Obama defends Bush wire taps
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| Mon, 04-06-2009 - 9:16pm |
I thought liberals didn't like the Bush era wiretaps. Other than of course when they voted for them in Congress. It looks like these formerly despised illegal Bush era wiretaps will now become much loved legal legal wire taps when the Obama administration uses them. My how times have changed.
Where did the Obama promise of transparency go?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/06/BARP16TJOQ.DTL&tsp=1
Administration defends Bush wire-taps
The Obama administration is again invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration's wiretapping program, this time against a lawsuit by AT&T customers who claim federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records.
Disclosure of information sought by the customers, "which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security," Justice Department lawyers said in papers filed Friday in San Francisco.
Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lawyer for the customers, said Monday the filing was disappointing in light of the Obama presidential campaign's "unceasing criticism of Bush-era secrecy and promise for more transparency."
In a 2006 lawsuit, the AT&T plaintiffs accused the company of allowing the National Security Agency to intercept calls and e-mails and inspect records of millions of customers without warrants or evidence of wrongdoing.
The suit followed President George W. Bush's acknowledgement in 2005 that he had secretly authorized the NSA in 2001 to monitor messages between U.S. residents and suspected foreign terrorists without seeking court approval, as required by a 1978 law.
Congress passed a new law last summer permitting the surveillance after Bush allowed some court supervision, the extent of which has not been made public. The law also sought to grant immunity to AT&T and other telecommunications companies from suits by customers accusing them of helping the government spy on them.
Nearly 40 such suits from around the nation, all filed after Bush's 2005 disclosure, have been transferred to San Francisco and are pending before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. He is now reviewing a constitutional challenge to last year's immunity law, which the Obama administration is defending.
Walker is also considering a challenge to the surveillance program by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a now-defunct charity, which was inadvertently given a government document in 2004 reportedly showing that its lawyers had been wiretapped during an investigation that landed the group on the government's terrorist list.
The Obama administration is also opposing that suit and has challenged Walker's order to let Al-Haramain's lawyers examine the still-classified surveillance document.
The administration's new filing asks Walker to dismiss a second suit filed by AT&T customers last September that sought to sidestep the telecommunications immunity law by naming only the government, Bush and other top officials as defendants.
Like the earlier suit, the September case relies on a former AT&T technician's declaration that he saw equipment installed at the company's San Francisco office to allow NSA agents to copy all incoming e-mails. The plaintiffs' lawyers say the declaration, and public statements by government officials, revealed a "dragnet" surveillance program that indiscriminately scooped up messages and customer records.
The Justice Department said Friday that government agents monitored only communications in which "a participant was reasonably believed to be associated with al Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization." But proving that the surveillance program did not sweep in ordinary phone customers would require "disclosure of highly classified NSA intelligence sources and methods," the department said.
Individual customers cannot show their messages were intercepted, and thus have no right to sue, because all such information is secret, government lawyers said. They also said disclosure of whether AT&T took part in the program would tell the nation's enemies "which channels of communication may or may not be secure."

Your title to this thread is misleading. They are dismissing the lawsuits not defending them.
>"Obama has ordered his attorney general to review all 23 Bush era assertions of the state secrets privilege. Administration officials say they're in a bind. The fate of most of the cases hinge on the successful application of the privilege, and so in deciding to retract the privilege, the administration fears it will set a precedent that will weaken what President Obama believes is a lawful extension of the executive's authority to protect national security information.
Administration officials say that Obama wants to find a case where he can retract the privilege without harming the privilege.
For the true predictors of what an Obama national security doctrine will look like, we'll have to wait a while. Three contentious provisions of the Patriot Act expire at the end of 2009 as does the Congressional authorization for the NSA's domestic surveillance program. Obama's own sympathies lie with civil libertarians, but he has incorporated the experience of his advisers, most of whom are arguing for a less obvious balance between security and liberty. Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, knows more about the NSA program than anyone in Obama's inner circle, and while not privy to the Bush administration's secret debate over its legality, he is said to believe that the program worked."<
Segment from.... Decoding Obama Law
http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/04/_judging_by_his_campaign.php