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EFF Says Obama Warrantless Wiretap Defense Is Worse than Bush
SonicSpike writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just said that 'In the warrantless wiretapping case, Obama DOJ's new arguments are worse than Bush's.'"
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The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying -- that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes...No one -- not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration -- has ever interpreted the law this way.
Wow, nothing like taking things to the next level, huh? I guess Obama brought his A-game.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Well, at least Guantanamo is being shut down, so we in the rest of the world can relax a little, while things stay the same for the actual US citizens..
which is totally what she said
The Obama administration has roughly the same goals as the Bush administration, so it's no surprise that they're continuing to pursue them.
The change, and it is a change, is that they are pursuing them in a smarter way.
1) By making this extreme argument, they give judges wiggle-room to reject it and then accept the state secrets argument, while still allowing the judge to make token gestures in favor of the rule of law, even write a long, pious opinion dismissing the second argument while accepting the first. I can see that it would be very easy for any judge to delude himself into believing he was making a Solomonic compromise. Very smart on their part.
2) If the second argument *does* somehow fly, they have carte blanche to do what they want. I suspect that the Bush administration would've argued for the same thing, except that they weren't smart enough to come up with a line of argument that would've passed the laugh test (IANAL, maybe this one doesn't either.)
Begin broken record mode: The only way to get real improvement from Obama (or from Bush, for that matter,) is to mobilize the public to control the government. No elected leader is going to do this for us as a gift, we have to maintain the pressure constantly.
Personally, I'm much more disappointed with his ongoing embrace of "public-private partnerships" in education (crooked self-dealing and cronyism do not focus group so well, so they rebranded them as "public-private partnerships" in which the government partners with a private entity to give it money with minimal oversight and much righteous rhetoric.) My saintly mother blogs about it: http://chemtchr.dailykos.com/
And I'm sure Obama has not delivered from progressives on a dozen other fronts. Only way he will is *if we make him*. In the case of progressive causes that are popular with the public, this should be relatively easy, and ought to benefit the election prospects of the Democratic party anyway, so let's get going.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Read up on it if you don't understand it. Just like it took Nixon to go to China, it will take Obama to get this through. Those of you who voted for Obama and really believed that he stood for "hope and change" were every bit as big of morons as the people in the Republican Party who thought that McCain was some maverick conservative.
Obama voted yes for the telecom immunity bill. He supported the wiretapping program in the Senate, why do you think he'd stop supporting it when he was elected President?
Substance doesn't matter to "Hope And Change" zombies.
Not that it matters much to the "Saddam planned 9/11" crowd, but liberals are supposed to be Sooooo Muuuuch Smarter, Hipper And Rational than Bible-thumping Young Earth Creationist conservatives that you'd think they'd care a smidgen about reality.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Folks, this is what many of us voted for and this is the conclusion of the EFF;
Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ's radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama's own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.
This isn't change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.
Tyranny we can believe in.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I love how comedy news shows are becoming a more reliable source for news than the traditional. Then again, hasn't "news" always been sort of a joke in this country?
Voted for Obama because despite his moronic position on this he's a vasty better person to have as president than Bush, Et al. Or McCain/Palin
Bush was certainly, um, "less than perfect", but I see nowhere that B.O. is vastly better than W.
Unless you consider "better" to mean
In which case, yes, B.O. is much better than Bush!
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
This has nothing to do with Obama (other than that his DOJ is making the argument), and it is not a bullshit argument from a legal standpoint.
It's called sovereign immunity, and we brought it over to our legal system from the British system when we declared independence. To put it shortly, it's exactly what you quoted: Congress has to waive its immunity in order for you to sue the federal government. There are a few laws on the books outlining cases in which they automatically waive that right. I don't know if this would be one of them, except to say that the DOJ obviously feels there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.
I agree with what somebody else said in another thread earlier: Sovereign immunity has no place in a democratic society. That said, though, it's here and as frightening as it may be, it's far from a bullshit legal argument to have a lawsuit dismissed. It's a good one.
