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The Supreme Court refused today to rule on the merits in a case that questioned whether the government can intercept international calls by American citizens:
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates who challenged the constitutionality of the law could not show they had been harmed by it and so lacked standing to sue. Their fear that they would be subject to surveillance in the future was too speculative to establish standing, he wrote.
In other words, it doesn’t matter if the law is actually constitutional or not. So as long as the government does a good job of keeping its wiretaps secret, no one will ever have standing to sue and the law will remain on the books. Nice work. Scott Lemieux has more here.
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