Posted on 04/07/2014 9:15:07 AM PDT by xzins
The US Supreme Court is chickening out and taking a step back from the entire NSA scandal. Rather than making a final decision on whether the bulk telephone metadata surveillance program is constitutional, the Supreme Court has decided to decline the case.
Instead, the Court has now left lower courts to contradict each other over the legality of this particular NSA surveillance program. One court, for instance, has described the metadata program as an “almost-Orwellian” effort.
In fact, this particular petition brought to the Supreme Court concerns precisely a decision given out by US District Judge Richard Leon, who also wrote that in his opinion, America’s founding fathers would be aghast at the spying practices.
Political activist Larry Klayman skipped the Appeal Court and went straight to the Supreme Court, saying that this is a case of imperative public importance, so it should immediately get the attention of the highest court. It should be mentioned that the Supreme Court doesn’t normally pick out cases before they go to the Federal Appeal Court.
The decision to ignore this particular case comes just before the White House is expected to come up with a series of more drastic reforms for the National Security Agency. So far, these reforms have extended to restricting the NSA’s access to the records and having a third party hold them rather than the agency itself, as if that will fix the issue generated by the initial collection.
Most people don’t really expect big changes in the way the United States conducts surveillance considering its weak response thus far and clear unwillingness to make any real changes.
The future of the telephony metadata collection program will most likely be decided by politicians rather than judges. There are several important bills awaiting in Congress, including some that will considerably cut down on NSA’s surveillance powers.
The intelligence community has been lobbying the Congress not to pass the bill, but social pressure might eventually pay off and the bills could still pass.
One of these bills has been written by Jim Sensenbrenner, the same man who wrote the Patriot Act, which the NSA uses to hide behind whenever it explains why a certain surveillance program is legal. Sensenbrenner now wants to set things right and make sure there’s no loophole to be used by the intelligence agencies.
bkmk
What reason need s to happen is for the phrase “reasonable expectation of privacy” needs to be elliminated from our legal lexicon. This is the worst sort of orwellian phrase that has been used over and over again to increase the power of the state to do whatever the hell it wants to do to us.
Yes, they all have something to hide. And the presidents that appointed them all knew the dirt. Yet they appointed them anyway. Probably because they thought they could control them. Then when they left the white house the next president had even more dirt.
Yes but even worse is making Roberts chief justice. Bush should have made Clarence Thomas chief justice.
—
Yeah, I never got that. Didn’t bush even look into how this guy got two blonde kids from Central America?? No red flag there?? Then again, bush floated that dreadful woman as a SC nominee. Sheesh.
OK Thanks.
Problem is, with this SCOTUS, a federal player can catch the ball in the parking lot and it's still ruled in-bounds.
““You take this case and we will spill the beans about X, Y, and Z....”
The Supreme Court is OWNED!!! Obamacare taught us this valuable lesson...”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.