Slashdot Mirror
US Government Fights To Not Explain No-Fly List Selection Process
An anonymous reader writes: On August 6, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga ordered the federal government to "explain why the government places U.S. citizens who haven't been convicted of any violent crimes on its no-fly database." Unsurprisingly, the federal government objected to the order, once more claiming that to divulge their no-fly list criteria would expose state secrets and thus pose a national security threat. When the judge said he would read the material privately, the government insisted that reading the material "would not assist the Court in deciding the pending Motion to Dismiss (PDF) because it is not an appropriate means to test the scope of the assertion of the State Secrets privilege." The federal government has until September 7 to comply with the judge's order unless the judge is swayed by the government's objection.
Look, no matter how totalitarian we actually are, we will always pretend this is true. "America is the specialist most freest place in the universe" is an idea beaten into children's heads without qualification throughout early and middle childhood. It's my pet theory that this is the mechanism by which we get so many libertarians.