The NSA and YOU!?

[madmusic]

The most mind-blowing example comes from Albany, New York, where two men (Yassin Aref and Mohammad Hossain) are accused of laundering money for terrorists. In that case, the defendants filed a motion asking whether any evidence against them came from the NSA program. Despite the fact that their lawyers had security clearance, there were nineteen secret communications between the government's lawyers and the court which the defense lawyers never saw. The punch line: the court rejected the motion to find out whether the NSA illegally spied on defendants, and classified its own ruling, essentially issuing a secret opinion in a criminal trial.

There's no precedent for this anywhere in American history. Judges have sometimes blacked out parts of their opinions to protect classified secrets. But to black out the entire opinion is just astonishing.

You have to go back a long way to find something this outrageous. My favorite comparison is the way the Star Chamber--the secretive English court of inquisition that served the will of tyrants like Henry VIII and Charles I--banned the publishing of all newspapers in England for six years starting in October 1632.

We're not quite at the level of banning reporting about NSA cases (yet), but even our most respected newspapers have been feeling the pressure of the national security claims and self-censoring--the Washington Post got copies of the documents proving the NSA was spying on the attorneys in the Oregon case and, instead of running a story about it, turned in the documents to the government. The AT&T whistleblower apparently gave his evidence of phone company complicity with the NSA to at least one major paper, which seems to have done nothing with it. And the New York Times held the story of the NSA scandal until after the 2004 election. Good thing these editors weren't in charge during Watergate or the Pentagon papers controversy.

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