Bush Secrecy Is Now Obama Secrecy

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Secrecy is secrecy, regardless of who abuses it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) used to fight the secrecy practices of the Bush Administration. Now they're battling that of the Obama Administration. (Change? Riiii-ght.) An email blast from EFF alerted us to this: For years, the state secrets privilege was a favorite tool of the Bush Administration. They used it to avoid accountability for both the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program and the CIA's "special rendition" program. The Justice Department has used the privilege to get lawsuits thrown out of court before they have even begun, based merely on the claim that letting courts judge the legality of those programs would endanger national security. Yes indeed, and Democrats, liberals, and even many Republicans and consevatives were very unhappy about the Bush practices. Now that Obama is guilty of the same sneaky things, will the Democrats and liberals cry out about it? Recently, the Obama Administration has begun to use the same tactic -- most notably, to attempt to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF's ongoing lawsuit against the NSA for warrantless wiretapping. Yet, even President Obama himself recently admitted that the state secrets privilege is "overbroad" and a "blunt instrument" that needs to be reformed. Read more at EFF's web site in the article "Fight Government Secrecy and Reform the State Secrets Privilege"... More from EFF: Government Still Blocking Information on Secret IP Enforcement Treaty - Broken Promises from the Obama Administration Keep Americans in the Dark About ACTA Massive FBI Data-Mining Project Needs Congressional Oversight - EFF Calls on Congress to Examine the Investigative Data Warehouse CommieBama Hats and More Chicago News Bench RSS Feed Follow ChiNewsBench on Twitter