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Will Verizon Challenge the Government’s Fishy Dragnet?

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Tim Edgar has a fascinating post on how the SCOTUS decision in Yates v US — in which a guy busted for throwing away undersized fish was let off because those fish do not constitute a tangible object under the law — might have repercussions for the phone dragnet.

The Supreme Court let Yates off the hook.  Five justices agreed that a fish is not a tangible object.  At first blush, this seems a bit implausible.  Justice Kagan certainly thought so.  Her eloquent dissent cites Dr. Seuss’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish – for a time, my favorite book – as authority that fish are, indeed, tangible objects.  I expect it is the first use of any book by Dr. Seuss as legal authority in an opinion of the Supreme Court, and I must say that I found it squarely on point, if not ultimately persuasive.

Justice Ginsburg’s opinion for the plurality explains that fish are not tangible objects because “in law as in life . . . the same words, placed in different contexts, sometimes mean different things.”

[snip]

Surprisingly, Yates has real implications for national security surveillance.   The NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records is based on section 215 of the Patriot Act, which amended the business records provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  That provision is titled “Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.”  It allows the government to obtain an order from the FISA court “requiring the production of any tangible things(including books, records, papers, documents, and other items)” in national security investigations.

Does this literally mean “any tangible things,” or is this just a catch-all ensuring that  all types of business records are covered?  While the provision is very broad even if limited to business records or data, until Yates it might have meant literally anything at all.  For example, it might be tempting for the government to use it to obtain, in national security investigations, the kind of physical items that would otherwise have required a physical search order.  As a FISA business records order requires only relevance, and not probable cause, that would be a dangerous loophole.  Yates closes it.

Perhaps more to the point, Yates also weakens the government’s bulk collection theory for telephone records.  While Yates is interpreting a different statute, the logic is clear: the words “any tangible things” should not be read literally.  Instead, they must be read in context, taking account of the words immediately surrounding it, the title of the section, the structure of the law, and its purpose.  Read in this way, it is clear that “tangible things” should not be read to encompass things far afield from the sorts of business records that Congress expected would be sought in national security investigations.

[snip]

Bulk collection is qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from the sorts of requests for records, documents, or other “tangible things” ordinarily made by government both in law enforcement and intelligence investigations. 

Steve Vladeck made a similar observation on Twitter earlier today, so Edgar is not the only one raising this question.

As it happens, today is dragnet renewal day. Which not only means that some FISC judge will reapprove the dragnet, but that providers will get new Secondary Orders. And — as happened in January 2014, when Verizon challenged an order based on Richard Leon’s decision in Klayman v. Obama — that presents the providers with an opportunity to challenge the order based on new legal developments.

And it’s not just Verizon that has a new opportunity to challenge the government’s fishy dragnets.

I’ve long suspected that the government has, in limited fashion, used Section 215 to obtain DNA material (they have databases of DNA from Gitmo detainees, for example, and I can imagine that they’d love to obtain DNA samples where they exist).

More interestingly, we’ve been talking about the government’s use of Section 215 to obtain Internet data, probably in hacking investigations. If, as a number of people suspect, they’re using it to get data flow records, that may be deemed even further away from common definitions of “tangible things.” And the Internet companies are riled up.

So let’s have it, providers! Some challenges to the fishy dragnet!

Update: In the post announcing the reauthorization (yesterday, actually) of the dragnet, I Con the Record noted that this one expires on June 1. I suppose that’s designed to add pressure on the reauthorization fight.  I think that works out to be a 95 day dragnet.

Why Should We Believe Solicitors General about Warrantless Wiretapping

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I’m working on a longer post about the arguments in Amnesty v. Clapper today.

But I wanted to point to this passage from the transcript, in which Solicitor General Don Verrilli responded to Justice Ginsburg’s suggestion that the FISA Court didn’t exercise very rigorous oversight, given that it had only ever rejected one application.

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Is there much of a speculation involved in how — I think it’s only one time, and it was under the pre-amended statute, that the FISA court ever turned down an application

GENERAL VERRILLI: Yes, but that, Your Honor, is, I think, not a fair assessment of the process. It’s really very much an iterative process in which there’s a dialogue between the executive branch and the FISA court in which the court can demand more information, raise objections. Those get worked out, and then there’s a final order.

