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State Secrets, No-Fly List Showdown Looms
schwit1 writes "The Obama Administration and a federal judge in San Francisco appear to be headed for a showdown over the controversial state secrets privilege in a case about the U.S. government's 'no-fly' list for air travel. U.S. District Judge William Alsup is also bucking the federal government's longstanding assertion that only the executive branch can authorize access to classified information. From the article: 'The disputes arose in a lawsuit Malaysian citizen and former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim filed seven years ago after she was denied travel and briefly detained at the San Francisco airport in 2005, apparently due to being on the no-fly list. In an order issued earlier this month and made public Friday, Alsup instructed lawyers for the government to "show cause" why at least nine documents it labeled as classified should not be turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers. Alsup said he'd examined the documents and concluded that portions of some of them and the entirety of others could be shown to Ibrahim's attorneys without implicating national security.'"
I want this judge on the Supreme Court.
Not sure what disgusts me more here, reading how TSAs due diligence with assessing no-fly status is suddenly a matter of national security, or the fact that this was an issue in 2005 and our wonderful legal system is just now getting around to it.
Gotta love it when judges are arguing over bullshit that is so damn old that former Presidents barely remember authorizing it.
Obama will be retired and tending to his marijuana crops by the time we bring up his policies for legal review...
Captcha = erasable. Yup, sounds about right. Your rights are being erased every day.
why at least nine documents it labeled as classified should not be turned over to Ibrahim's lawyers.
Because power.
Just the things being investigated and when can tip off associates, or, in the case of mistaken identities due to similar names, the real target.
While I am all for increased legislative oversight of all spy and terrorist-related investigations, good luck with this. The real Constitutional crime is not just warrantless stuff, but warrantless without cursory review by elected legislators or judges.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Executive branch claims it and it alone can authorize access to classified information. If this is deemed as stupid as it sounds, especially in a supposedly free society and by a President that campaigned on unprecedented transparency, then this may be the start of something wonderful.
There will be no 'showdown'. The feds can and will tell everybody to fuck off, and as always, they will comply... to avoid being tagged as 'anti-American'
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It doesn't matter which party they are in they want to control you.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Does the No-Fly List consist of just strings ($NAME) or is it a set of unique records?
Set your phasers on "funky"!
I like David E Kelley's Boston Legal in general. Granted, lots of people hated his shows because his main characters tended to go on rants and act as mouth-pieces for his political views, but I enjoyed his shows and think that even if you disagree that he would at least make good points about them.
Anyway, there was an episode about the No Fly list and that monologue always stuck with me.
The main character (Alan Shore) went on and on about how poorly contrived it was and how INSANE it was that a system that cost SOOOO much money was less advanced than an iPod that fits in his pocket. That the iPod could store meta-data AND pictures for 20,000+ items but the No Fly List only handled names. Names which could be faked AND shared with others.
How it's insane that in a country that has Google, Apple, and even small-yet-innovative companies that the contract went to a system as worthless as what became the no-fly-list.
The plot-point was "Denny Crane" couldn't even fly on his private jet because his name was an alias for a terrorist. Then the main character had a dozen+ people named Denny Crane from the Boston area to come in to show how ridiculous it was they couldn't fly (even the children).
The monologue was found here: http://www.boston-legal.org/script/BL03x12.pdf
But the delivery of it was quite solid and emotional.
This is the same guy that headed off the Oracle vs. Java ruling disaster.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The real question is why there should even be a no-fly list. No U.S. citizen or legal resident should be denied their right to travel without due process.
I can't wrap my brain around the no-fly list. You can't find out if your on it until you're denied boarding. You can't find out how you got on it. You can't get off it once your on it. That's constitutional how? Oh, I forgot. Bush tossed the constitution out on it's ear 9/12/01.
Why doesn't some hacker group like anonymous start putting politicians and staffers on the damn thing so we can all watch the fun?
