On Tuesday, January 20th 2009, in front of a crowd of over one million and assisted by Samuel L. Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and Beyoncé Knowles, Barack Obama made the following pledge:

“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

We do not know what sort of surroundings, how big an audience, or whether any celebrities were in attendance when Edward Snowden, on beginning his work for National Security Agency contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, swore two oaths: “The first oath," said Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, "was to keep secret the classified materials to which he would be exposed in his work as a spy; the second oath was to uphold the Constitution”.

Two very different men in very different circumstances had sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. That document’s Fourth Amendment reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

One of these men totally disregarded this Amendment of the very Constitution he was sworn to uphold. Instead, he oversaw a ‘security’ apparatus which used a court order to demand that Verizon, a mobile phone company:

“shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls...Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call.”

IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that no person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order...”

A program called PRISM gave “the US government access to a vast quantity of emails, chat logs and other data directly from the servers of nine internet companies. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple”.

No “probable cause”, no “Oath or affirmation”, no description of “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”. Just the mass harvesting of data on the private communications of American citizens.

The other man, by contrast, when he found that one of his two oaths flatly contradicted the other, told people that this was going on, that the Constitution he had quietly sworn to uphold was being trampled on. And it is Edward Snowden, not Barack Obama, who is being branded a ‘traitor’ by all sides.

John Phelan is a Contributing Editor for The Commentator and a Fellow at the Cobden Centre. He has also written for City AM and Conservative Home and he blogs at Manchester Liberal. Follow him on Twitter @TheBoyPhelan