- The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.
- The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.
Balancing public politics. This is walking a tight wire between being an insider with voters on disclosure and turning a new page on government transparency and decency, and being an insider protecting the intelligence community to fight the war on terror (or whatever they are calling it now).
they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security."
The Electronic Freedom Foundation is now fighting a second administration, challenging the agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. For the second time they are not only hearing the same arguments, they are hearing reasons why the core principals of the Bill of Rights should be bypassed.
As in the past, in Jewel v. NSA,this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence. BO ran against the arrogation of power, but he now appears to be starting his term as a president not just looking for the same, but looking to increase executive privilege to bypass guarantees of free speech and privacy that are foundations of law. WH counsel Greg Craig must have agreed with BO to approve this.
http://www.eff.org/...
Don't cede any power already in house appears to be the WH meme. But the constitution has core principals the last regime assaulted and ignored, and it is troubling to see an almost immediate compromising on those core principles of our law for political convenience.
We have rights, and they are not negotiable. Nonetheless, here we are, our rights rationalized away by a completely different set of government officials, at the behest of a completely different president.