Court Denies State Secrets Claim in Wiretapping Case
In a rare judicial denial of an official “state secrets” claim, a federal court yesterday rejected (pdf) a government assertion that a lawsuit against AT&T alleging illegal wiretapping should be dismissed because it would place state secrets at risk.
In May, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte formally asserted the state secrets privilege in support of a motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But instead of simply deferring to the executive branch, Judge Vaughn R. Walker did his own analysis of the matter.
“The first step in determining whether a piece of information constitutes a ‘state secret’ is determining whether that information actually is a ‘secret’,” he wrote.
He went on to conclude, based on public statements by the President and other officials, that the state secrets privilege was inapplicable in this case.
“Because of the public disclosures by the government and AT&T, the court cannot conclude that merely maintaining this action creates a ‘reasonable danger’ of harming national security.”
“It is important to note that even the state secrets privilege has its limits. While the court recognizes and respects the executive’s constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to adjudicate the disputes that come before it…. To defer to a blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdicate that duty….”
The court’s rejection of unconditional judicial deference is noteworthy. Although the executive branch’s assertion of the state secrets privilege has been denied on at least four occasions in the past, those denials seem to have been based on technical defects or procedural failings rather than a substantial judicial assessment of the merits of the claim.
tudents in the 21st century need strong critical thinking skills like reasoning, questioning, and problem-solving, before they can meaningfully engage with more advanced domains like digital, data, or AI literacy.
When the U.S. government funds the establishment of a platform for testing hundreds of behavioral interventions on a large diverse population, we will start to better understand the interventions that will have an efficient and lasting impact on health behavior.
The grant comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) to investigate, alongside The British American Security Information Council (BASIC), the associated impact on nuclear stability.
We need to overhaul the standardized testing and score reporting system to be more accessible to all of the end users of standardized tests: educators, students, and their families.