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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.
"We are gratified that the appeals court found that the FBI cannot silence people with complete disregard for the First Amendment simply by saying the words 'national security,'" said Melissa Goodman
Since it was the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, does this ruling only apply in New York, Vermont, and Connecticut?
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
Technically speaking, yes. However, any circuit court or district court (in another circuit) will either follow this decision or explain why this decision is wrong. This ruling does make a contrary result in another circuit somewhat less likely.
I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to.
...in my experience, very few people have no gag reflex. Therefore, I believe the requirement was unconstitutional and unnatural.
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.
Ya, a handful of people of were unlawfully detained, and there were attempts to repress critical comments, but when the American people finally got sick of it they were allowed to change directions. The US Constitution doesn't stop us from electing idiots, crooks, or both. But it slows them down with the checks-and-balances scheme and allows the people to get a new government without violence.
The Bush administration got away with far less than they attempted, and we've got the Constitution to thank for it.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
That's a very sexy learning disability you have there.
First let me say that my country, the ol' U.S. of A. is far from perfect. Second, let me say as an anonymous coward, you fail to let us know your own country. The UK and Canada, two countries I admire, currently have their own issues they are dealing with. You could be posting from some third world country that believes that anything the US stands for is something you refuse to stand for and therefore you are anti-constitution. I don't know. But don't throw stones at our huge glass houses. And don't shit pan the US constitution without a discussion of what failed and what didn't.
What the constitution is:
1) A document of precise, but not perfect, rules by which to found and run a government with very specific checks and balances so that no one branch of government is more powerful than others, so that not only there would be cooperation in order to pass important laws, but there would also be some competition.
2) A document with an addendum to preserve specific human rights the founders thought were important so that no state could pass laws to take away those rights.
3) A document that is changeable over time, albeit with a little difficulty, so that the change isn't whimsical.
What the constitution is not:
1) A suicide pact
2) A written in stone monolithic set of commandments
3) Psychic paper which compels the reader to always obey it's rules
4) A document that can pick up a gun and enforce itself
What happened to the constitution was that it was ignored. It was ignored because over a very long time, the public was pushed in a specific direction believing that the direction we were going was the proper one. This involved countless economic and social reasons. And it just got worse. Most people didn't see it that way, because it didn't impact them personally, and the average wage was not keeping up with inflation, the rich were getting richer and poor getting poorer, more people being impacted by NSL letters, more soldiers were dying in Iraq for what we knew to be a lie, a terribly managed natural disaster, and then finally an economic collapse followed by the most inept management seen in living memory. Eventually the public would demand a shift to a different direction.
What happened on first Tuesday of November in 2006 was the first step in what shows us the first thing that is good about the constitution. As things get worse, as more and more people are fed up with bad decisions, people begin to exercise the single most important constitutional power they have... a vote. The 2006 election was the first inkling that the US was fed up with it's president. So we voted another party into power. This didn't fix the problem, this didn't even stop the bleeding, but it did apply a tourniquet. Since then, the political will was slowly shifting away from Bush. This allowed all these things to properly come to light. Then in 2008 we used that constitutional power again, and we soundly rejected anything and everything that man stood for.
And while we flexed the constitutional rights there, other groups were going out and using the constitution for what it was for, defending these rights that Bush and cronies tried to take away. Such processes take time, and they are bearing fruit now. You may want these things to happen immediately, and am right there with you, but they don't. If we did things like this whimsically, then everything we'd do would be on a whim, and we'd be in worse shape as more bad decisions snuck into a system that didn't properly vett them, as the US system is designed to try to do.
One of the reasons why it took so long to fix this is because the will of the people, partially driven by stupidity, partially driven by fear, partially driven by group think, and partially driven by a very corrupt and very bad set of politicians, was against changing the status quo. But when it got really bad, the constitution succeeded by giving us an opportunity to return from the edge, and I think we have. A court decision like this is proof of
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
They were launched in under 45 minutes too. ;)
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.
Exactly! I like to think of it this way: The Constitution is not a list of Things That Are -- meaning we have freedom of speech because the 1st Amendment says we do. The Constitution is instead a list of Things That We, The People, Demand -- meaning that the 1st Amendment says we demand that Congress respect our freedom of speech, and if they don't they'll get the King George treatment.
To the extent that we have retained our rights, it is because we have refused to abrogate them, and to the extent we have lost our rights, it is because we have allowed them to be taken without consequence.
The enemies of Democracy are