So I don’t think it’s fair to infer from the fact that there’s only one rejection that this — that it’s a process that isn’t rigorous.

But there was evidence in the court room today to show how false such assurances are.

You see, Ted Olson was in the room. He was there to argue a copyright case heard just after Amensty v. Clapper. And as I have noted before, the government actually sent Olson–back when he was Solicitor General–to argue before the FISA Court of Review without disclosing the warrantless wiretapping program to him. He made a number of claims about how “lawful” the government’s activities were when, in fact, they weren’t.

Given that the government has lied to FISCR before, and given that Solicitors General apparently don’t get briefed on what the government does with warrantless wiretapping, is there any reason we should believe this Solicitor General about the FISA Court’s oversight?

Chief Justice Roberts, Flipped Votes, and the Naked Partisans

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Yesterday Barack Obama discovered the one high-rankng Republican in the country who would help him raise taxes: John Roberts.

While the political (how will yesterday’s ruling affect both the Presidential and lower ticket races in November) and pragmatic (what red states will turn down tons of Federal money to provide health care for their poor) consequences of yesterday’s decision are still playing out, I’m quite interested in the Kremlinology over Roberts’ vote.

Because the unsigned dissent on the mandate refers to Justice Ginsburg’s opinion as itself the dissent–and for a slew more reasons–a number of people think that Roberts originally joined the conservatives, but then flipped at a late moment. (See here and here for a discussion of the evidence supporting that argument, see here for an alternative explanation.)

Then there are questions about why Roberts voted, for the first time, with just the liberal block, his first swing vote on one of the highest profile cases of his tenure. Was it to save the respectability of the Court? To gut the commerce clause? To serve his one consistent constituency, corporations?

The answer to those questions, too, are still playing out.

I can’t help but see this in another context. This decision was the last opportunity for SCOTUS to help defeat Barack Obama. They helped mightily with Citizens United and again with their rejection of the Montana campaign finance case. The Court came close to helping on voting rights and redistricting. The Republicans in the Roberts court has done a lot to make sure Obama doesn’t get to pick anymore of their future colleagues.

But yesterday’s decision had a big impact on the the course of this year’s election. Had the Administration lost, I do think they hypothetically could have used the loss as a rallying point, though in practice they have never shown the ability to win this political argument or even try in concerted fashion, so the more likely outcome would have been a setback at the polls. I do think given Mitt’s embrace of the dissent–rejecting insurance for those with pre-existing conditions, among other things–Democrats ought to be able to spin his opposition to great advantage. Yet I also agree with those who argue that neither Obama nor Mitt have an incentive to talk much about healthcare moving forward. Congressional races are another thing altogether, as the GOP will try to run on a promise to overturn ObamaCare.

Alll that said, I’m most struck by the naked partisan face that has emerged in recent days. While the dissent was largely an angry legalistic screed, the decision–to overturn all of ObamaCare–was radical in its intent. Ginsburg’s opinion’s frequent reliance on the Massachusetts example, RomneyCare, was a nice partisan touch. Most all there’s the haunting dissent to the SB 1070 ruling that Scalia read on Monday, using slavery-era law to argue that states could exclude undesirables from their state (to say nothing of Alito’s defense of life in prison for teenagers).

Roberts may be a corporatist, but the other four conservatives are showing far uglier faces of late.

Then there’s this detail. Amanda Terkel noted Jim DeMint saying conservatives had been “teased” into believing SCOTUS would overturn ObamaCare for them, doing as activist judges what even Erick Erickson now accepts must be done by politics.

“Teased”? What does that mean? Was DeMint “teased” with the results before Roberts flipped, if he did? Did DeMint have reason to believe the five conservatives had taken the radical step of overturning all of ObamaCare?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I will say that the dissenters yesterday have clerks and other staffers who, with a half hour’s work, could have hid the most obvious relics of John Roberts’ flip, if that’s what he did. Search and replace: “dissent,” “concurrence.” That is, if indeed Roberts flipped his vote, then it seems likely that the angry Republicans deliberately left evidence that would lead us all to speculate if not conclude he had done so.

SCOTUS doesn’t leak, Jack Goldsmith says, because it doesn’t bring the same political leverage that leaking does for Executive branch employees.

