Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA by Trevor Timm.
From the post:
If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.
Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.
In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.
It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it.
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See Trevor’s piece for the details.
There is one upside to this outrage.
Would you want to be representing the Justice Department the next time it appears before the Supreme Court?
Whatever semantic games the Justice Department want to play with whether it “lied” or simply didn’t reveal classified information, the bottom line is that the Justice Department deliberately lied to the Supreme Court.
You do know Rule #1 is to never knowingly suborn perjury. Right? Well, Rule #2 is to never lie to a judge. If you lose credibility with the court, that ends any effective representation on your part.
Of all the damage that the national security mania that started under Bush II and continued under Obama has done, destroying the minimal standards of decency and trust between the three branches of government has been the most damaging. Certainly the three branches can disagree and that is part of the checks and balances system. But to lose trust in one or more of the other branches, that is a very serious loss indeed.
It may not be too late for Congress, along with the Supreme Court to find and excise the national security cancer that lies at the heart of the executive branch of government. Here’s to hoping they don’t wait too much longer.