Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[unixronin]

Via cipherpunk:

[...] late Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government’s first response to EFF’s lawsuit (.pdf), the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush’s NSA program.  But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the “state secrets” privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new “sovereign immunity” claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is “willful disclosure” of the illegally intercepted communications.

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned.

[...]

What’s being asserted here by the Obama DOJ is the virtually absolute power of presidential secrecy, the right to break the law with no consequences, and immunity from surveillance lawsuits so sweeping that one can hardly believe that it’s being claimed with a straight face.  It is simply inexcusable for those who spent the last several years screaming when the Bush administration did exactly this to remain silent now or, worse, to search for excuses to justify this behavior.

(Emphasis in second quoted paragraph mine.  Emphasis in first quoted paragraph original.)

Comments

[lebo-superman.livejournal.com]

That's why we needed Ron Paul - because NOTHING really changes when you only switch between Democrat and Republican.

(ok, I know Ron Paul was running as a Republican, but at heart he's really a Libertarian, and all Libertarians know it).

[lonewolf545.livejournal.com]

With simple majority rule in each house of Congress, we're pretty much always going to have two parties. A party may split, causing new alignments, or a third party may represent sufficient influence that one or both major parties adopts some of it's platform to try to gain those voters, but we're generally going to have two parties.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

This is one reason why I believe we need electoral reform. Single vote, first-past-the-post, winner-takes all makes the barrier to entry for any new party almost impossibly high even before one considers the campaign-finance morass.

[luxobscura.livejournal.com]

you should cross post this to neph politics just to see what sort of deafening silence it's greeted by from amongst The Faithful.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

*laughing*

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Did that last night. No responses yet.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

they're being transparent about it at least!

#

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Transparently Evil: That's Change We Can Believe In!

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I wish you, and cipherpunk, were actually surprised. How far are civil liberties going to fall in the first 100 days?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It's not so much the first hundred days that worry me — there's only 22 of them left, after all — so much as the next 1361.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

*nauseated*
beginning of the worst case scenario... but not surprising.
so, yeah, need to go talk to someone about practicing the second.