Government secrecy
I think I'm going to use this post to plan what might be a series of posts about government secrecy. Just in the last few months (or even days), there has been a lot of news and discussion on this topic - and some interesting concrete developments. For instance, it was announced today that the Supreme Court refused to overturn an expansion of the federal wiretap surveillance rules that was passed in 2008. By itself, perhaps not big news, but the reason is certainly big news. The plaintiffs (journalists, the ACLU, etc.) couldn't prove that they had been subject to surveillance, so the court decided they didn't even have standing to bring a case. Of course by the very nature of the surveillance program, subjects will likely never become aware that the government is monitoring them. That means that there is virtually no conceivable circumstance in which the law could ever be subject to constitutional review by the Supreme Court. This is part of a pernicious trend, whereby