A.C.L.U. Files Suit Over Phone Surveillance Program

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/aclu-files-suit-over-phone-surveillance-program.html?pagewanted=all

by ParkerK • 13 years ago

308 39 13 years ago

nytimes.com

gesman• 13 years ago

Scenario 1: NSA loses, People wins, Lawyers wins

Scenario 2: NSA wins, People lose, Lawyers wins

Now, who's the smartest?

jpdoctor2• 13 years ago

I've never considered donating to the ACLU before this incident, but I've never considered them ambulance chasers either.

jondtaylor• 13 years ago

What do you mean by "ambulance chasers"?

rayiner10• 13 years ago

Cynicism ahead: periods of strife and conflict are among the best time to be a lawyer. The job isn't fun when everyone is happy and cooperative and agrees on everything.

nostromo• 13 years ago

I love to make anti-lawyer jokes as much as the next guy, but it's just not true for the ACLU, EFF, and other public interest organizations.

ACLU lawyers make a fraction of what they could working for private law firms.

According to this article from 2007, a job at the ACLU will get you $59k starting wage vs. $160k working for private law firms. Note that these folks have the same college loans to payback. I think we owe them our respect and gratitude.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20070311/SUB/70311015

nullc• 13 years ago

Note that these folks have the same college loans to payback

This isn't always the case: http://www.studentaid.ed.gov/sites/default/files/public-serv...

(At least employees of the ACLU foundation are eligible for loan forgiveness, and $59k is low enough that it would actually matter)

baddox• 13 years ago

The court building janitors win too. I don't see your point.

DannyBee• 13 years ago

Doubtful. Most of the time you have to file N copies of a brief, where N > 10.

(There is a lot of electronic case filing now, but ..) For example, for the supreme court, you need 40 copies.

These poor bastards lose no matter what, because of how many times they have to empty the recycling bins.

oceanstone• 13 years ago

ACLU & EFF, moving our society forward.

h0w412d• 13 years ago

They both work tirelessly, mostly for people who don't even know they exist. Money donated to them is money well spent.

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

Or in the ACLU's case, people with irrational hatred toward them.

rayiner10• 13 years ago

For people who think that lawsuits can't do anything:

In the 1970's and 1980's, the courts were extremely active in policing the government. It was by all measures a much scarier time. Obama has a few drone strikes--Reagan was funding revolutions in other countries. It was the height of the cold war and the threat of nuclear holocaust, and the palpable fear about communism paled anything we see today over terrorism. Even in the early 2000's, in the throes of the aftermath of 9/11, the Supreme Court forced the Bush administration to dramatically adjust its policy on giving legal representation to inmates at Guantanamo.

Since then what has happened is a process of delegitimization of the judiciary. And both sides of the aisle have been to blame for this: from the right's talk of activist judges to Obama's physically menacing over the Justices during his state of the union. The judiciary has been at fault too: having overextended itself in the culture wars of the 1960's and 1970's, it very self-conciously adopted a mantra of extreme judicial restraint.

What you have left today is a judiciary that might no longer be able to effectively police the government. I've made it clear elsewhere that I don't think the current surveillance program is illegal, but it might not matter one way or the other. The judiciary's role in our system of checks and balances is ultimately rooted in faith in the legitimacy of the institution, and that faith has been dramatically eroded over the last two decades.

bmelton• 13 years ago

Another, perhaps overlooked fact, is that the path to the Supreme Court often starts with a lowly lawsuit claiming damages. Without somebody filing an initial suit at the local level, the case won't ever have the opportunity for SCOTUS review.

timberlane• 13 years ago

that faith has been dramatically eroded over the last two decades...

In hindsight Bush. vs. Gore did a lot to erode this faith, and the ruling was probably a mistake.

Although, to it's credit, the court did not overturn Obamacare, probably because deciding such a partian battle would have further eroded this faith.

rayiner10• 13 years ago

Liberals are mad about citizens united, but Roberts is doing yeoman's work. In hindsight, do you really want the government deciding what is political speech and what is impermissible electioneering? Or that the corporations targeted by the NSA have no speech rights? Then he threaded the needle with obamacare. Upholding it, but reiterating the narrower commerce power of Lopez.

adventured• 13 years ago

A scarier time? The executive branch has been given the power to murder Americans without any proper civilian judicial oversight. The executive branch has been given the power to indefinitely detain Americans, without any civilian judicial oversight. All the while the Feds are tracking and recording everything they can get their hands on.

A few drone strikes? We've built drone bases around the globe and are murdering thousands of innocent civilians with those strikes.

Fund revolutions in other countries? We're doing that in Syria right now. We actively participated in the revolution in Libya.

rayiner10• 13 years ago

Massive hyperbole. I guarantee you its not the first time in history Americans have been killed on the battlefield while fighting for the other side. The executive branch has been given no power to indefinitely detain Americans. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. The people who have been detained are not Americans.

The scale of proxy wars engaged in then versus today can scarcely be compared its so different.

pvnick• 13 years ago

It may not be "illegal" per se, but I would certainly say that it's either unconstitutional or at the very least against the spirit of the constitution. For whatever the hell that's worth...

rayiner10• 13 years ago

Whether its against the spirit of the constitution depends on how you perceive the nature of monitoring. The "spirit" of the 4th amendment is to keep the police from invading your personal space. If you think of your gdrive as a natural extension of your desk drawer, then I can see how you could interpret it as against the spirit, because the NSA looking through those documents is like the police rummaging through your desk.

That's not the only way to view the situation, though. That's the "software" view of the world. I take a "hardware" view of the world. That data is sitting on Google's property. Its servers, its hard drives. You've given up posession of that data. Under that view, rummaging through that data is neither unconstitutional nor against the spirit thereof.

more generally, the constitution just has nothing to say about the larger issue of "tracking." The founders wrote the 4th with a specific grievance in mind: British searches of houses with very broad warrants. They just didn't address the government collecting information you left out in the world to track you.

temphn• 13 years ago

Reagan funded revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Obama's State Department is giving arms and money to Islamic revolutionaries in Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, and other countries. "We came, we saw, he died!"

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html?pagewante...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y

And there isn't even a geostrategic goal like turning Afghanistan against the USSR; it's just setting fire to formerly stable Muslim nations in the name of "democracy", just as Bush did.

A.C.L.U. Files Suit Over Phone Surveillance Program

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