The justices benefit from the reality and mystique of secrecy, and gain nothing from a leak. A justice can frame a case to the public in a written opinion and wins no internal leverage (and likely loses some) from disclosing the disposition of a case prematurely.

[snip]

Emboldened lower level officials become disrespectful of the secrecy system and sometimes disclose classified information to spin an operation in their favor, to settle a bureaucratic score, or to appear important.

Whether or not Jim DeMint learned how the Court voted some time ago, if it’s true Roberts flipped his vote, then it seems likely the other conservatives–the ones serving an even uglier partisan ideology than Roberts’ raw corporatism–believe they benefit from making that known now, after the fact.

They delivered their side of the bargain, the clues in the dissent show. And they seem to want that known.

Elena Kagan Votes With Alito and Thomas To Undermine Miranda

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When Elena Kagan was nominated, there were very few of us voicing strenuous objection, one of the primary reasons I did was her complete lack of experience in the adversarial system, especially with her total lack of knowledge and interest in criminal process issues, which would be critical in the face of the Obama DOJ’s determination to further gut Miranda.

The feared Kagan chickens have come home to roost. The Supreme Court just announced its decision in Howes v. Fields, and the decision is a significant further erosion of the critical Constitutional protections embodied in Miranda. The ruling specifically holds that police are not automatically required to tell prisoners of their legal right to remain silent and have an attorney present when being questioned in prison about another crime.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer dissented. Noting that Fields was only incarcerated for disorderly conduct in the first place, Ginsburg stated:

For the reasons stated, I would hold that the “incommunicado interrogation [of Fields] in a police-dominated atmosphere,” id., at 445, without informing him of his rights, dishonored the Fifth Amendment privilege Miranda was designed to safeguard.

Notice who did NOT side with her fellow “liberal bloc” Justices to honor and protect Miranda? Elena Kagan. No, Kagan instead sided completely with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and the rest of the conservative bloc.

No democratic appointee to Supreme Court should ever vote to further erode Miranda, and this case did exactly that in a fundamental way. But Barack Obama gave us the authoritarian Elena Kagan who, predictably, did just that. As a prediction: you will be seeing a lot more of Elena Kagan voting with Alito, Scalia and Thomas on crucial law and order/criminal process, not to mention evidentiary, issues. Get used to it.

Oh, and as a reminder, Obama may soon enough have the opportunity to further shove the ideological spectrum of the Supreme Court substantially to the right, just as he did when he replaced John Paul Stevens with Kagan. If Obama replaces the liberal stalwart Ruth Bader Ginsburg with another mushy authoritarian and/or corporatist centrist, like he did in replacing Stevens, liberals will regret it for decades.

Judicial policy matters.

[updated slightly to reflect authoritarian as a descriptor for Kagan, which, as EW points out, is more germane to this discussion on Howes]

The SCOTUS Merrygoround: Is Ginsburg Shuffle Coming?

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The UPI has an article up with the startling headline “Ruth Bader Ginsburg stepping down in 2015”. The article, which is really more of a pondering question, is bylined today by Michael Kirkland and paints the scenario of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg retirement in 2015 so that Obama has sufficient time left in his second term to appoint and confirm a successor.

Although referenced rather obliquely in his article, Kirkland’s basis is premised entirely on the thoughts and predictions of SCOTUS, AND SCOTUSblog, longtime pro Tom Goldstein in a SCOTUSblog post he did last Tuesday, February 14th. Goldstein may be only one voice thinking out loud, but he carries the bona fides to warrant serious consideration here.

Goldstein points to the confluence of Ginsburg’s age, health, and personal career tracking with that of Justice Louis Brandeis. And the thought that Ginsburg will want to see that her replacement is chosen by a Democratic President. Goldstein’s thought process, originally laid out in the comprehensive February 14th entry at SCOTUSblog, is worth reading. Assuming Obama is reelected, which is still a pretty decent bet at this point (certainly capable of changing though), it is hard to find fault with Goldstein’s logic; in fact, it is rather compelling. I also agree with Tom that none of the current conservative bloc, including swing man Tony Kennedy, are going anywhere anytime soon.

