9/08/2013

"NRA backs ACLU spying lawsuit over gun registry fears"

Remember when a bipartisan group of 26 senators worried that the NSA was collecting data on American gun ownership?  The main problem with letting the government collect massive information is that a large percentage of the population doesn't trust it.  From Fox News:
The National Rifle Association on Wednesday filed an amicus brief in federal court supporting an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging a government phone-tracking program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans.
The brief argues that the National Security Agency's phone records collection program could "allow identification of NRA members, supporters, potential members, and other persons with whom the NRA communicates, potentially chilling their willingness to communicate with the NRA."
The ACLU's lawsuit — which names as defendants the heads of national intelligence as well as the agencies they lead, including the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice — argues the phone record collection program disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is unconstitutional.
The suit, filed in federal court in New York in June, asks the court to halt the datamining effort and purge phone records collected under the program, claiming the government action violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution.
The NRA argues in the brief that it would be "absurd" to think that Congress would take steps to prevent the creation of a national gun registry while simultaneously allowing the NSA to gather records that "could effectively create just such a registry." . . .
PEW has a series of different polls on trust in government, but unfortunately it ends in January of this year before all the White House scandals have come out.  After the 2012 election government had apparently enjoyed something of a boom in trust, though it was still historically low.  I can only presume that the many scandals have caused trust in government to plummet.


Here is an April poll from the AP, but it doesn't seem directly comparable.
Just 7 percent of Americans say they trust the government in Washington to do what is right "just about always," the AP-GfK poll found. Fourteen percent say they trust it "most" of the time. Two-thirds trust the federal government only some of the time; 11 percent say they never do. . . . .

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