Supreme Court declines to hear challenge to secrecy of U.S. surveillance court | Hacker News Reader

Supreme Court declines to hear challenge to secrecy of U.S. surveillance court

knightcolumbia.org

96 pointsarkadiyt27 comments

"The government also presses the extraordinary claim that this Court is powerless to review the lower court decisions even if they are mistaken. On the government’s view, literally no court in this country has the power to decide whether citizens possess a First Amendment right of access to the work of our national security courts ... this case in-volves a governmental challenge to the power of this Court to review the work of Article III judges in a subordinate court. If these matters are not worthy of our time, what is?" - Gorsuch dissent

FISC was created by an act of congress. Now the executive branch is asserting that the court created by this act is not reviewable by the Supreme Court, established in the consitution. And except for strange bedfellows Gorsuch and Sotomayor, the court is letting them get away with it.

If congress has such power regarding foreign surveillance, why wouldn't they have the same for other issues, like establishing an unreviewable Sedition Court or an Ecological Justice Court? Like FISC, these courts would effectively get their own interpretations of the bill of rights and everything else, with no need to even publish the resulting case law.

I think it’s because the court is outside of the justice branch of government. Put another way, the courts aren’t sentencing people. They aren’t enforcing the laws on the books really either. They are outside of either.

Congress is really the party that needs to reign this in. They created this mechanism and the Supreme Court is basically confirming congresses right to do so.

The reality is your representative(s) are to blame.

BTW I’m not saying this is moral, justified, makes sense, w.e. I fully think congress should completely demolish the security state. I’d rather live in a world with risks than a world constructed to keep me a prisoner.

> The reality is your representative(s) are to blame.

The representatives from nearly 50 years ago, that is.

There are really just two reasons to keep things secret. One of them is to protect people from embarrassment.

Is the other to protect government sources?

Not only is it not outside the Judicial branch, the Chief Justice appoints the FISC judges.

Supreme court can review the act passed by Congress and modified it or nullify it which clearly unconstitutional. Essentially they are scared and just choose the cowardly way of ignoring it. Basically turning into NATO more and more each day.

That secrecy court is illegal, supreme court is in constitution. That secrecy court is just an act by congress which is much lower than supreme court at constitution level. If the SCOTUS refuse to review this, then only people through revolt will have to take it down. These days our SCOTUS is basically a disgrace. Anything that "tickle" their "scared bone" it will be no standing or decline.

You created your account 11 days ago, you misspelled a word, and you used some unusual phrases that seem to resemble a common saying but you are a little off

Non native English speaker most likely - his text is incoherent in a scattershot bad translation way (as opposed to a bad bot,) but there seems to be underlying meaning. Unless it's English translation from a gpt-3 bot in another language?

Funny that we have to suspect everything now.

the ACLU's challenge isn't that directly pointed at the existence of the court. It is pointed at saying a citizen's "free speech" right is involved in viewing the court's opinions. It was a stretch, and it failed.

The dissenting justices are making it about something the case was not specifically about, the consensus judges don't have absurd opinions either, they looked at what the case was specifically about (does the first amendment have anything to do with this) and said nah. The question wasn't "do other articles of the constitution force us to curbstomp this court out of existence", and if it was there would probably be a different result.

If people want a case about the FISC's constitutionality itself, then they need to make a case about that. This case wasn't that.

One thing to understand is that this case got so much support because it was the only case they could put their energy on. If there was another or better case, all the motions and "friends of the court" briefs would have gone to that better case. The other cases don't exist because people accept the narrative that there is a big boogeyman this secret court protects us from, and so its always a compromise to try to get "studies" and reviewability done. But the thing about compromises is that they're usually just a long way doing the wrong thing. The original idea was the "right" thing, and compromises are often just the wrong thing and a waste of time. This time, the compromise idea of "lets make up a bill of rights reason why we can review court opinions" failed.

From Article 3 Section 2:

"In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

Certainly seems like Congress could in fact have the constitutional authority to limit the Supreme Court's ability to review decisions from subordinate courts.

