The Electronic Frontier Foundation, who had filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, said it was perverse to dismiss a suit for lack of proof (standing) when the surveillance program complained of was secret, and urged federal courts to tackle the serious constitutional issues that Upstream surveillance presents.[21] The plaintiffs filed an appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on February 17, 2016.[22]
On May 23, 2017, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the dismissal by the lower court of Wikimedia’s complaints.[23][24] The Court of Appeals ruled that the Foundation’s allegations of the NSA’s Fourth Amendment violations were plausible enough to “survive a facial challenge to standing”, finding that the potential harm done by the NSA’s collection of private data was not speculative.[7][23] The court thereby remanded the suit by the Foundation and ordered the District Court of Maryland to continue the proceedings.[8] The court inversely affirmed the dismissal by Ellis of the suits by the other plaintiffs; in its finding the court noted that the non-Wikimedia plaintiffs had not made a strong enough case that their operations were affected by Upstream’s scope.[7][23]
National Review Finally Gets It Right on Stop-and-Frisk
In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the New York City police tactic of Stop-and-Frisk was unconstitutional because it violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on illegal searches and seizures. It was good to have such a ruling, but the notion that police officers could search random people based on nothing more than a hunch should have struck everyone as unconstitutional from the get-go. In America, you can’t just stop passersby (so many of whom were innocent) and intrude on their personal spaces and lives in brute fashion.
.. Democrat Bill de Blasio vowed to end the practice, something many in law enforcement and on the political right insisted would inevitably spike crime. That isn’t what happened. Today crime is down in New York City significantly, to levels not seen since the 1950s.
.. de Blasio was correct in saying the city could withstand a sharp decrease in stop-and-frisk. And he was right to draw attention to the social cost of the practice; more than 80 percent of those subjected to stop-and-frisk since the start of the Bloomberg administration were, according to the NYPD, completely innocent. That means hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were unjustly subjected to embarrassment or even humiliation.
.. The basic freedom of a man or woman to walk down the streets of New York or any other city without fear of being harassed by law enforcement is something we should all be able to agree on and defend. There are no exceptions great enough to dismiss that principle. It’s why we have a Fourth Amendment in the first place.
.. Government will always tend towards exploiting our fear to take away our constitutional rights: mass shootings, murderous white supremacists, urban crime.
Democrats Shouldn’t Dismiss Nunes’s Spying Claims So Quickly
If true, this isn’t the wiretapping of Trump Tower, as Trump claimed in his infamous tweet a few weeks ago, but it is spying in any commonly understood sense of the word.
.. While the answers might not vindicate Trump, they are legitimate questions. If it turns out intel wasn’t properly minimized, this is the kind of abuse that civil libertarians have long warned undermines Americans’ privacy, a Fourth Amendment right.
.. Intelligence agencies cannot share details about American citizens with no foreign-intelligence value. If Nunes is right, how
.. It could very well be that Nunes is attempting to give the president cover. He’s a partisan, after all. That doesn’t make the incident potentially less serious.