Sometimes if you postpone something long enough, someone else will do the job.
Last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled the National Security Agency’s metadata collection program unlawful, I immediately saw it as a vindication of Edward Snowden and his “illegal” leaks.
It will be hard to charge the man with treason for uncovering programs that have been determined, in court, to be themselves treasonous — or at least unconstitutional.
But I was busy last week; didn’t have time to make the case.
Nicely, Noah Feldman made it for me, at Bloomberg View. “This is the most serious blow to date,” writes Feldman in his May 7 article, a blow against “the legacy of the USA Patriot Act and the surveillance overreach that followed 9/11.”
The linkage with Snowden is in no way an imposition on the story:
The first striking thing about the court’s opinion was how openly it relied on Snowden’s revelations of classified material. The court described how the program was known — by Snowden’s leaks. It also analyzed the NSA order to Verizon, leaked by Snowden, that proved the existence of the program and revealed indirectly the legal reasoning that the government relied on to authorize the metadata collection.
More importantly, Feldman recognizes that the decision rightly breaks “the bad precedent of secret law created by the NSA.”
A republic isn’t a republic if its laws are secret.
Now, of course, it’s time for Americans to cease their procrastination. If we don’t recognize that our government is out of control, no one else’s determination will matter.
Except, perhaps, history’s.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