What does anyone expect from a bloated government bureaucracy that seems to exist for no other reason to protect it's own power.
Conservatives and liberals are both happily sacrificing liberty for security, the only difference being their motivations for doing so. Conservatives generally have a fear of ambiguous foreign threats. Liberals want to be sheltered from the difficulties of life. Both lead to the same end result which is a massive state that regulates every aspect of our lives.
This is not to say there aren't legitimate concerns on both sides of the aisle, because each side is too quick to dismiss the concerns the other side has. Virtually every issue has been so utterly politicized that there's little room for rational discussion. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't intentional so that everyone is weakened by fighting amongst themselves and thus distracted from the real threat. Otherwise how is it that people keep re-electing the same old garbage into office over and over again?
Bullshit. The Dixie Chicks have their views and we have ours. BTW, Pelosi says it is un-American to enforce our immigration laws. How does that grab you?
The Dixie Chicks have every right to speak their mind. I have every right to disagree with them and not give them any more money.
I do take offense when Americans go off to France, for example, and criticize our President or our country. All they are doing is selfishly making themselves more important at the expense of the rest of us. Its a kick in the teeth to the brave soldiers risking their lives for our safety.
Questions about Obama's citizenship and links to Islamic religious belief are canards.
Whether or not Obama's deficit spending and involvement in the affairs of private business constitute a step towards socialism or whether he will go along with gun control zealots in the Democratic party are not canards. They represent legitimate criticisms and legitimate fears.
The media, who have been some of the thirstiest consumers of the Obama-aide, have begun to leak very subtle criticisms of him, but only subtle ones, and Obama himself still engages in gross exaggeration of his critics positions (http://www.slate.com/id/2215631/).
It's still fairly early on in his presidency to have too many criticisms of Obama (although his spending is fair game), but in six months or so the "I'm still cleaning up after Bush" won't work.
Agreed. It started at the top and rolled down hill. There was even a clip of someone who was invested by the feds for making a not so kind comment about Bush at his local gym. He was visited by the nice men in blue suites. Totally out of control and scary as hell to think it could have gotten that far.
I remember the story like it was yesterday. It sent chills down my spine. To say it wasn't the (then) presidents administration pushing the buttons is ridiculous.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2001/12/18/eguillermo.DTL
You think Bush gave a shit about sensitivity to the families of dead soldiers?
Yes. It's clear that he did. He personally wrote a letter to the family of *every* dead soldier, and never talked about that to the press, or used it politically. No president has even been so personally involved with each death. He might not have been in the black sedan with the two soldiers who knocked on the door at each family's house (worst job in the army), but it's clear he counted the cost.
Your zealotry makes you look like a real ass in the face of the facts.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
But you can't blame the lawyers for defending their client.
I'm not sure if the lawyer ever swears an oath to defend The Constitution, but his client sure has hell did. Lawyers who are aware of an intent to violate the law going forward are obligated to disclose that fact. These lawyers are obligated to make it clear that the government intends to continue infringing our right to petition for redress, and to continue infringing the Fourth Amendment. If they cannot make that clear, they have an obligation -- at least moral if not legal -- to recuse themselves or resign their position.
Dress it up in the beauty of the adversarial legal system all you like, but saying that these lawyers have no obligation to expose the intent to commit treason by their employers is as empty as any tool of a criminal organization claiming he was just doing what he was told.
Will they get convicted for failing to disclose their fore-knowledge of a future crime? Of course not -- they are failing to disclose a future crime that will never be seen as a crime by those who judge crime, because those who judge crime want absolute power just like this President and the one before him (and most of them since the original GW said he didn't want it). But that does not excuse them of their obligation -- it just means that they will not face any punishment for being accessories to treason.
They'll be as innocent as O.J. and Ted Stevens.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Very similar to how the conservative movement was critical of the Bush administration running a very liberal fiscal policy, spending hundreds of billions on nation building and failing to veto a single spending bill.