How DOJ Gagged Google Over Surveillance of Wikileaks Volunteer

It seems to me that secrecy is the default state of the federal government now, not the exception, and between the NSA and gag orders keeping me (or you) from knowing you're privacy is being violated, my right to defend myself and redress against the government are both violated.

The Founding Fathers knew the price paid by the general public when government acted for its own gain first, and held dominion over the population. Their attempt to reign in its powers and make it truly a collective representation of the will of the people was in reaction to oligarchy and monarchy - both of which make the relationship between the people and their government adversarial at best.

The U.S. government - and more and more, state and local governments - feel entirely adversarial to the people they claim to represent. Lobbies, super pacs, laws written by the entertainment industry and so on make it pretty clear we're bound to an oligarchy which attempts to masquerade itself as a democracy. There is rarely cooperation between the general public and their government - more often, the general public finds itself universally against (SOPA) or universally disgusted by (NSA, Snowden) the actions of the government that claims to be their mouthpiece, working for justice for all.

So long as the judiciary upholds the government's power grabs against the people, there's little that can be done.

Edit: kudos to Google for fighting as hard as they could for the Fourth Amendment (and First). At least someone is. Secrecy was desired because of the huge public backlash the last time they acted so egregiously. Instead of the Judiciary acknowledging how out of bounds the last action was, they instead agreed public knowledge of bad acts was an unnecessary burden on government overreach.

Edit 2:

However, the Justice Department asserted that “journalists have no special privilege to resist compelled disclosure of their records, absent evidence that the government is acting in bad faith,”

I contend that this seizure of private data, with a threshold of evidence far below a Fourth Amendment level, ignoring historic protections for journalists based on the absolute importance of their work in keeping the government in check, is the government acting in the worst faith possible.

It's interesting to get a glimpse into the lengths that Google goes to push back against government requests.

I imagine that the NSA is building a database with every single person on the planet sourced from multiple databases, both PRISMed, FISAed and stolen, and each person has a 'risk' and 'delinquency' factor, just like credit ratings. They also have an 'influence' factor and next to it a link that takes the operator to the available naked pics of the subject for blackmail purposes.

What's always baffling to me is how seldom stuff like this is leaked -- all it takes is one person with the right access, conscience and the technical skills to work out how to siphon off their own unofficial copy, then put that unofficial copy anonymously on the internet when the appeals to do it legally have been exhausted.

Anyone have the actual decisions that were given? I can't seem to fine them.