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Justices Turn Back Challenge to Broader US Eavesdropping
The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned back a challenge to a federal law that broadened the government’s power to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails.
The decision, by a 5-to-4 vote that divided along ideological lines, probably means the Supreme Court will never rule on the cons utionality of that 2008 law.
More broadly, the ruling illustrated how hard it is to mount court challenges to a wide array of an errorism measures, including renditions of terrorism suspects to foreign countries and targeted killings using drones, in light of the combination of government secrecy and judicial doctrines limiting access to the courts.
“Absent a radical sea change from the courts, or more likely intervention from the Congress, the coffin is slamming shut on the ability of private citizens and civil liberties groups to challenge government counterterrorism policies, with the possible exception of Guantánamo,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates who challenged the cons utionality of the law could not show they had been harmed by it and so lacked standing to sue. The plaintiffs’ fear that they would be subject to surveillance in the future was too speculative to establish standing, he wrote.
Justice Alito also rejected arguments based on the steps the plaintiffs had taken to escape surveillance, including traveling to meet sources and clients in person rather than talking to them over the phone or sending e-mails. “They cannot manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipation of nonimminent harms,” he wrote of the plaintiffs.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/14833...-eavesdropping
the authoritarian Big Brother state trumps the Cons ution and any sense of democratic "freedom and liberty". The govt own our asses and will break any law or regulation to crush us.