I bet they are working hard to get rid of him as soon as possible. Can't have irrelevant things like fundamental legal principles slow down the establishment of a police state.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I will vote any candidate that will make that happen.
And it is mindless cynicism like this that keeps it this way. If every politician is a crook, then only crooks become politicians.
There are two main reasons I think this sort of thing about keeping unnecessary secrets is happening.
First, is a power play by the executive branch (it happens in the other branches too, don't get me wrong). Ie, when asked to do anything the knee-jerk response at all levels is to say "no", and when being forcefully asked or ordered again, the response is "NO" even louder. Like a petulant child being asked to go to sleep. It's pervasive because it's not a directive that comes down from upper management but just a natural response that most people have.
The second big reason is to protect loss of face and avoid embarrassment. Ie, these aren't national security secrets, but embarrassing secrets. Not even embarrassing in the sense of explosing malfeasance, but embarrassing because it makes someone looks stupid, or it makes a policy look stupid, or it makes someone who said "no" earlier look stupid if it's discovered there was no reason to say "no".
I guess another reason is just laziness: To say "yes", you must first go through the documents and check whether it is OK to release them. Just saying "no" is much easier, and normally the party asking for it cannot check whether that "no" was justified or not because to do so it would have to have access to the very documents to which it just got denied that access.
And yet another reason may be the person having to decide it fearing an error: If you happen by mistake to disclose something which you shouldn't have disclosed, you'll probably face severe punishment. However you'll not face severe punishment for wrongly denying access.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If this is deemed as stupid as it sounds, especially in a supposedly free society and by a President that campaigned on unprecedented transparency, then this may be the start of something wonderful.
If you think that living in a free society with government transparency means you, and any random person that asks the janitor, librarian, or county judge, gets access to top secret intelligence data, encryption methods, war plans, nuclear release codes, the tax data from your neighbors, reviews of weakness in the security plans at the local nuclear plant, etc., etc., etc., then you haven't correctly identified where the label stupid should be attached in this discussion.
It would have been better to have started squawking about the Obama administration before the last election, don't you think?
Mr Obama's justice department has proposed that if documents requested by the public are exempt from freedom of information laws, federal agencies should be able to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."
Transparency campaigners described the move as a "stunning" reversal of Mr Obama's pledge to run "the most transparent administration in history" during his campaign for the presidency.
In a joint statement, the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and OpenTheGovernment.org said the plan threatens to "destroy integrity in government".
"It is very problematic," said Patrice McDermott, the director of OpenTheGovernment.org. "There are options open to them other than this nuclear option of lying to requesters".
The plan is the latest in a string of controversial moves by Mr Obama, who earlier this year even insisted on collecting an award for his commitment to transparency behind closed doors at the White House. --- Barack Obama accused of breaking transparency pledge
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
> If every politician is a crook, then only crooks become politicians.
That's how the system is designed (ie Money = power). It's not mindless cynicism, it's demonstrable cause and effect.
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This is the heart of it. The State Secrets Doctrine in its modern form has its roots in a coverup by the Air Force of its own negligence that led to a plane crash that killed three RCA engineers. When their widows sued and requested the crash report in discovery, the Air Force refused citing State Secrets. Eventually, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force's right to not turn over the document without any judge having ever looking at what it contained, but rather, just trusting the Government to be honest.
Fast forward many decades, the report is declassified, and guess what, all it contained was a record of poor maintenance and a failure to install manufacturer recommended heat shields in the engine to prevent the exact type of engine fire that occurred and caused the crash.
Great interview with the granddaughter who finally got her hands on the document:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/383/origin-story?act=2#play
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The whole system by which the No-Fly list operates is stupid. If the government wants to have a no fly list, then they should have to justify to a court putting someone on that list, before the name goes on it.
