For secretive surveillance court, rare scrutiny in wake of NSA leaks

Re:For secretive surveillance court, rare scrutiny in wake o... by senjmccarthy on Sunday June 23, 2013 @01:44PM (#5928517)

The only way to know if a law is "constitutional" or not is to subject it to challenge it in the (non-secret) court system.

If a law cannot be challenged because either its existence is secret or the process of its enforcement is secret, or both, then we can never know whether such a law is or is not constitutional.

I guess some in favor of the status quo would argue that sometimes scrutiny (to use the word in the article's title) of laws and their enforcement is imprudent? Because it threatens "national security"?

Should the public be permitted to scrutinize the laws that make what NSA is doing "legal"? Why or why not?

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Re:For secretive surveillance court, rare scrutiny in wake o... by coldcode on Sunday June 23, 2013 @06:40PM (#5929861)

The very idea of a secret law that cannot be challenged is certainly not what the writers of the Constitution ever imagined. Once one law can be successfully hidden from the people then in the future all laws will be designed in the same way. At that point it no longer matters what we want or what the Constitution says.

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