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Court Nixes National Security Letter Gag Provision
2phar sends news that on Monday a federal appeals court ruled unconstitutional the gag provision of the Patriot Act's National Security Letters. Until the ruling, recipients of NSLs were legally forbidden from speaking out. "The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients. The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders — provisions that required the courts to treat the government's claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch." Update: 12/16 22:26 GMT by KD : Julian Sanchez, Washington Editor for Ars Technica, sent this cautionary note: "Both the item on yesterday's National Security Letter ruling and the RawStory article to which it links are somewhat misleading. It remains the case that ISPs served with an NSL are forbidden from speaking out; the difference is that under the ruling it will be somewhat easier for the ISPs to challenge that gag order, and the government will have to do a little bit more to persuade a court to maintain the gag when it is challenged. But despite what the ACLU's press releases imply, this is really not a 'victory' for them, or at least only a very minor one. Relative to the decision the government was appealing, it would make at least as much sense to call it a victory for the government. The lower court had struck down the NSL provisions of the PATRIOT Act entirely. This ruling left both the NSL statute and the gag order in place, but made oversight slightly stricter. If you look back at the hearings from this summer, you'll see that most of the new ruling involves the court making all the minor adjustments that the government had urged them to make, and which the ACLU had urged them to reject as inadequate."
...this is one of the few steps that has been taken in a long time that makes me feel the whole "land of the free" thing.
Now, 250 million Americans should be writing to the Obama organization and asking why the fuck it was allowed in the first place and what is HE going to do about it... in the next 12 months, not how will he leave it to the next election.
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Well, congratulations America.
It is very nice to see a resurgence of freedom in your country.
The question/task for the future is to figure out how to prevent this sort of abuse from happening again.
It has been somewhat disturbing to see how easily your executive can disregard your highest laws with impunity only to have their actions repealed years later.
I mean, it is nice to have a constitution that declares things like a right to free speech and habeus corpus (or however that is spelled) but if the government can break that law for years without any legal sanction then is it anything but an empty statement of principles?
George Bush has proven that the American constitution has no teeth.
If an American president decides to break the law (any law) they cannot be stopped or punished in any way. The most that can happen is that they will be asked to stop... usually long after they have finished anyway.
Short of kidnapping white women is there anything your president cannot do? will your police forces EVER do anything to stop a president from breaking a law?
The answer seems to be no.
Yes, as a junior senator, voting is something you can do about not letting it get worse. He's president elect now and has the ear of everyone in the beltway and the world.... so.... what is he going to DO about it? He can't vote against it anymore in the Senate. Where will his veto votes be spent? It's a nice history, that, but what is his plan to fix the problems. So many promises are broken on the day after inauguration. What is Mr Obama's plan going forward?
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And the Congress Critters are elected from those same Americans.
Some of them are good. I'm in Washington state and all of my Congress Critters voted against the telcom immunity. And I voted for them again.
But the Constitution does not have any magical power to protect us. It is a statement that WE must support. Our forefathers died for those words.
Now, our Congress Critters won't even risk re-election to uphold them. Hell, they won't even risk the CHANCE that their opponents might say something mean about them.
Which is why Congress's approval rating is even lower than Bush's.
Get educated. Get organized. Then hold your Congress Critters accountable for their votes and their absences. That's the only way to get real change.
Obama's position on civil liberties is clear. He doesn't believe in them any more than Bush did.
His positions on liberties and freedoms are like those of most politicians. They all promote freedom to do "harmless" stuff, because it's not a threat to them or their power. But it's very rare to find one who promotes the "dangerous" ones. Being able to speak freely about and criticize the government (and call them on it when they screw up), habeas corpus, keeping and bearing arms, the right to privacy (both physical searches and observation)... those are ones that keep the government from exercising absolute control. There's a reason those things are the first things mentioned in the bill of rights, and in very clear terms; they knew the government would sooner or later try to restrict that.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.