Federal Court Invalidates Gag Order on National Security Letter Recipient
calyxinstitute.org
calyxinstitute.org
Maybe he really wanted to, but then got told by the NSA that, in fact, he is not allowed to do it, and then got a gag order to speak of it no more.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/16/state-of-decept...
After a joint lawsuit filing of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenging the NSL, the gag order and the constitutionality of the NSL on behalf of the IA - the FBI withdrew the NSL as well as the gag order. [1]
As such, the gag order and NSL was never invalidated in IA, Brewster Kale (ACLU, EFF) vs. FBI.
Who wants to engage into any kind of business with an American partner with this kind of police state? I think even in China the police needs to gets warrants.
edit: added to
> The Court’s order will go into effect in 90 days. Mr. Merrill will remain gagged for that period, in order to allow the government time to decide whether to appeal the decision.
The government has 60 days to file an appeal. But even filing the appeal won't by itself prevent the district court's order from going into effect. It'll have to file a motion for stay, and the appellate court will have to decide to keep the district court order from going into effect pending appeal.
The decision of that motion will be an early look into what the appellate court is thinking. The standard for granting a stay requires the appellate court to conclude that the appellant (here, the government) has a likelihood of succeeding on the merits of the appeal.
No disrespect to any law students, but if you're going to step to the national security state, your law game had better be "A".
I wouldn't consider over 10% of one's life expectancy (at least for now) to be "speedy"
This is not a criminal prosecution. It is a civil suit.
(Note: A lot of states have deadlines on appeal resolution, etc, for criminal cases)
While I look forward to the first instance of someone standing up and very publically and broadly violating an NSL to get such an abomination into a real court, that shouldn't be a necessary step. The whole mess needs abolishing, but in the interim, 10 years is about 9.95 years too long.
Kinda like how you have to show you've been harmed to sue someone. Nice rules in theory, but in practice the government will use them like loopholes to keep themselves out of trouble.
The government was already protected.
For example, you literally cannot sue the US government for torts without its permission. This has been absolute since day 1 of our government.
The government has decided to abrogate immunity in a bunch of situations, but in general, the government was already protected from whatever it wanted to be.
If you want to multiply the judiciary budget by a factor of 50 (which would be a lot of your tax dollars), yeah, i bet we could make this work, but as to the philosophical question:
Yes. If you have no danger of actually being criminally charged, the courts should be free to resolve the issue at their leisure. Yes, there is a chilling effect, blah blah blah. That is not the same as "some guy gets the death penalty or thrown in prison for life". Courts resolve those issues first, and others second. Period.
" that shouldn't be a necessary step."
Sorry, but i completely disagree. Criminal charges involve possibility of being thrown in prison. Civil things do not.
"The whole mess needs abolishing, but in the interim, 10 years is about 9.95 years too long."
Remember this the next time the federal judiciary has to sit in front of congress and beg for money to fill the existing vacancies in appeals courts, let alone become large enough to make what you want happen.
The pendency of appeals and length of lawsuits is directly related to docket sizes growing without bound.
And there's another rather obvious solution to the volume of cases going through the criminal justice system that doesn't involve expanding it to handle that volume...
Yet the history of our country is one of "commit civil disobedience and deal with consequences if you actually want change". Remember, they were revolutionaries.
"And there's another rather obvious solution to the volume of cases going through the criminal justice system that doesn't involve expanding it to handle that volume... "
Good luck with that one too :)
I don't know how long these gag orders should remain in force, but they clearly need to expire at some point, and 11 years is clearly long enough.
I hope other NSL recipients are emboldened by this outcome to file similar suits.
That is a tired old excuse. I think it's safe to say that cat is out of the bag now. The government wants to protect these methodologies from disclosure because they are in fact unconstitutional, and disclosure (as in part of the official public record) threatens existing convictions as well as present and future investigations. Additionally, there is probably more than a little bit of paranoia within gov't that someone might get in hot water over the illegal things they've been up to; though I'll believe that's a real fear after I see a gov't agent actually go to jail.
Because cases that have little impact beyond pure Constitutional law often have little profit upside, law clinics are one of the mechanisms by which such cases reach the appellate level and the Supreme Court. The students that work on them often go on to prestigious Federal clerkships, major law firms, etc.
The law clinic at Yale, as one would expect, is extremely well-regarded.