Team Obama asserts that the need for intelligence overrides that pesky Constitutional thingy
(Venture Beat) The White House filed papers late Friday to stop a federal judge from deciding whether the warrantless surveillance operations were legal or not.
The government said that, despite leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, full disclosure of the surveillance data would put government secrets at risk. Divulging these secrets in a court would cause “extremely grave damage to the national security of the United States,†wrote James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, in the filing.
The government can use its state secrets privilege to block information from being used in a court, and the Justice Department has asked the federal judge, Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California, to dismiss the case without ruling on whether the programs violated the First or Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. White had earlier ordered the government to evaluate how the disclosurs by Snowden had affected its earlier assertions of state secrets.
There you go: government secrets are more important than the Rights of US citizens. Yes, there is a need for secret programs. But they should be in accordance with our Constitution, and these NSA programs are simply sweeping up information on US citizens without warrants and without knowing what is being done with the information.
