I've got a secret

Updated It gets frustrating sometimes. No matter how much you try to keep up, things slip by. No matter how much you read, you don't know what you need to. And it seems that every lefty website I follow a link to has something that I missed. The site where I found the previous item also had a link to this, which, yes, I missed. It's from today's Washington Post:

The Justice Department is using secret evidence in its ongoing legal battles over secrecy with the American Civil Liberties Union, submitting material to two federal judges that cannot be seen by the public or even the plaintiffs, according to documents released yesterday.

In one of the cases, the government also censored more than a dozen seemingly innocuous passages from court filings on national security grounds, only to be overruled by the judge, according to ACLU documents.

I mentioned one of these cases back on May 5.

You have got to read this. It's a description of a suit the ACLU has filed challenging the constitutionality of National Security Letters which can be obtained without any "individuated suspicion," that is, without any cause to believe the person so targeted has done anything wrong. ...

That is, the case was filed in secret, with the ACLU not even able to reveal its existence, until it could work out a deal with the government about what information about the case could be released.

The name of the client on whose behalf the ACLU is suing is still a secret. And if the government gets its way, not only will the public never know the name of the client, but even the plaintiffs will never know what information the feds used to win their case: suppressing information in order to justify suppressing information.

The use of "secret evidence" is unusual in any case, but particularly in the civil courts, according to legal experts. ...

Instead, prosecutors in national security cases commonly share classified information with defense attorneys on the condition that it cannot be divulged to the public.

"There is no case law that says it's okay to give classified information just to the court" in civil cases, said Ann Beeson, an ACLU attorney. "They should also give it to us under a protective order."

But of course keeping things secret, deals behind closed doors, intoning "trust us" with smarmy smiles to those who will fall for it, snarling "shut up and go away or you'll be sorry" to those who won't, these are hallmarks of the Shrub team's methods, they're SOP. To show you the absurd lengths they'll go to, consider that

[a]mong the phrases originally redacted by the government was a quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling: "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

That's right, they tried to have a quote from a Supreme Court decision declared a risk to national security. I'm not sure how they arrived at that conclusion, although I can see how they arrived at the conclusion that it was a risk to their case. There were other things that the public, in government's view, must not be allowed to know for the safety of us all:

Justice officials also excised language describing one of the plaintiffs: "provides clients with email accounts" and "provides clients with the ability to access the Internet." ...

In fiscal 2003, federal agencies decided to classify documents more than 14 million times, a 25 percent increase from the year before, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, which keeps track of classification decisions. At the same time, the total number of pages declassified by the government dropped to its lowest level in at least 10 years, according to the office.

Even Republicans are getting fed up: The article ends by noting that next Tuesday, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) is holding a hearing titled, "Too Many Secrets."

Footnote: On a separate but still related matter, the ACLU is starting a campaign to pressure private companies to refuse to willingly take part in government attempts at surveillance.

Updated to say that the ACLU report on which the campaign is based, titled "The Surveillance-Industrial Complex"," is avilable here and that Wired has a good article based on the report, found here.