White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts

By CHARLIE SAVAGE and DAVID E. SANGER, NYT

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 National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets.

In a set of filings 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.

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.

“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.

(More here.)

Forwarded with permission.

From: Scott Horton
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2013 2:34 AM
To:
Subject: Clapper Caught in More Whoppers

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz recently told a group of Stanford students that he just didn't get it. James Clapper had appeared before Congress and told a series of blatant, conscious lies that went right to the heart of the questions presented to him. Lying to Congress was, before Obama, a serious crime, at least when the lies go to substantive matters and are practiced and intentional. Now it seems that the Administration--or more particularly, the rogue national security division at DOJ--just winks at such lies. As Shultz explained, those who work in the national security arena know that there are specific ways to cope with the dilemma of answering questions in public about classified matters--one says that one will provide a response in executive session. But what regularly transpires now, in the age of Obama (and Bush) is different. The public and Congress should be misled, apparently, because we don't want them to worry their pretty little heads about what their government is up to--indeed, they have no right to know anything, because we have classified it all. Now Clapper is up to the same mischief again, submitting sworn statements to a federal court in California in which he tells tall tales about the "president's program" (the president in this case being George W. Bush) and what it has accomplished. He filed two versions, one public, and one classified. The public version makes claims that Obama's own review commission has already confirmed to us are not true. If Clapper follows prior practice, the classified version, which of course cannot be checked by the public, tells still more outrageous lies. The big question at this point becomes this: why is James Clapper still working in the White House? And why would any court consider his sworn statements to have even the slightest credibility?