If you want to search someone's house you need a warrant. If you want to tap someone's phone you need a warrant. So why don't you need a warrant to stop them from flying? It just seems stupid to me. Also when does your name of this No-Fly list expire? Wire taps expire, warrants expire, so how come you can be put on a No-Fly list indefinitely?
Wait a minute. I pretty well agree with your characterization of the situation, but there's more to this than "I'm a Democrat and expected Obama to do the right thing because he's a Democrat, too". I'm not really politically active (erm, probably something I should work on...), but I do vote third party.
When Obama was campaigning for his first term, he explicitly made transparency part of his platform. We have since found out that he didn't mean it, but it's not something he handwaved or hinted it, it's something he made specific and precise promises about. He broke those promises (among others), but that's different campaigning vaguely on principles and not upholding those principles in the way I thought he meant, which is the way you normally expect politicians to "lie" (i.e. by carefully never actually making a factual statement).
This is quite different from something like drone strikes which simply was never discussed in the last election because neither candidate wanted to remind the American people of their support for extrajudicial killings and they didn't disagree on them anyway.
I'd like to believe that but as I said, Obama's presidency is proof against your assertion. Take for example Marty Lederman. He used to excoriate the GWB administration for using secret memo to support due process free detention (Gitmo). When he became part of the Obama administration, he began _writing_ Obama's secret memos "authorizing" (*) due process free execution.
Exactly what besides "my tribe uber alles" can account for that 180 degree switch in position on the core question of whether a person is entitled to trial before punishment is exacted?
Or try to have a conversation with an Obama apologist, and try to get a straight answer to the question: why was it wrong for GWB to put people in jail without trial, but not wrong for Obama to kill people without trial? Eventually, after all the deflections, slogans, and GWB-blaming, you'll get down to the core: I trust Obama and I did not trust Bush. I did this once with a frequent poster on my local paper's website and that is exactly what he said. His avatar is a picture of Bush with "worst ever" written over it. That is tribal politics, nothing else, and I think it accounts for much more of what we see than it is given credit for.
The ways in which Obama has extended the GWB era policies are legion. I started to list those before burning out on the project -- I've not updated this in a year, but you can sort of get an idea: http://nothingchanged.org/ Despite the plain facts, people still support him, and nothing can explain that besides the fact that he's a member of their tribe. The silence we hear from "progressives" is proof positive that policy doesn't matter because if it did, the same people that burned GWB in effigy, would be doing that to Obama. He's that bad from a policy perspective. And of course, all those GOPers should be praising him as much as Dick Cheney has praised him. But they don't. They call him a Marxist for coming up with a health care plan to the right of that proposed by Nixon. It really is tribal, at least for the most part.
(*) legal memos written by your own lawyers are not laws, they are opinions, so to suggest there is some authority there is ridiculous.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I can sort of understand their reasoning. Letting your enemies know that your Air Force management is so inept they can't even keep their hardware maintained properly, would have been a huge blow to the perceived strength of U.S.A's military might.
And that statement is as stupid as saying if you play three card monty a thousand more times you are sure to win.
For voting to actually do jack shit you have to have something to vote FOR and what we have in the states isn't even Coke V Pepsi anymore, its Coke in a bottle V Coke in a can. Any and all attempts at a grass roots movement on a national level WILL be quashed by the MSM, for an example look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" which even though Stewart doesn't agree with Paul on squat (and neither do i, I find libertarianism quite nasty) even he was quick to point out using the MSM footage just how badly it was rigged. The amount of sentence tap dancing they had to do to keep Paul "He who would not be named" would have been comical if not for the fact that you were watching the primary being tilted by the corporate masters of the MSM, it got to the point one of the reporters even says "We are talking about Palin and Christie, who aren't even running, and nobody is talking about Paul who is doing great in the polls here" and the anchor got a douchebag smirk and says "If you get footage of Palin or Christie send it in, you can keep the Paul stuff"
So it is NOT "mindless cynicism" to face reality and reality has shown time and time again that all you can do in American politics anymore is change the figureheads, the power behind the throne is still making the calls no matter which lackey is in the seat. As the late great Bill Hicks said more than 20 years ago " I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well i believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart...hey there is one guy controlling both puppets!"
