Supreme Court Snubs Wikipedia Bid To Challenge NSA Surveillance (reuters.com) 35
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a bid by the operator of the popular Wikipedia internet encyclopedia to resurrect its lawsuit against the National Security Agency challenging mass online surveillance. From a report: Turning away the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal, the justices left in place a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit based on the government's assertion of what is called the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that can shut down litigation if disclosure of certain information would damage U.S. national security. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Wikimedia Foundation sued in 2015 challenging the legality of the NSA's "Upstream" surveillance of foreign targets through the "suspicionless" collection and searching of internet traffic on data transmission lines flowing into and out of the United States.
Everybody wants transparency... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody wants transparency... about what other people are doing, but wants to keep what they are doing secret.
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Rights are bestowed by God
Imaginary concepts can't bestow things. That's why you don't get any rights the legal system doesn't protect.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Everybody wants transparency... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rights aren't universally recognized because there's no such thing as natural rights, and/or vice versa. That's why we have to fight for each right, and then fight some more to protect it. Nobody is just handing them out.
Re: Everybody wants transparency... (Score:2)
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It's called "mental masturbation" because it's best done in private.
What, you mean pretending things are true because they sound nice? Yes, people should certainly keep that idiocy to themselves.
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Rights are not self-evident [Re:Everybody wants... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, despite Jefferson's noble words, rights are not "self-evident" nor endowed by the creator. For better or worse, rights are a social construct, and what rights you have, or think you have, depends on the society you live in.
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Re:Rights are not self-evident [Re:Everybody wants (Score:5, Interesting)
Back when Jefferson was crafting his noble words, there was very little society to be had- and securing your own agency was mostly an individuals responsibility.
The point of the above poster was that our system of government was supposed to put restrictions on the state, not the individual- anything not specifically spelled out was left to the states, and anything not spelled out by the states is explicitly allowed. That was what made us so special, and was the opposite of the way things were done at the time.
Rights are not granted by anything... they just are. We've granted the state license to curtail certain rights for our benefit- but the state seems to have convince a lot of us that it's granted us limited rights for it's own benefit.
The state has spent the last century growing it's own power at our collective expense, and now here we are- arguing over who grants what freedoms to who. We've progressed so far from securing our own agency at the point of our own rifles that we've forgotten whos supposed to be in charge- and now our institutions are blatantly breaking the social contract and daring us to do anything about it.
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The point of the above poster was that our system of government was supposed to ...
"Our system of government"
Which is exactly what I said: What rights you have, or think you have, depends on the society you live in."
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Spy's gonna spy. It's the job.
If you have a secret, keep it to yourself. Otherwise, assume that the spies know it.
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Spy's gonna spy. It's the job.
If you have a secret, keep it to yourself. Otherwise, assume that the spies know it.
A spy once told me two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.
Hypocrites (Score:3, Interesting)
The Supreme Court, with some members so concerned about the original text of the constitution, affirms a legal doctrine that doesn't have any basis in the text of the constitution.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:4, Insightful)
In general "The Left" uses the courts to actually enforce the law, because as it is written, things like the constitution lean very heavily towards "The Lefts" values.
It's like reality, it tends to have a liberal bias. That is why there is news media, and then there is "Conservative media". Same reason religions and communist/fascist countries need their own special media.
In general "The Right" likes to violate the law because they can't get what they want passed. They also very often don't want to actually put their biases and prejudices into actual writing, but they expect the actual enforcement to include them.
"The Right" has spent decades getting their politicians on the Supreme Court. If "The Left" played the same political games as the "The Right" with the courts, the SC would still be "Left" controlled. 1 GOP SCJ only got his seat because a "Left" judge retired under Bush Sr instead of waiting for Clinton, and the Dems in the senate approved him. He still whines about how they were mean to him, except he ignores that they still voted to approve him. RBJ would've retired the instant she got sick under Obama and dem Senate, instead of going until she died. And, of course the GOP ignored their "election year" SCJ "rule" .
GOP appointed judges only leave the Supreme Court under a Democrat president if they die from a sudden illness. If they get sick, they immediately retire under the next GOP president, and if they want to retire they wait until a GOP president. The problem is that Democrat appointed justices have been acting like independent judges against politicians.
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It is the left that is currently working hard to introduce a crack in the First Amendment to ban harrassing speech.
Yes, the right soent decades getting justices on the court. They are playing a game of catch up on the left's tricks.
All this does is prove your claim the cinstitution is values of the left is circular reasoning thanks to courts.
I do not defend the Republicans. But nor will I sit still while the left tromps on the constitution in its own way.
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> It is the left that is currently working hard to introduce
> a crack in the First Amendment to ban harrassing
> speech.
Oh really? What legislation has the left introduced to this effect? Did it originate in the house or the senate? Who are its authors and sponsors? Did it make it out of committee... and which committee... to the open floors of either house of congress? Was it brought to a vote? What were the results? Did Biden sign it? Come on... this all on the public record. If you're no
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Not really. The Constitution leans toward liberal values and the left left liberalism behind long ago. At this point liberalism is a conservative value the left wants to progress from.