Where I do differ from Goldstein, however, is in his prediction for what would transpire upon the theorized Ginsburg tactical retirement:

Assuming that President Obama is re-elected and that Justice Ginsburg does retire at some point in the next Administration, who will be the next nominee? One thing is certain: it will be a woman. It is inconceivable that a Democratic administration with any reasonable choice would cause the gender balance of the Supreme Court to revert to seven men and two women. Relatedly, appointing three women in a row to the Court is excellent politics.

President Obama will also have a strong desire to pick an ethnically or racially diverse nominee. It would be disappointing for the nation’s first African-American President to make two white appointments, leaving the Court with seven white members. A more diverse Court is a better legacy. Given that the President already appointed the first Latina Justice, most likely is an African-American or Asian-American nominee. That said, I think race and ethnicity are plus factors, rather than an imperative like gender.

I am not sure I buy Goldstein’s certainty of yet another female Supreme Court nominee from Barack Obama. I am just not convinced Obama appoints a third woman in a row, color or not. It sure makes it easier that it would be to fill a “female seat”, Ginsburg’s, I guess, and Obama clearly wanted to see three women justices on the court. But he crossed said threshold, and knowing one of them may not be there so long into the future likely played into the strength of his desire to appoint a second woman after Sonia Sotomayor. Such is quite a different thing from having an abiding determination to insure there are always three women on the Supreme bench.

Further, it really restricts the pool of potential nominees and plays into a plethora of counter Read more →

Scalia Invents a New Meaning for “Suspicion” while Letting Ashcroft Off the Hook

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SCOTUS has just ruled unanimously that John Ashcroft can’t be sued by Abdullah al-Kidd for using a material witness warrant to incarcerate him. The 8 justices (Elena Kagan recused herself) all agree there was no law explicitly prohibiting this kind of abuse of material witness warrants, so Ashcroft has immunity from suit.

Where the decision gets interesting is in the justices’ various statements about whether material witness warrants are valid under the Fourth Amendment. The court’s swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, basically invited a constitutional challenge of the material witness warrants themselves.

The scope of the statute’s lawful authorization is uncertain. For example, a law-abiding citizen might observe a crime during the days or weeks before a scheduled flight abroad. It is unclear whether those facts alone might allow police to obtain a material witness warrant on the ground that it “may become impracticable” to secure the person’s presence by subpoena. Ibid. The question becomes more difficult if one further assumes the traveler would be willing to testify if asked; and more difficult still if one supposes that authorities delay obtaining or executing the warrant until the traveler has arrived at the airport. These possibilities resemble the facts in this case. See ante, at 2.

In considering these issues, it is important to bear in mind that the Material Witness Statute might not provide for the issuance of warrants within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment’s Warrant Clause. The typical arrest warrant is based on probable cause that the arrestee has committed a crime; but that is not the standard for the issuance of warrants under the Material Witness Statute. See ante, at 11 (reserving the possibility that probable cause for purposes of the Fourth Amendment’s Warrant Clause means “only probable cause to suspect a violation of law”). If material witness warrants do not qualify as “Warrants” under the Fourth Amendment, then material witness arrests might still be governed by the Fourth Amendment’s separate reasonableness requirement for seizures of the person. See United States v. Watson, 423 U. S. 411 (1976). Given the difficulty of these issues, the Court is correct to address only the legal theory put before it, without further exploring when material witness ar-rests might be consistent with statutory and constitutional requirements.

Mind you, he remains coy about what he thinks about the material witness warrants, as his language makes clear: “uncertain,” “might,” “unclear,” “more difficult,” “more difficult,” “possibilities,” “might not,” “might.”  Of note, though, he neither endorses a rather crazy argument Antonin Scalia makes (joined by the usual suspects)–that witnesses to a crime may now be considered suspects of a sort–nor Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s trashing (joined by Sotomayor and Breyer but not Kennedy) of that claim.

Here’s Scalia’s assertion:

Needless to say, warrantless, “suspicionless intrusions pursuant to a general scheme,” id., at 47, are far removed from the facts of this case. A warrant issued by a neutral Magistrate Judge authorized al-Kidd’s arrest. The affidavit accompanying the warrant application (as al-Kidd concedes) gave individualized reasons to believe that he was a material witness and that he would soon disappear.The existence of a judicial warrant based on individualized suspicion takes this case outside the domain of not only our special-needs and administrative-search cases, but of Edmond as well.

