The one thing we know from past experience is that the NSA has consistently abused its powers. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the agency routinely intercepted communications outside its legal purview and ran an illegal operation known as “Minaret” that spied on anti-war figures ranging from boxer Muhammad Ali to syndicated humorist Art Buchwald to Sen. Frank Church (D-ID). The latter would chair hearings in the 1970s exposing massive illegal and improper actions by the NSA, FBI, and CIA, giving rise to FISA, which was passed in 1978. In 2008, ABC News reported on NSA operatives listening in on and sharing recordings of phone-sex calls between U.S. troops and their spouses in the States and routinely listening in on Red Cross and other relief workers as well.
The legal justification for the NSA’s actions, according to the Times, is the 1979 Supreme Court ruling that found “no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called.” A more recent yet equally unfortunate Supreme Court decision—the 2012 one upholding President Obama’s health-care-reform plan—is the reason that the Obamacare exchanges are theoretically going to be up and running come October 1 (pay no attention to the massive and mounting delays with the program).
The clearest argument against Obamacare was always the specifically libertarian one against the individual mandate, or the idea that the government could force you not only to follow certain rules if you engaged in commercial or economic activity but that it could force you to engage in commercial or economic activity in the first place.
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