Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To Surveillance Law

It was a 5-4 decision along ideological, if not party, lines.

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.

Justice Alito also rejected arguments based on the steps the plaintiffs had taken to escape surveillance, including traveling to meet sources and clients in person rather than talking to them over the phone. “They cannot manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipation of non-imminent harms,” he wrote of the plaintiffs.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that the harm claimed by the plaintiffs was not speculative. “Indeed,” he wrote, “it is as likely to take place as are most future events that common-sense inference and ordinary knowledge of human nature tell us will happen.” Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined his dissenting opinion.

By: Cheston Catalano

Cheston Catalano is a Kentucky-based journalist whose work has been featured in the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle. He is a long-time contributor to Liberaland.