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I'm curious how this will turn out. It's obvious that the State will try to assert state secrets, but we've already seen another court say that now that the in
by Osiris 13y ago
I'm curious how this will turn out. It's obvious that the State will try to assert state secrets, but we've already seen another court say that now that the information is public, they can no longer assert that privilege.
When Snowden first came out, I was skeptical that the information leaked would actually cause any real change to occur within governmental institutions. If lawsuits like this continue to pop up, we may begin to see the courts restraining the executive in a significant way.
A big problem here is that people in the executive firmly believe that these programs deter terrorism in the same way they believed that torture would provide actionable intelligence. They need to stop and re-evaluate whether other tactics may be as or more effective than blanket surveillance.
- ihsw 13y agoIt's not about terrorism anymore, but instead these broad-sweeping and baseless spying programs are integrated in their regular intelligence briefings regardless of whether they're terrorism-related. I wouldn't be surprised if they can cut a significant amount of their intelligence infrastructure because of the operational efficiency, I'd even go a step further and say that the DHS has been coaxing all of the state local law enforcement to pool all of their data centrally to the NSA -- so now all levels of law enforcement rely entirely on the NSA's data processing capabilities. The amount of data-gathering by the local and state law enforcement agencies is massive and they likely have very little/no infrastructure to handle this data, so they'd pass it off to the federal government.