Supreme Court Hears Case Surrounding Lawfulness of Government Surveillance

[mystery-ak]

Supreme Court Hears Case Surrounding Lawfulness of Government Surveillance

Katherine Hamilton 8 Nov 2021

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga on Monday, a first-of-its-kind case that deals with the interaction between Section 1806(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Act of 1978 (FISA) and state secrets privilege.

FISA allows federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to secretly gather information on persons suspected to be foreign agents engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States, and state secrets privilege allows the government to exclude certain information in a lawsuit, that if disclosed, could cause harm to national security. FISA, in contrast with state secrets privilege, requires the government to divulge the information to a court in order to determine if it should be excluded.

The case under review involves three Muslim American men who accused the FBI of illegally using a paid confidential informant to surveil them after the 9/11 attacks, starting in 2006 in Southern California. Yassir Fazaga, a former imam at the Orange County Islamic Foundation, and members of the Islamic Center of Irvine Ali Uddin Malik and Yasser Abdel Rahim brought the case, asserting the FBI violated their religious rights by spying on them solely because they are Muslim. Their case was dismissed based on state secrets grounds in district court in 2012 and then revived by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019.

The justices will decide on whether the FISA’s Section 1806(f) displaces the state secrets privilege and authorizes federal judges to consider the privileged evidence in order to resolve the merits of a lawsuit challenging the lawfulness of the government surveillance.

more
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/11/08/supreme-court-hears-case-surrounding-lawfulness-of-government-surveillance/

[GtHawk]

Meh, they should all be glad it wasn't the 1940's and they were Japanese. I can't recall if the OC guy had made radical statements before and after but I have no problem with those of their persuasion being surveilled at the time or now if they are 'preaching' violence to Americans. Same for any other whack jobs religious or otherwise.

[The_Reader_David]

Whatever you may think of the plaintiffs, we should all hope they prevail.  Any curtailment of our Constitutional rights (in this case those codified in the Fourth Amendment) on the basis of secret evidence is an abomination against the fundamental principles of Anglo-Saxon law which the Founders tooks as foundational for our laws, the Constitution included.