1115.org

AP:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government’s warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency’s program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy.

The networks are still fixated on the Jon Benet Ramsey developments. I will post updates as more details are available. As of now, news.google produces only one hit for “Anna Diggs Taylor”.

Previously: Judge Allows AT&T Lawsuit To Proceed

***Update 1, 9:35 am ***

I was in a hurry to get the news out as soon as I came across it, since it was still very much breaking news. Am now doing what I would have done to begin with if I wasn’t in such a hurry, repeating relevant bits from that previous post.

John Dean, writing about the Detroit lawsuit on June 16 at Findlaw had said:

Indeed, if she so chooses, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor can do for America what the GOP-controlled Congress, and Republican-beholden federal judges, have thus far refused to do: She can require the Administration to comply with the law — and in the process, she can actually examine the validity of the government’s claim of “state secrets,” rather than merely buying into assertions that national security is involved. Since such claims have been persistently abused by prior presidents, this kind of examination is long overdue.

He went on to certify Judge Taylor as an all-round good guy:

Unlike those judges who easily disposed of Edmonds, Arar and El-Masri (recent lawsuits where the government successfully sheltered behind the state secrets privilege), Judge Taylor plainly understands civil rights and liberties, as her biography well illustrates. She is a no-nonsense judge with a quarter century of experience on the federal bench. She has tossed lawyers out of her courtroom when they played delaying games in discovery (and she has been upheld by the Court of Appeals when doing so). She writes well-reasoned opinions that reveal deep sympathy for victims of civil liberties violations. And she certainly has no fear of being reversed by an increasingly conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which has jurisdiction over her court.

In short, if ever there was a federal judge to stand up to the President of the United States to tell him he must obey the law, and to cut through the nonsense that typically surrounds the invocation of the “state secrets” privilege, it is Judge Anna Diggs Taylor.

My Miss Cleo comment on July 20:

Things really don’t look good for the President.

***Update 2, 9:50 am ***

Thinkprogress has links to Judge Taylor’s opinion, and the injunction which enjoins the administration from “directly or indirectly utilizing the Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

They picked out this quote from the opinion:

In this case, the President has acted, undisputedly, as FISA forbids. FISA is the expressed statutory policy of our Congress. The presidential power, therefore, was exercised at its lowest ebb and cannot be sustained.

Getting slapped down hard by the courts is getting to be a habit for this administration.

***Update 3, 1:15 pm ***

Glenn Greenwald has a very detailed analysis. It’s too long to summarize effectively, so please go read it there. Two bits I found particularly interesting:

It took real courage for Judge Diggs Taylor to issue this Opinion and Order — it is hard to overstate how much courage it took. It will obviously be appealed. But as of right now, it is illegal, according to this federal court, for the Bush administration to continue to implement its “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” and since it is grounded in constitutional conclusions, nothing — such as Arlen Specter’s dreaded bill — could change that.
[…]
According to the ACLU, the Justice Department has notified them that they intend to ask the District Court Judge to stay her decision pending appeal to the Sixth Circuit (meaning the injunction would not apply immediately, but would only be activated if the decision were affirmed on appeal). Typically, with a decision of this magnitude — particularly one that changes, rather than preserves the status quo — a court would stay the decision. I was surprised that she did not stay it on her own (perhaps the Government did not ask).

Ordinarily, I would be inclined to think that it was almost automatic that the decision would be stayed, but given how dismissive she was of the administration’s arguments — and how unequivocal were her conclusions that this program violates the constitutional rights of Americans — I wouldn’t be all that shocked if she refused to (the administration could still then ask the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the Order).

Greenwald also notes that Taylor, being a black woman, is likely to attract more than her fair share of personal attacks for her ruling. The attacks, of course, have already begun, and he describes some of the shit that has already been flung by the usual suspects.