Nation's Soul Is at Stake in NSA Surveillance Case

[IDemo]

Jennifer Granick - Wired News
08.15.07 | 2:00 AM

Today the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is hearing arguments on two of the most important cases in decades dealing with the rule of law and personal privacy.

The cases are Hepting v. AT&T and Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush. At stake is whether the government can immunize itself from public oversight and prosecution for illegal activities by claiming that whatever actions it took were done in the name of national security. These cases will also influence whether the government is entitled to warehouse citizen phone calls and e-mails for subsequent unsupervised searching and data mining.

(Disclosures: During the trial court proceedings, law professor Susan Freiwald and our Stanford Center for Internet and Society filed a law professors' amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs in Hepting. Wired News has also filed motions to intervene in the case and asked the court to make public evidence filed under seal of AT&T's alleged wiretapping activities. In September of this year, I will join Hepting plaintiffs' counsel the Electronic Frontier Foundation as Civil Liberties Director.)

The plaintiffs in the Al-Haramain case include a charity that claims the government illegally wiretapped calls between itself and its lawyers. During the litigation, the government turned over a document that proved, the plaintiffs say, that the charity was indeed surveilled without a warrant. The government claimed the document was classified top secret and asked the plaintiffs to return it. However, the lawyers still remember what the document said. Now the government wants to prevent the lawyers from using their own memories to prove that the charity was indeed monitored and therefore has the right to sue.

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/commentary/circuitcourt/2007/08/circuitcourt_0815