A warrant based on individualized suspicion in fact grants more protection against the malevolent and the incompetent than existed in most of our cases eschewing inquiries into intent.

Here’s Ginsburg’s response:

The Court thrice states that the material witness warrant for al-Kidd’s arrest was “based on individualized suspicion.” Ante, at 6, 8. The word “suspicion,” however, ordinarily indicates that the person suspected has engaged in wrongdoing. See Black’s Law Dictionary 1585 (9th ed. 2009) (defining “reasonable suspicion” to mean “[a] particularized and objective basis, supported by specific and articulable facts, for suspecting a person of criminal activity”). Material witness status does not “involv[e] suspicion, or lack of suspicion,” of the individual so identified. See Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U. S. 419, 424–425 (2004).This Court’s decisions, until today, have uniformly used the term “individualized suspicion” to mean “individualized suspicion of wrong-doing.”

[12 cases–many of them the ones used to authorized warrantless wiretaps–cited]

The Court’s suggestion that the term “individualized suspicion” is more commonly associated with “know[ing] something about [a] crime” or “throwing . . . a surprise birthday party” than with criminal suspects, ante, at 6, n. 2 (internal quotation marks omitted), is hardly credible. The import of the term in legal argot is not genuinely debatable. When the evening news reports that a murder “suspect” is on the loose, the viewer is meant to be on the lookout for the perpetrator, not the witness. Ashcroft understood the term as lawyers commonly do: He spoke of detaining material witnesses as a means to “tak[e] suspected terrorists off the street.” App. 41 (internal quotation marks omitted).

And here’s Scalia’s retort to that:

JUSTICE GINSBURG suggests that our use of the word “suspicion” is peculiar because that word “ordinarily” means “that the person suspected has engaged in wrongdoing.” Post, at 3, n. 2 (opinion concurring in judgment). We disagree. No usage of the word is more common and idiomatic than a statement such as “I have a suspicion he knows something about the crime,” or even “I have a suspicion she is throwing me a surprise birthday party.” The many cases cited by JUSTICE GINSBURG, post, at 3, n. 2, which use the neutral word “suspicion” in connection with wrongdoing, prove nothing except that searches and seizures for reasons other than suspected wrongdoing are rare.

In other words, Scalia wants to broaden the Fourth Amendment to sanction searches (and arrests) of people suspected of knowing something or doing something (throwing a birthday party!), rather than just those suspected of doing something illegal.

Not only does Scalia’s novel interpretation of the word “suspicion” pre-empt future challenge to material witness warrants’ constitutionality, but it also lays a novel groundwork for sanctioning all the domestic surveillance the government has been conducting. After all, the government is wiretapping (or tracking the geolocation of) people who may or may not have committed a crime, but are suspected solely of talking to or hanging out in the vicinity of a suspected terrorist.

And because Kennedy didn’t tip his hand in either direction, that’s the kind of interpretation the government will use–no doubt in its secret interpretations of the laws–to claim it can surveill even those of us suspected of no crime.

Because suspicion doesn’t mean what it used to mean.

Justice Ginsburg to Senator Bunning: “Screw You”

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Mind you, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is much too polite to say it in those terms. But this story makes quite clear: one of the things that motivated Ginsburg to return to the Court so quickly and attend Obama’s address to Congress was Jim Bunning’s prediction of her imminent demise.

One month after her surgery for pancreatic cancer, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Thursday that she expects to be on the Supreme Court for several more years. In an interview, she also vividly recalled why, on her second day back on the bench, she attended President Obama’s televised speech to a joint session of Congress.

"First, I wanted people to see that the Supreme Court isn’t all male," the lone female justice said of the evening event Feb. 24. "I also wanted them to see I was alive and well, contrary to that senator who said I’d be dead within nine months."

You know, I had already sort of been rooting for Bunning (in that crafty sabotage kind of way), given that his continued presence in the Senate–and especially his determination to run again in 2010–is driving Mitch McConnell crazy.  And of course, having Bunning as a Republican opponent in 2010 might make that seat a pick-up opportunity.

But if Bunning’s continued idiocy is going to keep a solid liberal like Justice Ginsburg going strong on the Court, more power to the asshole.