Sen. Rand Paul
(CNN) – Sen. Rand Paul said Wednesday he’s suing President Barack Obama and top national security officials over the government’s sweeping electronic surveillance program made public by intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.
The Kentucky Republican and the conservative group FreedomWorks are filing a class-action challenge against the government’s phone metadata collection effort, which stores the numbers and call times of phone calls.
“I think that we will be heard and I think that we have a very strong argument,” Paul, a potential presidential contender in 2016, said on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront on Wednesday.
He acknowledged that the generally large composition of the class could complicate the case.
“But we didn’t define the class,” he said. “This is defined by the arrogance of government that has decided that the Fourth Amendment really allows a warrant to be written for everybody’s phone records. It shows the enormity and the egregiousness of the government’s intrusion.”
The suit also names National Intelligence Director James Clapper, outgoing NSA Director Keith Alexander, and FBI Director James Comey.
“We don’t do this out of disrespect to anyone,” Paul said earlier Wednesday at a news conference in Washington. “We do this out of respect to the Constitution and out of belief that these decisions cannot be made in secret by a secret court but that they need to be made in open by the Supreme Court.”
Categories: Americas, United States