O'Reilly calls the PRISM program a 'massive intrusion.' O'Reilly: Snowden 'great for ratings'

The recent scandals hitting the administration are great for Fox News, host Bill O’Reilly said Tuesday.

“This is great for ratings, great for us, but bad for the country,” he said during an appearance on “Fox and Friends.”


O’Reilly said “somebody’s got to be prosecuted” if the National Security Agency is monitoring email content.

( Also on POLITICO: 10 things to know about Snowden)

Monday night on his show, O’Reilly called for the NSA to pull the plug on its PRISM surveillance program.

“This PRISM program should be shut down immediately,” O’Reilly said. “If it’s not, a class action suit should be filed and the Supreme Court should hear it as quickly as it can.”

O’Reilly said another program involving the monitoring of the metadata of phone calls is “questionable” but permissible, but he called the top-secret PRISM program revealed to the media by Edward Snowden a “massive intrusion.”

“You can’t just seize everything and say you’re doing so to try and root out terrorism.You have to have probable cause to violate the privacy of Americans,” he said, going on to quote the Fourth Amendment.

( PHOTOS: 10 famous/infamous whistleblowers)

O’Reilly said the danger is in a corrupt government official who could look at stored email data.

“Who’s gonna stop them?” he said.

President Barack Obama wants a powerful federal government that “runs nearly everything,” O’Reilly said, so these revelations are “consistent.”

“This is dangerous,” he said. “The IRS scandal proves the federal government can and has abused its power for political reason, simply can’t have American authorities spying on the voters, storing their emails, this can’t happen.”

On Tuesday, O’Reilly said, “The thread of Benghazi, of James Rosen, of IRS, of this listening deal, there’s one thread - who’s in charge? There’s nobody in charge.”

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