You wouldn't even need a court in that case, it would just be ridiculous posturing. They could put on robes, but it would just be another LARPG.

If brain level surveillance were a thing, is this the kind of court that would hear such cases and does other country have such things ??

FYI: Not a whistle blower

Was this the court that authorized wire taps of Trump's campaign on the basis the government had evidence they were conspiring with Russians to hack the election? Or am I getting my ultra right wing conspiracy theories mixed up in my head.

Correct. The FBI based a wiretap application at FISC on the Trump Dossier.

While there are plenty of right-wing crazy theories, this one had teeth as an example of an injustice.

Robert Mueller's report (https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download) found no such evidence though.

p.181 "The investigation did not establish that the contacts described in Volume I, Section IV, supra, amounted to an agreement to commit any substantive violation of federal criminal law—including foreign-influence and campaign-finance laws, both of which are discussed further below. The Office therefore did not charge any individual associated with the Trump Campaign with conspiracy to commit a federal offense arising from Russia contacts, either under a specific statute or under Section 371’s offenses clause."

"The investigation did not establish any agreement among Campaign officials—or between such officials and Russia-linked individuals—to interfere with or obstruct a lawful function of a government agency during the campaign or transition period. And, as discussed in Volume I, Section V.A, supra, the investigation did not identify evidence that any Campaign official or associate knowingly and intentionally participated in the conspiracy to defraud that the Office charged, namely, the active-measures conspiracy described in Volume I, Section II, supra. Accordingly, the Office did not charge any Campaign associate or other U.S. person with conspiracy to defraud the United States based on the Russia-related contacts described in Section IV above."

p. 183 "The investigation did not, however, yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of a foreign principal within the meaning of FARA or, in terms of Section 951, subject to the direction or control of the government of Russia, or any official thereof. In particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government—or at its direction,control, or request—during the relevant time period."

Shouldn't Mueller have at least included all the evidence that the FBI had taken to this court in the report?

Much of that evidence had been disproven (and not in the "You can't prove a negative" sense, but in the "People and actions were quoted that refuted the accusations and were impossible according to other evidence"), rendering the rest of that dossier's accusations suspect/discredited. Plenty of true things were in the dossier, but none of them were incriminating, except in as much as Trump has open hands and poor taste in business partners.

They already knew the dossier was flimsy and had problematic provenance, didn't they? There seems like no way that could possibly have been the only evidence used to justify the warrants, or to keep a special council investigation running for 2 years, or have Adam Schiff as ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee clearly state that he had seen ample evidence that Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election. Surely there must be much stronger evidence out there. The simplest explanation says that Putin and Trump got to Mueller and Schiff and others to keep them quiet and prevent the evidence getting out. What's the alternative?

The alternative is that Obama and Biden, or anyone in their bureaucracy, got to the FBI and convinced them to accept their crazy dossier.

This is entirely he said she said, without the records of the court in question - and even then would likely be he said she said.

A very far fetched conspiracy theory that would really have astounding implications for the entire system of government inthe country. What's more likely happened is Putin and/or Trump got to Mueller and Schiff and others to silence them and bury all the evidence.

In the most polite way possible, what are you talking about? How does anything you've quoted have anything but a tenuous, situational connection to the FISC court?

The Mueller report said they found no such evidence, and therefore it failed to consider the evidence put before the FISC court in the first place.

Do you deny that Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election? Or that there was strong evidence of him having done so?

Do FISC rulings set precedent? Or are they more administrative in function?

How would one know?

I found a Yale Law Journal essay[1] that suggests that FISC ruling are at least partially precedential. But I'm not really sure how that works, given that case law systems like ours require all precedent to be public.

[1]: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/comment/stare-decisis-and-sec...

Dang. Have you ever thought about putting the account age in the comment header?

Heh, I guess that's supposed to read "DanG,"

But either way, I bet this would be easily achievable via a User Script, if you wished to scratch your own itch. I admit it would be easier if they included `data-accountCreated=` but AIUI the HN codebase isn't exactly under heavy development

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