Source:
Center For Constitutional RightsCCR Warrantless Wiretapping Case Dismissed By Federal Judge
Obama Administration Wins Right to Keep Any Records of Illegal SurveillanceFebruary 1, 2011, New York and San Francisco – Last night the federal district court in San Francisco dismissed CCR v. Obama, a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against the Bush administration in 2006 to challenge the legality of the National Security Administration’s (NSA) warrantless wiretapping program. The suit originally sought an injunction ordering the government to end the program, and in response to this and other litigation, the government claimed to have shut down the program by 2007. In the remaining part of the case, CCR asked the court to order the government to destroy any records of surveillance of the plaintiffs—CCR attorneys and legal staff who feared that their phone calls and emails were subject to surveillance under the program.
The government argued that CCR did not have standing to sue because the Center lacked evidence that its staff and attorneys had actually been surveilled (and could not obtain or use such evidence in the court proceedings because such evidence would be a “state secret”). The court agreed, holding that, even though “plaintiffs appear to have established that their litigation activities have become more costly due to their concern about
,” plaintiffs could not sue without proof that they had actually been eavesdropped upon.
“The Obama administration has never taken a position—in this or any of the other related cases—on whether the Bush administration’s NSA surveillance program was legal. Instead, it fought to keep this case out of court on the Catch-22 argument that no one can ever prove they were targeted by a secret program,” said CCR Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal. “Despite considerable public evidence that attorneys were targeted by the program, the court refused to even order the minimum relief we sought—an order that the government destroy any records of this illegal surveillance that it still retains. It is astonishing that President Obama’s administration continues to fight to hold on to the fruits of a patently illegal surveillance program, even where that surveillance was directed at attorneys engaged in suing the government.”
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CCR v. Bush was filed against President George W. Bush, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA's warrantless surveillance of people within the United States. As was widely reported, the NSA, for more than four years and with the approval of President Bush, engaged in a widespread program of warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone calls and emails in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA explicitly authorizes electronic surveillance for the purposes of collecting foreign intelligence only upon orders issued by federal judges who sit on a special court. It expressly authorizes warrantless wiretapping only for the first fifteen days of a war and makes it a crime to engage in wiretapping without specific statutory authority. Rather than seeking to amend the statute, President Bush simply violated it.
Read more: http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ccr-warrantless-wiretapping-case-dismissed-federal-judge
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