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The Executive branch claims it and it alone can authorize access to classified information.
I really do not care who claims what and who is authorize to do what
What I want to know is this --- WHO THE FUCK IS GOING TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY WHEN THINGS GO WRONG ?
Take the case of the Boston Marathon bombing - those two were not listed in the "no fly list", although the elder brother was questioned by the FBI, after getting tip from the Russian government
Is FBI going to take responsibility for THEIR FAILURE TO STOP THE BOMBING ?
Is the Obama administration going to take responsibility for letting the two cold-blooded bastards into the United States of America ??
3 people died and over 200 injured, and NO-FUCKING-BODY TAKES ANY RESPONSIBILITY !!!
This is *NOT* the America that I know, and as an America, I am VERY ANGRY at what is happening !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Sad, but true. As an update, Obama now actually has a worse record on prosecuting whistle blowers than all previous administrations. Combined. Transparent indeed.
in a country that has Google, Apple,...
in a country that has Google, Apple, and the cattle that simply adores them, nothing is insane.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Fine, Apple and Google and the rest are WAY over-rated. And as I said, tons of smaller yet innovative firms were around.
But considering the work they've done in the past, did around the time of Do Not Fly list, and have done since... tapping a decent firm to put something together would have solved a lot of issues.
In 2001, there is no excuse for this multi-billion dollar system to only be a names-list and nothing else. So picking some firm or some guy who just threw something together quickly and accepting "that's the best that can be done" with something so pitiful is poor judgement.
Oh -- we're at war with Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, etc. etc.? I guess I didn't get the memo. Or do you mean "the whole world is a battlefield"? In that case, there is no logical reason to exclude drone strikes in Iowa -- it is after all, part of the battlefield. Expect it. Not this year or the next, but a decade or so from now. And then blame yourself.
And yes, it is so terrible that Obama does the same and worse than GWB. It's the pattern:
http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/05/ratchet-effect-part-infinity.html
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
It's not mindless cynicism. It is a recognition that US politics operates on a purely tribal basis.
You have Democrats who really honestly believe Obama is a peacenik who has reduced the number of troops in Afghanistan every single year of his presidency. I'm not joking -- I saw this exact comment in my local paper's comment section by a die-hard Obamabot.
You have Republicans who believe that forcing people to pay premiums to private for profit insurance companies is Marxism (as opposed to crony capitalism or corporatism, the softer brother of fascism). I see this in my local paper's comment section all the time from the mainstream-GOP-subverted Tea Baggers.
Combined, the purely tribal Democrats and Republicans probably account for about 60% of the population. The remainder will be largely filled by people who vote for a "lesser evil" and a few single digit percentage pointers who support "fringe" third parties. I'm in that last group, have been actively engaged with the fringe, stood out in the sleet and rain holding signs for that fringe, will not vote for any candidate affiliated with either the DNC or the GOP under any circumstances -- I am the fringe -- and I know there is no hope short of a scandal so egregious that one of the parties basically has to reinvent itself. Seriously, Obama's presidency should be all the demonstration one needs that to most people, policies are irrelevant, only party affiliation matters.
Why does everyone think that the President walks on water and has absolute power. Every president relies on his staff. A president is an orchestra leader. And some of his musicians are excellent, others don't deserve to be there.
As the leader, he tries to be on top of everything, to listen to briefings and to make the best decisions, subject to constraints. And from what I have seen, the constraints are that socialism is a very dirty word. Socialism means old age pension, Obamacare, medicade, public schools and low cost universities and fairness.
Socialism does not mean communism, nor does it mean the government owns everything. It does often mean that a person has a right to fair compensation, and that wealth should be creating jobs domestically.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada