Friday round-up
on Dec 20, 2013 at 7:56 am
With the Court in recess until January, much of the coverage of, and commentary on, the Court focuses on the possibility that it will be drawn into the challenges to the National Security Agency’s global telephone data sweeps. (Lyle covered the ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon blocking the program earlier this week.) Discussing the case in his column for Forbes, Daniel Fisher suggests that, “sooner or later, in this case or some other, the Supreme Court will have to consider the mosaic theory of intelligence: At what point has the government gathered so much information about a person that it constitutes an illegal search, even if each individual snippet of information was legally obtained.” At Bloomberg Politics, Andrew Zajac and Greg Stohr explain that the district court decision “may have laid the foundation for U.S. Supreme Court review of the National Security Agency’s telephone data surveillance program when he said it probably violates constitutional privacy rights.” And at the Politics blog of the San Francisco Chronicle, Joe Garofoli reports that, in the wake of the district court’s decision, Senator Dianne Feinstein – who has defended the NSA program – indicated that she would “welcome” Supreme Court review of the program.
With the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit having recently announced that it will allow video streaming of all en banc arguments, attention once again turns to the issue of cameras at the Supreme Court. In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Maureen O’Connor – the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court – urges the Court to permit cameras, arguing (among other things) that “evidence shows that cameras in the courtrooms are a positive experience.”
