate any of us without probable cause or reasonable suspicion. They can investigate us for exercising our First Amendment rights because of a letter to an editor or a protest we joined or a online petition we signed. They can investigate us for a website we visited (The Guardian, Al Jazeera America, WikiLeaks, ACLU), or a book we took out at our local library.
On July 24 an amendment was sent to the House to support the Fourth Amendment by defining that only those suspected of actual terrorist activities can be subject to this scrutiny. The amendment failed by a vote of 205 to 217. By a difference of 12 votes, the amendment supporting The Constitution of the United States failed. Eleven of those “no” votes came from Illinois. The list of Illinois House Representatives who support spying on their own constituents are below. District 3, Daniel Lipinski; District 4, Luis Gutierrez, District 5, Mike Quigley, District 6, Peter Roskam; District 8, Tammy Duckworth; District 9, Jan Schakowsky; District 10, Brad Schneider; District 11, Bill Foster; District 12, William Enyart; District 15, John Shimkus; District 16, Adam Kinzinger.
John D. Morgan
Arlington Heights