Comment by nozzlegear
16 days ago
> You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court.
What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."
16 days ago
> You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court.
What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."
At least in the context of the presidential surveillance program, the ACLU did sue to make them stop. But the program was classified which made getting evidence of the program's existence a crime. The supreme court ruled that they couldn't make a decision without evidence. Shortly after, Snowden leaked the evidence the supreme court had requested. That leak provided the ACLU the evidence necessary to bring the case back to the supreme court and win, "stopping" the program.
So... what part of the program stopped?
It’s in air quotes for a reason. Obama ran on promises to end it and protect whistleblowers like Snowden. Then he kept it alive under new branding and doubled down on vilifying whistleblowers like Snowden.
19 replies →
Wasn’t this exact route taken? Government got cases dismissed for lack of standing - plaintiff could not prove they were being spied on… because the government wouldn’t reveal anything.
"We're going to sue you to make you stop" is exactly where you deploy the semilegal sound bite. You then use that as the public justification to stall, deny, countersue, delay, appeal, defend, depose and do everything you can to avoid a decision happening one way or the other until you've already gotten and done what you wanted to get and do.
That strategy relies on courts always being slow and expensive though. It often feels like it, but that's not a universal truth of the court system. If the damage is high enough, courts can fast-track cases. Judges can also issue injunctions before the delays start, and if the argument is too flimsy it can backfire on the defendant.
I'll concede that if whoever's being sued is going to rely on secret legal interpretations like the NSA/intelligence agencies did with the FISA court rulings, then it makes things a lot trickier.
>That strategy relies on courts always being slow and expensive though.
It doesn't rely on them being slow and expensive, it forces them to be slow and expensive, or to abrogate your rights as a litigant in such a way that any decision they make will be overturned on appeal (which drags out the process even further). Courts can issue injunctions, and those injunctions can be appealed, dragging things out further. If the damage is high enough courts can fast track cases but what do you do about the 99.99% of cases where the damage isn't high enough, and who gets to decide when it is? If this doesn't work why does it keep working?