Federal Judge rules NSA phone surveillance is lawful

[bedstuy]

Kind of a strange decision at first blush if you ask me.  The judge didn't rule that the NSA program was lawful after a trial, this was a motion to dismiss the ACLU lawsuit.

So, the judge is saying, accepting all of the factual assertions of the ACLU as true, there is no way for the ACLU to prove that the NSA program is unconstitutional or illegal.  I haven't read the opinion, but that seems surprising. 

[bedstuy]

If this had been a Bush appointee, it would've been mentioned by now...

It's a Clinton appointee.

The sins of moderate heroism will always come back to haunt us.

The politics of the judge should be entirely irrelevant here.  A lower court judge follows the Supreme Court and Circuit 4th Amendment precedent.  They don't have the freedom to decide what they think the law should be. 

[bedstuy]

I think he mistakenly added an "l".

Anyone can just say, it's all politics.  I don't agree at all, especially when we're talking about district courts and not the Supreme Court, but it's one of those arguments that's pointless because it's about the interior motives of decision-makers in complicated issues. 

At the very least, you have to agree that the 4th Amendment precedent about the NSA is very thin and unclear.  Until the Supreme Court clears this up in twenty years or so, the proposition that this program is constitutional under current precedent is clearly supportable and can't just be rejected out of hand.