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Supreme Court Refuses To Hear EPIC Challenge To NSA Surveillance
Trailrunner7 writes "The challenge to the NSA's domestic surveillance program filed with the Supreme Court by the Electronic Privacy Information Center ended Monday, with the court refusing to consider the challenge at all. EPIC had filed the challenge directly with the Supreme Court rather than going through the lower courts. EPIC, a non-profit organization involved in privacy policy matters, had asked the court to vacate an order from a judge in the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court that had enabled the NSA's collection of hundreds of millions of Verizon call records under the so-called metadata collection program. The challenge hinged on the idea that the FISC had gone outside of its authority in granting the order."
I hate it when that happens.
Sounds like we're going to need a reliable supplier of pitchforks soon.
EPIC tried to jump the line - they didn't follow the proper appeals process. That is highly frowned upon by the legal system and rarely succeeds. No surprise in this outcome. And nobody should read anything into it either way. One of the existing or future challenges may succeed as it works its way through the court system.
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
EPIC had filed the challenge directly with the Supreme Court rather than going through the lower courts.
This is the issue. The Supremes like you to work your way up through the lower courts as it is the proper procedure. If they accepted even a fraction of cases that didn't work the system the way it was designed, they would have a HUGE case load that could have been solved at a lower level.
EPIC will whine about this, but they should have been able to predict the outcome.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you are still in college I recommend you take a course or two in the functioning of the judicial system. This was an easily predictable failure. You don't make your first filing with the US Supreme Court for just about any case an ordinary citizen could bring.
Even citizens with rights have to follow procedure.
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
That's indeed how it works, like a Bruce Lee movie: you start with the lowest ranked minion, then work your way up. Except you're not working, a very expensive team of lawyers is. Ka-ching, Ka-ching and Ka-ching. You don't get to jump to the End Boss without racking up a huge, huge legal bill.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Yes - you're right. The intel community is indeed trashing the constitution. But - if we are going to defend the constitution, then we need to do it in a constitutional manner. File suit, and win - OR, file suit, be defeated, appeal, be defeated again, appeal again, THEN argue your case in front of the Supremes.
Hey, I don't really like it. It's time consuming, and wasteful, as you suggest. The only other way to put the NSA in it's place, is to have congress just pass some laws defining what is legal, and start defunding the illegal activities.
The remaining alternative is wasteful in terms of human life, as well as money and material. Revolutions can be like that.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Even citizens with rights have to follow procedure."
So what you're saying is in order to remove all our rights all the government has to do is make the procedures difficult and esoteric enough that no one could follow them? I hate to bring up Kafka in situations like this but this seems a bit too like something out of Kafka.
Why is it that you can get arrested for smoking a joint, but when it comes to violating the constitution it seems that the worst punishment is "we'll cut your funding"?
Because the CIA funds its black ops with money from drug running, so it has to remain very illegal to keep the prices up.
Who do you think is really controlling things, the Congress or the permanent bureaucracy that makes the outcomes of elections largely meaningless?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)