{"id":988021,"date":"2021-11-09T04:28:42","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T09:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=988021"},"modified":"2021-11-09T04:28:44","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T09:28:44","slug":"supreme-court-hears-case-surrounding-lawfulness-of-government-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/supreme-court-hears-case-surrounding-lawfulness-of-government-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Hears Case Surrounding Lawfulness of Government Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fsupreme-court-hears-case-surrounding-lawfulness-of-government-surveillance%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=988021&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Supreme-Court-justices-group-photo-getty-640x335-1.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p class=\"subheading\">The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in&nbsp;<em>Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga <\/em>on Monday, a first-of-its-kind case that deals with the interaction between Section 1806(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Act of 1978 (FISA) and&nbsp;state secrets privilege.<\/p>\n<p>FISA allows federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to secretly gather information on persons suspected to be foreign agents engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States, and state secrets privilege allows the government to exclude certain information in a lawsuit, that if disclosed, could cause harm to national security. FISA, in contrast with state secrets privilege, requires the government to divulge&nbsp;the information to a court in order to determine if it should be excluded.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"D-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B1\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<figure id=\"gmxrevmore\" class=\"H\"><\/figure>\n<p>The case under review involves three Muslim American men who accused the FBI of illegally using a paid confidential informant to surveil them after the 9\/11 attacks, starting in 2006 in Southern California. Yassir Fazaga, a former imam at the Orange County Islamic Foundation, and members of the Islamic Center of Irvine Ali Uddin Malik and Yasser Abdel Rahim brought the case, asserting the FBI violated their religious rights by spying on them solely because they are Muslim. Their case was dismissed based on state secrets grounds in district court in 2012 and then revived by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019.<\/p>\n<p>The justices will decide on&nbsp;whether the FISA\u2019s Section 1806(f) displaces the state secrets privilege and authorizes federal judges to consider the privileged evidence in order to resolve the merits of a lawsuit challenging the lawfulness of the government surveillance.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>Hearing Highlights&nbsp;<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Several justices cast doubt on the Ninth Circuit\u2019s ruling, which found that FISA completely displaces states secret privilege, though Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested making a \u201cnarrow ruling\u201d given the complicated nature of the case.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B2\" class=\"a8d\"><\/figure>\n<p>Sotomayor asked Ahilan Arulanatham, who represents Fazaga:<\/p>\n<blockquote readability=\"11\">\n<p>So, if you were to lose \u2014 and I know you desperately don\u2019t want to, but assume my assumption that all we hold is that no one\u2019s invoked 1806 here, and we send it back for the Court below to decide how state secrets interacts with a motion to dismiss. Is that the narrowest ruling that we could issue?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Arulanatham agreed, saying, \u201cEither&nbsp;that you shouldn\u2019t have dismissed on the pleadings or that we want the Ninth Circuit to decide if you should have dismissed on the pleadings\u2026\u201d That judgment would control whether the government can use state privilege, as well as whether they could use it to dismiss the plaintiffs\u2019 religious discrimination lawsuit.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI feel like we\u2019d be doing a drive-by in this case on a massively important issue if we get into that,\u201d Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. He also added that several other issues in the case can be \u201cfleshed out and come back to us where that\u2019s the central focus of the case.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Justice Stephen Breyer contemplated the ramifications of enabling a federal judge to access information privately in an effort to decide if the case should continue \u2014 while keeping the government accountable.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy point is there should be a way to look at the information for the court and decide what to do, not whether this particular statute applies or not,\u201d Breyer said.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"M-ROS-B3\" class=\"a8d adSo\"><\/figure>\n<p>Justice Samuel Alito was not as convinced, arguing that judges having access to sensitive information could create an \u201cincredible security problem.\u201d Alito said:<\/p>\n<blockquote readability=\"7\">\n<p>Wouldn\u2019t that be quite something? Because just dealing with some super-secret information in district courthouses around the country would create an incredible security problem. Most of the district courts don\u2019t have the facilities to deal with information of that sensitivity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Chief Justice John Roberts contended that the Ninth Circuit applied its ruling too broadly when it asserted that the FISA review process displaces state secret privilege in all cases. Roberts said:<\/p>\n<blockquote readability=\"14\">\n<p>\u20261806(f), the provision we\u2019re talking about, takes up the whole page of 207a and yet it consists of two sentences. The sentence we\u2019ve been talking about is 20 lines, and&nbsp;squirreled away in there are these few words that you\u2019re relying on for displacement of the state secrets privilege, for a reading of \u2014 of FISA that has enormous consequences for state secrets, for national security. And I just wonder, why would Congress put such significant language stuck in this provision? Isn\u2019t that an oblique way to have the consequences you\u2019re ascribing to that language?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Justice Breyer assessed that even if the Supreme Court overruled the Ninth Circuit, the plaintiffs ultimately want their lawsuit resuscitated, \u201csomething the court seemed likely to do,\u201d according to <em><a href=\"https:\/\/news.bloomberglaw.com\/us-law-week\/justices-seek-to-avoid-drive-by-ruling-on-national-security\">Bloomberg Law<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The case is&nbsp;<em>Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga<\/em>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scotusblog.com\/case-files\/cases\/federal-bureau-of-investigation-v-fazaga\/\">No. 20-828<\/a> in the Supreme Court of the United States.<\/p>\n<p><em>UPI and Kristina Wong contributed to this report.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in\u00a0Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga on Monday, a first-of-its-kind case that deals with the interaction between Section 1806(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Act &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-988021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}