When senators discovered they had been subjected to unconstitutional surveillance, they voted themselves half a million dollars each. The rest of us got nothing.

Last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed that President Joe Biden’s FBI had spied on eight Republican senators’ phones. Former Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, secretly monitored who contacted the senators, when, and for how long.

I had hoped this incident would lead to new legislative protections for every American’s privacy. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, the senators decided to cut themselves checks using taxpayers’ money.

Current privacy protections for phone “metadata” are weak. Forty-six years ago, the Supreme Court held that recording

See Full Page