Obama Claims “State Secrets” Privilege to Defend Bush-era Warrantless Surveillance Program

It’s been great to see the Obama administration trimming the excesses of the Bush administration’s curtailment of civil liberties, but the disappointing reality remains that the rollback of Bush-era rules is pretty limited, as we see with the latest invocation of “state secrets” as a reason to prevent the public from finding out what kind of surveillance is happening.

Unfortunately, while disappointing this is also all rather predictable. Civil liberties is a bit of a ratchet. If the political opposition doesn’t succeed in blocking some new expansion of authority when it’s first proposed, the soon enough the opposition takes over and isn’t all that interested in curtailing its own authority. Consequently, more and more powers and secrecy start developing, abuses occur, and eventually there’s some big blowup and outraged and new rules get put into place. After all, all this has happened before. When electronic surveillance first became possible, it was immediately put into use and each successive administration found ways to expand its scope. From the beginning, there were abuses happening. And under Richard Nixon the abuses both became enormous and were uncovered. Then new rules were put into place. Rules that have been eroding ever since—first slowly, then quickly—and will probably continue to erode until the next huge scandal.