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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.
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.
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?
As I am given to understand it, the No-Fly list consists of a list of the names of known terrorists, terrorist suspects, and the aliases that they have used. Back in 2004, Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy was stopped and questioned five times at airports because "T. Kennedy" was an alias used by a terrorist suspect. It took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed -- a process likely to be more painful and time-consuming for the average individual who only has access to the DHS TRIP ('Traveler Redress Inquiry Program') site.
Or even worse... since it is a question related to implementation, they can sick the copyright lawyers on you...
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".
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
Awhile back, 60 Minutes had a story on the No-Fly list, and there was a terrorist named "Robert Johnson", IIRC (if not, it was something similarly common), and a whole bunch of people were screwed from that one.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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
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