Judge OKs wiretap suit against the government

Suing us into submission. ARS Technica

A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit filed by an Islamic charity alleging that it was illegally wiretapped by the National Security Agency may proceed, and issued a stinging rebuke to government lawyers who have repeatedly sought to invoke the state secrets privilege to block litigation.

The case, Al Haramain v. Bush, is unusual in that—unlike the Electronic Frontier Foundation's more publicized suits against the NSA and complicit telecoms—the plaintiffs in this case know that the directors of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation were specifically subject to warrantless surveillance, thanks to a government blunder that put a classified memo in the hands of the charity's lawyers. An appellate court ruled last year that the secret document had to be turned over to the government, and so could not be used to establish standing to sue. But in an opinion issued this summer, Judge Vaughn Walker, who has been handling a spate of suits concerning the NSA's super-secret "Stellar Wind" program, decided that the foundation could still seek to show they'd been spied upon using public evidence.