NSA Spying Documents to be Released As Result of EFF Lawsuit

Mandated vaccination regimes? We know about those, but what about the specific drugs/vaccines that go in each regimen? I don't remember voting for the person at HHS overseeing that.

Nuclear weapons development and stockpiles? How do you know those are being properly supervised or not?

Foreign military sales? How do you know we're only giving our allies ships and other arms that wouldn't give away vital American secrets?

Or what about IRS tax audit policies? How do we know those are applied constitutionally?

Or abroad, how do we know that our diplomats are not doing anything shady?

Or even at home, how do you know the local cops don't have a pen register wiretap running on your cell phone tower this very day?

And it could go on and on. When it comes to the USG it's frankly a bunch of "unknown unknowns" that the people similarly can't really pre-emptively sue about. That's why it's important to get the built-in transparency and oversight measures correct in the first place, as the job of oversight is far too complicated to leave to the people alone.

That's not how politics works. You have to give candidates a reason to listen to you. If you attack both sides equally, you give up any leverage you have.

And so when people warned him that the law he actually wrong might be used to create programs that actually happened, why didn't he reword the law to conform to what he says he meant?

Either way, doesn't matter one fig what Jim personally meant when he drafted the law; what does Congress think they passed is the different question.

Just like you shouldn't proofread your own writing, you shouldn't assume 535 legislators and a President came to the same meaning of your draft legislation as you had in mind when you drafted it.

https://openmedia.ca/

In Citizens United, the ACLU did not take a line which said that for-profit or not-for-profit was relevant so I don't think you can rationalize the line they advocated in retrospect based on facts they argued were irrelevant.

There is a huge issue in anti-discrimination law (regarding the Elaine Photography case) regarding speech as discrimination, and I don't think you can waive away the issues so lightly. Certainly if photography is insufficiently expressive to warrant first amendment protection, I wonder why it is covered under copyright law.... I usually suggest supposing that instead of outright refusing service, if the wedding photographer placed a slogan and logo on every wedding photo along with terms of service that forbid the customer from ever removing it, and which was unfriendly to same-sex couples, (for example "One man. One woman. One holy marriage." emphasizing a religious dimension regarding marriage, and the belief that it is between one man and one woman) if this would be protected. It is clearly political speech in a commercial setting, and it is also clearly discriminatory (in the sense that it would effectively deny same-sex couples a right to enjoyment of their photographs).

If the ACLU is going to take a line that says that speech that is socially harmful is unprotected, maybe they should agree that restrictions on pornography should be up to the legislature if the legislature can show evidence of social harm, but of course they don't. They seem to hold that speech is good, especially political speech, unless it discriminates in ways they don't like, but that is hardly a robust defence of free speech there. The fundamental test of free speech is not whether the accepted viewpoints can be freely accepted, but quite frankly whether the Neonazis can march at Skokie or whether a cake decorator or photographer is going to be compelled to endorse a political message that he or she disagrees deeply with merely because it is a part of a commercial transaction. It is the unpopular views which must be protected.

So I don't think you can have perfect nondiscrimination in a commercial service without saying there is no free speech in the commercial sphere, which is where the case ends up on a collision course with Citizens United and why I wonder if the ACLU draws the line at speech by corporations that gets in the way of their other causes..... (BTW I have a relative, now deceased, who was kicked out of the ACLU for defending first amendment rights more than the ACLU was comfortable with in the 1950's-- he was defending the rights of Communists. They did apologize much later. I would point out that the ACLU has not been exactly a shining beacon of support for the 1st Amendment consistently and this is nothing new.)

Getting back to the EFF, I think they have an easier time because their focus is narrower and so they don't have the issues which get the ACLU (at least arguably correctly) labelled as inconsistent. For this reason, I think that of the two organizations, the EFF is by far the more needed one right now.

With regard to NSA spying, there's nothing that's a clear violation of Constitutional law. The basic premise of the program, as we know it, collecting metadata and collecting calls between foreigners, is very likely Constitutionally sound based on existing precedent. If certain parts do turn out to be unconstitutional, it will be things like minimization procedures not being good enough at filtering out calls from U.S. citizens. And that's not a violation of "clearly established law." Coming down on the wrong side of an issue that judges and law professors can debate about at length isn't something that should give rise to Bivens liability.

That Citizens United overturned previous precedents meant that the FEC employees could not have reasonably determined that their actions were in violation of the Constitution. Holding them accountable is to give the courts an ability to pass ex post facto legislation that even Congress is forbidden from doing. Such has no place in our system of laws.