What? You thought communism didn't come with a police state?

This was one Bush program I was completely against from the start, as were most people who grew up in a totalitarian regime where secret police silenced all dissent, and used their power to usurp the civilian population's property and lives as they pleased. Before he was elected I naively thought that one upside to Obama will be that this case will be thrown out quikcer than my tax dollars in bailing out AIG. Apparently not. We can spy on our own innocent civilians all we want, but there is no “war on terror” and Gitmo residents will get taken care of by the taxpayers for life. I guess it's Change you better believe in, because we know where you are and what you're saying.

clipped from www.eff.org Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration's made two deeply troubling arguments. First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security." As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court." The Department Of Justice's second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes. This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way. Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ's radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama's own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.