Rand Paul spent Wednesday going head to head with Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, demanding to know whether Johnson could justify the government's bulk data collection under the Fourth Amendment.

Johnson had no response, claiming that the question was “beyond my competence," and that he was unable to "answer in any intelligent legal way."

"I wouldn’t want to hazard a legal judgement on that.”

“Here’s the problem, though, your agency is in charge of cooperating and being part of this,” Paul replied. “And that’s the whole debate we have in our country is over whether we should do this.”

Paul went on a lengthy tired about how the government is not justified in collecting vast amounts of data with no individualized warrants:

I would propose that there is no person named Verizon, so you do not have an individualized warrant under the Fourth Amendment when to say to Mr. Verizon we want hundreds of millions of records. And this is a debate, and it’s an important one. And if we’re going to complain about encryption, and we’re going to complain about individuals wanting privacy, we really need to have a thorough discussion of the Fourth Amendment and the complaints by many of us that you’re doing something without a warrant.



Johnson tried to argue that increasing levels of sophistication in encryption block the government from targeted warrants. “The problem we have is that the marketplace is demanding deeper and deeper encryption into places where the warrant authority of the government does not extend."

Paul shot back that these demands were simply the market's response to government spying. “You have to realize that the real culprit is government,” he said.

“[Obama's] own privacy committee that he appointed said that you’ve gone too far in the bulk collection of records and the president’s done nothing to stop it.”

Watch below:

https://youtu.be/N_auHdE89qQ

(h/t Mediaite)