Ethics

Obama Invokes State Secrets Privilege. Again, Again.

By Ed Brayton

Yet another case where the Obama DOJ has chosen to continue the Bush administration's position and invoke the state secrets privilege to avoid any judicial scrutiny of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. This time it's in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's suit against the government for its coupling with AT&T to gain access to all communications routed through their equipment without any warrant.

The suit is based largely on the testimony of a whistleblower at AT&T, Mark Klein, who has testified before Congress that the company allowed the NSA access to its entire network to monitor all electronic communications. Obama is arguing, as Bush did, that the court has no jurisdiction to hear the case at all because it involves classified national security information:

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on April 08, 2009 (boomark / email).