{"id":187378,"date":"2013-03-19T21:12:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T02:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/03\/19\/finally-21\/"},"modified":"2013-03-19T21:12:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T02:12:00","slug":"finally-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/03\/19\/finally-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Finally!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A judge has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/threatlevel\/2013\/03\/nsl-found-unconstitutional\/\">ruled that national security letters are unconstitutional<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the board, in a stunning defeat for the Obama administration\u2019s surveillance practices. She also ordered the government to cease enforcing the gag provision in any other cases. However, she stayed her order for 90 days to give the government a chance to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe are very pleased that the Court recognized the fatal constitutional shortcomings of the NSL statute,\u201d said Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a challenge to NSLs on behalf of an unknown telecom that received an NSL in 2011. \u201cThe government\u2019s gags have truncated the public debate on these controversial surveillance tools. Our client looks forward to the day when it can publicly discuss its experience.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The telecommunications company received the ultra-secret demand letter in 2011 from the FBI seeking information about a customer or customers. The company took the extraordinary and rare step of challenging the underlying authority of the National Security Letter, as well as the legitimacy of the gag order that came with it.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I would expect the Obama administration to appeal this.<\/p>\n<p>They have yet to seen an excess of the state security apparatus that they won&#8217;t fully support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A judge has ruled that national security letters are unconstitutional: Ultra-secret national security letters that come with a gag order on the recipient are an unconstitutional impingement on free speech, a federal judge in California ruled in a decision released Friday.U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing so-called NSLs across the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,972],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}