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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

The legal theory (or practice) that you have to prove you have been personally hurt in order to sue the government. Often the government claims that if you cannot prove you have been personally affected you can't sue, and then uses secrecy laws to ensure you can't prove you have been hurt.

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Nit: you have to prove you have been personally hurt to sue anybody. It's a Constitutional perquisite to the federal judiciary's use of power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_or_Controversy_Clause.

It is also used to prevent random serial litigants from clogging up the court system with BS cases. Requiring the plaintiff to show that they have actually suffered harm is not a difficult bar to cross in most cases and the benefits this requirement brings to the legal system as a whole outweigh its inconvenience in cases like this.

Not to say that this is not a useful standard, but I do think we are beyond "inconvenience" here.

Following the current trajectory, surveillance is only going to grow as technology makes it easier and easier to gather more and more information without being noticed.

For all the handwringing about call records I can't help but think that the NSA has quite a few technologies that would make peoples heads spin. God knows what they have in skunk works.

I know, but I also know judges often rule based on "common sense" and "intent" of harm, regardless of the letter of the law.

Surely the fact that documents say that millions of people have been spied upon with such a program means that the judge should allow a case by an organization like EFF or HRW go through, even if the employees of that organization weren't personally affected by it? There should be a "for public interest" clause somewhere, or at least as an unwritten rule.

How do you decide what organizations get that special privilege?

If I were the government, I'd go a step further and throw anyone that could prove they had been harmed in prison for acquiring state secrets. Should make the law suits drop to zero.

All that free time, all those prison legal libraries, and now a completely unjust prison term? I know how I'd be spending my time in the clink and it wouldn't be brewing pruno...

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