Judge Strikes Down NSA Spying

by on August 17, 2006 · 2 comments

The ACLU has prevailed at the district court level in its lawsuit against the NSA’s domestic wiretapping program. Presumably, the ruling will immediately be appealed.

The ruling caught me by surprise; I’d gotten used to the courts shying away from confrontations with the Bush administration over civil rights. I’m glad to see the judiciary taking a more assertive posture. Of course, in an ideal world, striking down the program would have been a foregone conclusion.

The judge sided with the government on the NSA’s other secret program, the one that data mines calling records. I tend to think that program is illegal too, although as Orin Kerr argued back in May, it’s not as clear-cut.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • enigma_foundry

    Hooray!

    Of course, in an ideal world, striking down the program would have been a foregone conclusion.

    Even in a semi-quasi 60% ideal world, this thing should have been struck down in two seconds flat. BTW, the program that was stricken down was of almost no use for national security, as for any real terrorist or al-Qaeda associate, FISA allowed for a warrent to be obtained, and the judge administering FISA did so with quite a large benefit of the doubt to the government. Not to mention the fact that the terrorist would probably at least encrypt their communications in steganographic filesystem in images, or some other method, which is quite easy. They just wanted a program without any judicial oversight.

    I do not believe for, an instant, that the NSA did not use this program to monitor anti-war and pacifist groups. It is quite well-documented that they have spied on these groups in the past, and given this large new power, why wouldn’t they do it now?

    But this is, unfortunately, a small victory, in a continuing battle against the unchecked power of the executive branch.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com eee_eff

    Hooray!

    Of course, in an ideal world, striking down the program would have been a foregone conclusion.

    Even in a semi-quasi 60% ideal world, this thing should have been struck down in two seconds flat. BTW, the program that was stricken down was of almost no use for national security, as for any real terrorist or al-Qaeda associate, FISA allowed for a warrent to be obtained, and the judge administering FISA did so with quite a large benefit of the doubt to the government. Not to mention the fact that the terrorist would probably at least encrypt their communications in steganographic filesystem in images, or some other method, which is quite easy. They just wanted a program without any judicial oversight.


    I do not believe for, an instant, that the NSA did not use this program to monitor anti-war and pacifist groups. It is quite well-documented that they have spied on these groups in the past, and given this large new power, why wouldn’t they do it now?


    But this is, unfortunately, a small victory, in a continuing battle against the unchecked power of the executive branch.

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