State secrets are apparently covering up a lot of crimes and one wonders how justice will ever be served.

If you can’t use evidence to convict them because it’s a state secret, then what is to prevent them from doing anything and calling it a state secret? Dictatorship anybody?

They’re supposed to be â€the good guys.†When I was growing up, it was in all the movies…

Yeah. And now, we don’t even get that. There needs to be at least some prima facie showing, and consideration by the court that the invocation by the government is legal and proper in order to summarily deny a plaintiff due process court access to protect their Constitutional and legal rights. I know I am overly simplistic with what I have been saying, but it is seriously out of whack when mere words by the executive, that appear duplicitous on their face, trumps the Constitution and it’s due process protections.

The problem for Squillacote and Stand was that FISA allows the court to decide that the surveillance was legal without telling the surveilled party why (i.e. the law says the district court â€may†disclose).

I keep trying to get across a fundamental point. FISA was enacted to prevent exactly the behavior that the Administration has engaged in. To date, the Administration has used the state secrets privilege to prevent anyone from proving they have standing. If FISA preempts the state secrets privilege, the courts have it in their discretion to determine whether or not a person has standing. Of course, if they won’t do it in the al-Haramain case, I doubt they ever would. I guess I keep hoping that the judicial branch will at some point stand up to the incipient dictatorship that the current administration is creating (at least the courts never actually endorsed the disappearing of Jose Padilla).

or whenever any motion or request is made by an aggrieved person pursuant to any other statute or rule of the United States or any State before any court or other authority of the United States or any State to discover or obtain applications or orders or other materials relating to electronic surveillance or to discover, obtain, or suppress evidence or information obtained or derived from electronic surveillance under this chapter

Then in (g) the law says:

If the United States district court pursuant to subsection (f) of this section determines that the surveillance was not lawfully authorized or conducted, it shall, in accordance with the requirements of law, suppress the evidence which was unlawfully obtained or derived from electronic surveillance of the aggrieved person or otherwise grant the motion of the aggrieved person.

The courts have the power to stop this nonsense. I’m hoping the Ninth Circuit was telling the district court to do the job.

That is kind of what I was getting at; something we don’t know about that spooked the panel. If so, I have, as does Mary, real problems with such â€secret lawâ€. Eisenberg has discussed the call log pretty specifically, and I some time back asked the EFF folks if they had any suspicion to the contrary and they did not, and it is hard to envision from said description how the log deserves the status it has been accorded. Really hard to envision. That is why I mentioned Pregerson; he is old, cranky, independent, and not generally amenable to such governmental duplicity. Still, Pregerson concurred. Curious.