But the U.S. government has taken this doctrine, which was intended to limit the cases federal courts hear to actual live controversies, and turned it into a perverse shell game in surveillance cases—essentially arguing that because aspects of the surveillance program are secret, plaintiffs cannot prove that their communications were actually, in fact, intercepted and surveilled. And without that proof, the government argues, there’s no standing, because plaintiffs can’t show that they’ve suffered harm. Sadly, like several other courts before it, the judge agreed to this shell game and decided that it couldn’t decide whether the constitutional rights of Wikimedia and the other plaintiffs were violated.
This game is mighty familiar to us at EFF, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling. In our system, the courts have a fundamental obligation to conclusively determine the legality of government action that affects individuals’ constitutional rights. For years now, plaintiffs have tried to get the courts to simply issue a ruling on the merits of NSA surveillance programs. And for years, the government has successfully persuaded the courts to rely on standing and related doctrines to avoid doing so.
That is essentially what happened here. The court labeled as “speculative” Wikimedia’s claim that, at a minimum, even one of its approximately one trillion Internet communications had been swept up in the NSA’s upstream surveillance program. Remember, this is a program that, by the government’s own admission, involves the searching and scanning of vast amounts of Internet traffic at key Internet junctures on the Internet’s backbone. Yet in court’s view, Wikimedia’s allegations describing upstream—based on concrete facts, taken from government documents— coupled with a plaintiff that engages in a large volume of internet communications were not enough to state a “plausible” claim that Wikimedia had been surveilled.
Interesting update on Obama. His Occidental College Registration records are on file with the State of California. They reveal that he is indeed ineligible to President of the US. The registration form shows that he is an Indonesian national (citizen), and his religion is Islam. There is no record of a Barack Obama or Barry Soetoro having applied for US Citizenship, or even attempting to renew/re file his citizenship claim of having been born in Hawaii. Either way though, Obama fails the Constitutional "natural born Citizen" test, as his father was a British colonial citizen of Kenya. The term "natural born Citizen" requires that both parent be US Citizens. The Occidental College Registration also shows that Obama, aka Barry Soetoro, applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program. "Occidental Registration transcript states ~ Name: Barry Soetoro - Religion: Islam - Nationality: Indonesian The smoking gun evidence that annuls Obama's presidency is Obama's college transcripts regarding his application for and receiving of foreign student aid. Obama's college transcripts from Occidental College indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia as an undergraduate at the school. The transcript from Occidental College shows that Obama (Barry Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship (scholarship) for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program - an international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. Grants are available for U.S. citizens to go abroad and for non-U.S. citizens with no U.S. permanent residence to come to the U.S. To qualify, for the non-US citizen scholarship to study in the U.S., a student applicant must claim and provide proof of foreign citizenship. This document would seem to provide the smoking gun that many of Obama
