Michael Isikoff reports that–as I suspected–DOJ would very much like to accept the Vaughn Walker ruling and be done with George Bush’s illegal wiretap program. But the Department of Justice led by a guy who got paid a lot of money to help Chiquita’s rich white Republican executives avoid criminal liability for their support of [...]

Three significant pieces of news, taken together, show that the Courts continue to chip away at Bush-and-now-Obama’s domestic surveillance programs. FISA Court Encourages Government to Stop Collecting Some Metadata First, and potentially most importantly, the FISA Court, after learning more about what the collection of telecom metadata entailed, raised some concerns with the government, leading [...]

As I posted earlier, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against the government in the al-Haramain case today. Basically, Walker ruled that al-Haramain had been illegally wiretapped and the case should move to settlement judgment (corrected per some lawyer). But there’s more to it. I think Walker has crafted his ruling to give the government a big [...]

Short version: al-Haramain wins! Judge Walker just issued the following ruling in the al-Haramain case: The court now determines that plaintiffs have submitted, consistent with FRCP 56(d), sufficient non-classified evidence to establish standing on their FISA claim and to establish the absence of any genuine issue of material fact regarding their allegation of unlawful electronic [...]

The government tried to use a case reviewed this year to get SCOTUS to buy off on their larger claims of privilege. Thankfully, Justice Sotomayor declined to do that.

In what can only be described as a curious filing, the US Government, through the DOJ has submitted a pleading to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in the previously terminated appeal originally filed in 2006. The filing seeks to correct false statements previously made by the government in claiming state secrets dismissal of the al-Haramain case.

The state secrets doctrine was born on the wings of fraud and lies by the US government in the case of US v. Reynolds in 1953. As Congress struggles to rein in the unbridled use of the doctrine to cover up illegality by the Executive Branch (see here, here and here), it is a good [...]

Dennis Blair didn’t want to touch the “inaccurate” filings submitted under Bush.

Royce Lamberth and Vaughn Walker must have been golfing together recently. Because their rulings on governmental secrecy sound totally alike.

Obama’s DOJ is still flogging its efforts to use state secrets to shield the Bush Administration’s crimes.