Just copy from someone else. Isn’t that what you do if you can’t think of the right words to say?

The Tea Party member and Republican senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, recently filed a lawsuit against President Obama and heads of government agencies connected with the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program. The suit seeks to have the practice declared unconstitutional. But what was contained in the suit is becoming a plagiarization scandal.

Paul’s lawyer, Ken Cuccinelli, collaborated with Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration lawyer in writing the suit. Both Fein and his spokeswoman, his ex-wife, are now claiming that Fein had not been fully paid for his work and that the suit stole credit for it.

One example: Cuccinelli’s version says: “Since the MATP was publicly disclosed, public opinion polls showed widespread opposition to the dragnet collection, storage, retention, and search of telephone metadata collected on every domestic or international phone call made or received by citizens or permanent resident aliens in the United States.”

Fein’s version reads: “When the MATP was disclosed by Edward Snowden, public opinion polls showed widespread opposition to the dragnet collection, storage, retention, and search of telephone metadata collected on every domestic or international phone call made or received by citizens or permanent resident aliens in the United States.”

How this scandal will play out over time is unknown. As for the lawsuit, the Obama administration is standing by the program’s legality, despite its own efforts to curtail NSA surveillance in recent months.

With the proliferation of blogs and extensive use of Wikipedia as official sources, academic plagiarism is definitely on the rise. Paul’s decision to use the easiest and quickest way is nothing new…but is it right?

Let me know what you think.