White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts

[BobStackFan4Life]

Shameful.

The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets.

In a set of filings in the two long-running cases in the Northern District of California, the government acknowledged for the first time that the N.S.A. started systematically collecting data about Americans’ emails and phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants. The government had long argued that disclosure of these and other secrets would put the country at risk if they came out in court.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said:

he was continuing to assert the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to seek to block information from being used in court even if that means the case must be dismissed. The Justice Department wants the judge to dismiss the matter without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth Amendment.

Mr. Clapper’s unclassified affidavit to the court — he also filed a classified version, the documents state — contrasts sharply with the findings of President Obama’s advisory committee on signals intelligence, which said in a report made public on Wednesday that the collection of bulk telephone data was of little proven value.

The panel’s experts concluded that “there has been no instance in which N.S.A. could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different” in a terror investigation without the collection of the telephone data. “Moreover, now that the existence of the program has been disclosed publicly, we suspect that it is likely to be less useful still.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/us/white-house-tries-to-prevent-judge-from-ruling-on-surveillance-efforts.html?hp&_r=1&

 

[BobStackFan4Life]

So after the Snowden leaks DOJ is still claiming NSA spying is a state secret and can't be challenged in court. Meanwhile Obama was just talking about these programs at a press conference. Unreal.

 

[DeacMan]

Yep. Talks out of both sides of his mouth.

 

[BobStackFan4Life]

Yep. Talks out of both sides of his mouth.

He says he wants a debate on NSA spying, just not one that involves the possibility of another court ruling it unconstitutional.

 

[DeacMan]

I chalk it up to yet another example of no one being more upset than him with a promise of getting to the bottom of it - and then, of course, he'll do nothing.

 

[sailordeac]

He says he wants a debate on NSA spying, just not one that involves the possibility of another court ruling it unconstitutional.

Good luck Obama. There is no way that anyone, who has read the Fourth Amendment, can rule that NSA's indiscriminate spying on individuals not suspected of any crimes as constitutional. Barack is just doing the bidding of his guilty bureaucrarts and trying to delay things, playing for time.

 

[Deacon923]

He says he wants a debate on NSA spying, just not one that actually ends up causing the government to stop doing whatever the hell it wants to do and constitution be damned.

FIFY

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

 

[BillBrasky]

But but but he's black

#change