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| Obama admin Tries to Stop Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts | |||||
| 2013-12-22 | |||||
| WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets. In a set of filings in the two long-running cases in the Northern District of California, the government acknowledged for the first time that the N.S.A. started systematically collecting data about Americans’ emails and phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants. The government had long argued that disclosure of these and other secrets would put the country at risk if they came out in court. But the government said that despite recent leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public a fuller scope of the surveillance and data collection programs put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in any courtroom discussion of their details — like whether the plaintiffs were targets of intelligence collection or whether particular telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had helped the agency.
So, he said, he was continuing to assert the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to seek to block information from being used in court even if that means the case must be dismissed. The Justice Department wants the judge to dismiss the matter without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth Amendment.
The plaintiffs have until late January to file a response. Cindy Cohn, the legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is leading one of the cases, called the government’s assertion “very troubling.” She said that despite the Snowden revelations, it was still essentially saying, “We can’t say whether the American people have been spied on by their government.” Mr. Clapper’s unclassified affidavit to the court — he also filed a classified version, the documents state — contrasts sharply with the findings of President Obama’s advisory committee on signals intelligence, which said in a report made public on Wednesday that the collection of bulk telephone data was of little proven value. The panel’s experts concluded that “there has been no instance in which N.S.A. could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different” in a terror investigation without the collection of the telephone data. “Moreover, now that the existence of the program has been disclosed publicly, we suspect that it is likely to be less useful still.” Mr. Clapper, however, suggested that the program was one of many that needed to continue, and he discussed a litany of threats, mostly emanating from Al Qaeda and its affiliates, that he said made the program vital. He argued that revealing additional details, including whom it targets or how companies like AT&T and Verizon have given the N.S.A. access to its equipment and data, would be harmful. Still, Mr. Clapper’s description of the program as “an important tool” for tracking possible plots was a downgrade in rhetorical urgency. In earlier, now-declassified court filings, he and other officials had portrayed it as “an essential tool.”
“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we necessarily should,” he said, repeating a line he has used often.
The new filings came five days after another judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, ruled — in a case filed shortly after Mr. Snowden’s first reported disclosures — that the call-logging program in its current form probably violated the Fourth Amendment and called it “almost Orwellian.” The government is expected to appeal that decision.
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #5 Cannot stop listening so close to tax season. |
| Posted by: Airandee 2013-12-22 20:01 |
| #4 Perjury. Clapper should be brought up on charges and imprisoned. Same with Sebelius re Obamacare web site. You or I lie under oath, you can bet we see a jail cell. Should be the same for them. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2013-12-22 18:45 |
| #3 Here's a question: did the NSA eavesdrop on the Romney campaign? If so, did some tasty information make its way to ValJar, Axelrod and Plouffe? Maybe that's why Champ is fighting so hard... Hummm.... would Nixon have done it? Hell damn yes, would Johnson have done? Hell damn yes. We've got to get a handle on this shit somehow. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2013-12-22 11:44 |
| #2 Yes, and per Congressman Peter King, it's "unpatriotic" to call the good general out on it. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2013-12-22 09:34 |
| #1 That would be the same DNI, General James Clapper that told the Congress that none of this was actually going on anyway, rignt ? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2013-12-22 04:43 |