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NSA's Role In Terror Cases Concealed From Defense Lawyers
Rick Zeman writes "'Confidentiality is critical to national security.' So wrote the Justice Department in concealing the NSA's role in two wiretap cases. However, now that the NSA is under the gun, it's apparently not so critical, according to New York attorney Joshua Dratel: 'National security is about keeping illegal conduct concealed from the American public until you're forced to justify it because someone ratted you out.' The first he heard of the NSA's role in his client's case was 'when [FBI deputy director Sean] Joyce disclosed it on CSPAN to argue for the effectiveness of the NSA's spying.' Dratel challenged the legality of the spying in 2011, and asked a federal judge to order the government to produce the wiretap application the FBI gave the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to justify the surveillance. 'Disclosure of the FISA applications to defense counsel – who possess the requisite security clearance – is also necessary to an accurate determination of the legality of the FISA surveillance, as otherwise the defense will be completely in the dark with respect to the basis for the FISA surveillance,' wrote Dratel. According to Wired, 'The government fought the request in a 60-page reply brief (PDF), much of it redacted as classified in the public docket. The Justice Department argued that the defendants had no right to see any of the filings from the secret court, and instead the judge could review the filings alone in chambers."
Congress should be impeaching the President, and then in an act of real patriotism impeach themselves.
99% of Congress went along with Bush's illegal anticonstitutional plan, and then went along a second time to Obama's tune.
Fucking traitors that they are.
As long as they can get their weekly does of the Kardashians, Americans just don't give a shit about their freedoms anymore.
Fat, dumb, and happy. That's how the emperor of Rome did it, and that's how our government is doing it now.
"The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
- Hermann Goering
No individual let this happen.
The problem with the US as a whole is that everyone votes along party lines, versus voting for a candidate (regardless of their party affiliation) that best matches their individual ideals.
At the same time, we have politicians making bold promises, and then failing on actually keeping any of those promises. The President for example promised a more open government, and an end to the surveillance programs that Bush started. Absolutely none of that has come about. He may have started, and possibly intended to keep those lofty goals, but in the end, he just failed.
It is like that for every single politician out there. I'm not even going to get into the fact that they are all bought and paid for by one special interest group or another.
What we need is to clean house, we need people who don't want the jobs as politicians, they will be the ones who will perform the best. Pick a teacher, pick a garbage man, pick anyone but those who are actively looking to be a politician. I look at the current crop of Congress critters and Senators, and I am not sure what they stand for, they certainly don't stand for the little guys within their respective states..
Meh.. I am done,.. This turned into a rant that I was hoping to avoid.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Yeah, fuck the fascist USA with their terror squads, secret death camps for civilians, mass murders of citizens and what-not. Fucking come on.
The first step in curing a disease is acknowledging its symptoms.
Chanting U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A won't get you nearer to the solution.
If prosecutor is allowed to present secret evidence to the judge, the defence lawyers should also have the right to present their own secret evidence that the prosecutor will not be able to see/hear. I wonder how fair they would find it...
The NSA data was used to identify suspicious behavior, and establish probable cause, but all the evidence used to convict was collected by normal law enforcement.
Court cases get thrown out every single day because of issues in establishing probable cause. It is one of the most common reasons for criminal cases to be dismissed in court. For the government to now claim that probable cause can be established without the defendant seeing the evidence is quite literally overturning centuries of jurisprudence.