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<H1>White House Tries To Prevent Judge From Ruling On Surveillance
Efforts</H1></DIV>
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<DIV class=cat-date-line><SPAN class=cat-date-line2><A
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rel="category tag">Resist!</A></SPAN> <SPAN class=cat-date-line3><A
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surveillance</A>, <A href="http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/snowden/"
rel=tag>Snowden</A> </SPAN><BR><SPAN class=cat-date-line4>By Charlie
Savage and David E. Sanger, <A
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target=_blank>www.nytimes.com</A><BR>December 23rd, 2013</SPAN><BR></DIV>
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<H2 itemprop="headline">Government Admits Program Going On Since 2001,
Sensitive Secrets Still Remain Undisclosed, Asserts “State Secrets
Privilege” to Try and Stop Litigation</H2>
<H3>Cindy Cohn, the legal director for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, which is leading one of the cases, called the government’s
assertion “very troubling.”</H3>
<P><A
href="http://rt.com/usa/bush-nsa-spying-clapper-632/"><STRONG>More Clapper
reveals Bush-era docs showing NSA spying dragnet started
2001</STRONG></A></P>
<P itemprop="headline"><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 1.5em; FONT-SIZE: 14px">WASHINGTON — The Obama
administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California
from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs
authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent
disclosures about </SPAN><A
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 1.5em; FONT-SIZE: 14px"
title="More articles about National Security Agency, U.S."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org">National
Security Agency</A><SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 1.5em; FONT-SIZE: 14px"> spying were not enough
to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state
secrets.</SPAN></P>
<DIV>
<P itemprop="articleBody">In a <A
href="http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/70683717031/dni-announces-the-declassification-of-the">set
of filings</A> in the two long-running cases in the Northern District
of California, the government acknowledged for the first time that the
N.S.A. started systematically collecting data about Americans’ emails and
phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls
without warrants. The government had long argued that disclosure of these
and other secrets would put the country at risk if they came out in
court.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">But the government said that despite recent
leaks by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public
a fuller scope of the surveillance and data collection programs put in
place after the Sept. 11 attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in
any courtroom discussion of their details — like whether the plaintiffs
were targets of intelligence collection or whether particular
telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had helped the
agency.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">“Disclosure of this still-classified information
regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence
activities implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to
cause extremely grave damage to the national security of the United
States,” wrote the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper
Jr.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">So, he said, he was continuing to assert
the <A title="Times Topics page."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/state_secrets_privilege/index.html">state
secrets privilege</A>, which allows the government to seek to block
information from being used in court even if that means the case must be
dismissed. The Justice Department wants the judge to dismiss the matter
without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth
Amendment.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">The filings also included similar declarations
from earlier stages of the California litigation, which were classified at
the time and shown only to the court but were declassified on Friday. The
judge, Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California, had
ordered the government to evaluate how the disclosures since Mr. Snowden’s
leaks had affected its earlier invocations of the <A
title="More articles about the state secrets privilege."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/state_secrets_privilege/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier">state
secrets privilege</A>.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">The plaintiffs have until late January to file a
response. Cindy Cohn, the legal director for the <A
href="https://www.eff.org/">Electronic Frontier Foundation</A>, which is
leading one of the cases, called the government’s assertion “very
troubling.” She said that despite the Snowden revelations, it was still
essentially saying, “We can’t say whether the American people have been
spied on by their government.”</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">Mr. Clapper’s unclassified affidavit to the
court — he also filed a classified version, the documents state —
contrasts sharply with the findings of <A
title="More articles about Barack Obama"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per">President
Obama</A>’s advisory committee on signals intelligence, which <A
title="Times article, Dec. 18, 2013."
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/us/politics/report-on-nsa-surveillance-tactics.html">said
in a report made public</A> on Wednesday that the collection of bulk
telephone data was of little proven value.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">The panel’s experts concluded that “there has
been no instance in which N.S.A. could say with confidence that the
outcome would have been different” in a terror investigation without the
collection of the telephone data. “Moreover, now that the existence of the
program has been disclosed publicly, we suspect that it is likely to be
less useful still.”</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">Mr. Clapper, however, suggested that the program
was one of many that needed to continue, and he discussed a litany of
threats, mostly emanating from Al Qaeda and its affiliates, that he said
made the program vital. He argued that revealing additional details,
including whom it targets or how companies like AT&T and Verizon have
given the N.S.A. access to its equipment and data, would be harmful.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">“Disclosing or confirming further details about
these activities could seriously undermine an important tool — metadata
collection and analysis — for tracking possible terrorist plots,” he
wrote, and could reveal methodology, thus “helping foreign adversaries
evade detection.”</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">Still, Mr. Clapper’s description of the program
as “an important tool” for tracking possible plots was a downgrade in
rhetorical urgency. In earlier, now-declassified court filings, he and
other officials had portrayed it as “an essential tool.”</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">Mr. Obama, in a news conference on Friday,
strongly suggested that he was looking for a way to split the difference
between these two views. He stopped short of endorsing the advisory
group’s recommendation that the data should be held by telecommunications
companies or a private consortium that has yet to be created.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean
we necessarily should,” he said, repeating a line he has used often.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">The newly declassified affidavits discuss a
now-familiar list of threats to the United States coming from Al Qaeda and
groups that share some of its ideology, including <A
title="Times article, Aug. 11, 2006."
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/world/europe/11qaeda.html">a plot
in 2006</A> to blow up airliners over the Atlantic Ocean and
the <A title="Times article, May 1, 2010."
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/nyregion/02timessquare.html?pagewanted=all">attempted
car bombing in Times Square</A> in 2010. But one of the documents
makes reference to a renewed effort by Al Qaeda to obtain a nuclear weapon
after 2005. It did not cite evidence.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">The California litigation over warrantless
surveillance represents the remnants of a wave of lawsuits filed in 2006
after <A title="Times article, Dec. 16, 2005."
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all">The
New York Times revealed</A> that the Bush administration had
authorized a program of wiretapping without warrants. Most of the initial
suits were filed against telecommunications companies and were dismissed
after Congress passed a law retroactively immunizing them for
participating in the programs.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">One of the lawsuits had also named the N.S.A. as
a defendant, and in 2008 the Electronic Frontier Foundation refiled a case
against the N.S.A. and a series of government officials, challenging the
range of domestic surveillance and data collection activities. Several of
the claims in those cases have been dismissed, but the First and Fourth
Amendment ones remain.</P>
<P itemprop="articleBody">The new filings came five days after another
judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court in the District of
Columbia, ruled — in a case filed shortly after Mr. Snowden’s first
reported disclosures — that the call-logging program in its current form
probably violated the Fourth Amendment and called it “almost Orwellian.”
The government is expected to appeal that decision.</P></DIV>
<DIV id=crp_related class=crp_related>
<H3>Related Posts:</H3>
<UL>
<LI><A class=crp_title
href="http://www.popularresistance.org/federal-judge-allows-effs-nsa-mass-spying-case-to-proceed/">Federal
Judge Allows EFF’s NSA Mass Spying Case to Proceed</A><SPAN
class=crp_date> July 9, 2013</SPAN> </LI>
<LI><A class=crp_title
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September 14, 2013</SPAN> </LI>
<LI><A class=crp_title
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Groups Sue To Stop NSA And FBI Electronic Surveillance</A><SPAN
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<LI><A class=crp_title
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<LI><A class=crp_title
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NSA Progam Likely Unconstitutional, Snowden Comments</A><SPAN
class=crp_date> December 16, 2013</SPAN>
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