Federal judge orders halt to NSA spy program | CNET News.com
Warrantless surveillance authorized by Bush administration is ruled unconstitutional, must cease immediately.
By Anne Broache
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: August 17, 2006, 9:44 AM PDT

The warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance program authorized by the Bush administration violates the U.S. Constitution and must cease immediately, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

The landmark decision makes U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency’s once-secret program. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit against the government, claiming the program “ran roughshod” over the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and ran afoul of federal wiretapping law.

In a sweeping victory for the ACLU and its clients, which included organizations representing criminal defense lawyers, journalists, Islamic-Americans, and academics, Taylor appears to knock down every major legal argument that the Bush administration has used to defend the program since it was revealed by The New York Times last December.

The terrorist surveillance program, she ruled, violates the First Amendment’s right to freedom of expression and the Fourth Amendment right to privacy–that is, freedom from unreasonable searches. It also ignores requirements of a 1978 electronic wiretapping law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and represents an overstepping of presidential powers, Taylor wrote.

The judge also dismissed the government’s request that the suit be thrown out because of the “state secrets privilege,” which permits the government to suppress a lawsuit that might lead to the disclosure of military secrets.

I know this is supposed to be good news, but let’s back up a second.

Read carefully and you’ll see that even after our government was internationally exposed to be the hypocritcal mess it is, they STILL HAD TO FUCKING BE TOLD TO STOP BY A JUDGE.

What happened to doing the right thing, and being honorable?