re: #38 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

CIA admits: We sent Mandela to jail

I’ll go even one better:

Court Backs Snowden, Strikes Secret Laws

In a major vindication for Edward Snowden — and a blow for the national security policy pursued by Republicans and Democrats alike — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program is unlawful. This is the most serious blow to date for the legacy of the USA Patriot Act and the surveillance overreach that followed 9/11.

The central question depended on the meaning of the word “relevant”: Was the government’s collection relevant to an investigation when it collects all the metadata for any phone call made to or from anywhere in the U.S.?

Then there’s the legal reasoning, which was equally striking. To get to the conclusion of unlawfulness, the Second Circuit initially had to find that anyone who has had metadata collected — that is, anyone in the U.S. — has the right to sue and challenge the statute.

The government said no one could challenge the NSA program except the telephone companies, like Verizon, who received the order. Its logic was particularly Orwellian. The Department of Justice argued that the Patriot Act demanded secrecy in reviewing challenges to the surveillance program. The secrecy, in turn, implied that the statute meant to preclude anyone from challenging the program under the non-secret provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act, the catch-all statute for challenging unlawful government programs.

The Second Circuit wisely rejected what it called this “argument from secrecy.” It reversed a lower district court that had refused to allow the suit to proceed, and set the stage for an analysis of relevance under the statute.