Either the Solicitor General Lied to The Supreme Court, or Senator Feinstein Lied to the Public About Warrantless Wiretapping
16th July 2013
While there’s been plenty of attention over the last month or so concerning the revelations from Ed Snowden about NSA surveillance, there have been a series of important ongoing lawsuits that tried to challenge the various aspects of the surveillance efforts. Unfortunately, most of these have ended badly, leading some to wonder if there even is any way at all to legally challenge these programs. At the end of 2011, for example, in a case testing the legality of the telcos helping the government with warrantless surveillance, Hepting v. AT&T, one of the key reasons why the court rejected the challenge was because it basically said, “well, you can always sue the government, but the government has the right to absolve companies of such wrongdoing.” Except that, as the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year, because the government keeps the program a complete secret, no one has standing to sue. That is, unless you can prove that you were spied on via this specific program, you can’t sue because there’s been no harm.
The Supreme Court Justices were clearly troubled by the idea that the government could implement a secret surveillance program that could never be challenged in court, and homed in on that key point in questioning the Solicitor General of the US (and former top RIAA litigator), Donald Verrilli. As the NY Times notes, Verrilli insisted that it simply was not true that no one would ever have standing, because if the government ever used information from such surveillance programs in a court case against someone, the government would have to reveal that the info came via that program.
Since both are Democrast, I choose all of the above.