Words have meanings, and you're ignoring them. The bulk of the democrats are simply not leftists. Neoliberalism is fiscal conservatism, with a veneer of social liberalism. The DNC is not "the left", although all of the leftists in Congress are either registered as independents or democrats.
The right didn't put politicians on the Supreme Court, they put the most highly qualified Constitutional experts in the country on the court.
The interviews with their latest three justices proved that conclusively false.
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The Supreme Court, with some members so concerned about the original text of the constitution, affirms a legal doctrine that doesn't have any basis in the text of the constitution.
Pot, meet kettle.. you're both sooty black.
The Left uses the Courts all the time to ram home things they can't do by legislating in Congress. They do this because they know there's no chance in hell any other way.
Legislating from the bench should be abolished, and the practitioners and proponents hung from the front lawn of the White House.
Honestly, its just like USA and China. I can't tell which is the pot and which is the kettle, theres just too much soot.
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with some members so concerned about the original text of the constitution
Yes, they should blow up the document that set them up.
But actually, no; they should apply the rules as given to them. Suddenly deciding to void them isn't how the supreme court was set up.
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> affirms a legal doctrine that doesn't have any basis in the text of the constitution.
Agreed, but notice that nine of the most highly-educated and qualified legal minds in the country rarely agree what the Constitution means.
What's Rule of Law if nobody can even know what the law says?
What's Law and Order if the Order is arbitrary and capricious?
According to half the IRS agents, you are guilty of a several serious felonies. The other half says you're fine.
Welcome to the United States of Anxiety.
It's no
This Supreme Court is a corrupt parody of law. (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not law. And it is for damn sure not order.
They just didn't hear the case. (Score:1, Informative)
Despite the hyperbolic headline they simply didn't choose to hear the case. Happens all the time. Sometimes because it isn't a good example of what the court wants to address and sometimes because they know how they'd have to rule and aren't ready to overturn those carts.
Another case they recently decided not to hear brought suit against the members of congress who voted against a third of congress calling for additional investigation of the anomalies in the 2020 election. Nothing in the case hinged on anyt
Supreme Political Court of United States (Score:3)
The devil's in the details, not the headlines. (Score:3)
As normal, the headlines are making huge generalizations that aren't really supported by the details.
The case was initially dismissed due to standing. That is, even if there is spying going on the people being spied on couldn't show they were actually harmed.
The fourth circuit agreed almost entirely, except against one of the plaintiffs, the Wikimedia Foundation. That ruling [documentcloud.org] dropped it against 8 of the plaintiffs, but said that the Foundation had a plausible case that might allow them to show they were inured. This included statements that "But accepting the technical rules about the Internet as true, and given that Wikimedia is applying them in an appropriate context (i.e., it uses the rules to explain the technical means through which Upstream surveillance functions), we find this conclusion reasonable and entitled to the presumption of truth.", and that "To put it simply, Wikimedia has plausibly alleged that its communications travel all of the roads that a communication can take, and that the NSA seizes all of the communications along at least one of those roads. Thus, at least at this stage of the litigation, Wikimedia has standing to sue for a violation of the Fourth Amendment." In other words, there was a chance that the Foundation might have been actually harmed, so that potential harm needed to be evaluated.
That ruling set it back to the trial court, so instead of being 9 plaintiffs v NSA, it was Wikimedia Foundation v NSA.
Back at the trial court, the government invoked both the issues of standing (that the Foundation wasn't actually harmed) and the state secret's privilege (that digging too deeply into the details might hurt state secrets). The judge ruled again that the Foundation didn't have standing.
Back to the appeals court for the second time, the appeals court reviewed it. Here is their second ruling" [arstechnica.net]. The ruling agrees that it is likely the NSA is monitoring the connections, so they agree with Wikimedia there. The ruling also agrees with Wikimedia that it is likely continuing, as there is no evidence submitted to the contrary. So they agree with the first and second prongs of Wikimedia's arguments. For the third and final prong of standing, the appeals court wrote that they agree in part. Then they mince words about some grammar in the law, "will acquire" versus "may acquire", for example, and that ultimately Wikimedia almost certainly has standing although there is some potential room for error due to grammar. So ultimately they agree with the Foundation there.
But then the appeals ruling looks at the state secrets doctrine, and that even though the company has standing to sue, the government has the right to prevent further discovery to force the government to release the documents about how they're doing it. There is about 20 pages of technical, legal reasoning, but ultimately agree that the government can't be forced to release those documents due to state secrets doctrine, and that as a result, they don't have the evidence they need to go forward. It isn't that they were not injured, instead that the Foundation cannot legally force the government to disclose documents about how they were injured.
The supreme court didn't comment on the case, they didn't actively "snub" like the headline says, they simply didn't accept it to be reviewed on appeal. They only accept a tiny percentage of cases appealed to them, so it's not that surprising.
OBVIOUSLY !! (Score:2)
The US Constitution unequivocally grants the federal govt the power to levy "duties, imposts and excises". Necessarily included are powers of inspection to adminster such. The NSA is just operating a modern(?) Customs House. Now, copying and retaining data is a whole separate question of copyright violation.