Comment Once again: Really? (Score 2, Informative) 396
Apparently Mr. Moalin once missed a telephone call from "Aden Hashi Ayrow, the senior al Shabaab leader," which makes it likely that a little more was going on than merely the donation of "a small sum of money.
Really?
Was it really A.H.A. who called?
Was he really calling the defendant? Or did he misdial the number?
And I could go on for pages.
What the government is claiming is that the defendant has NO RIGHT TO ASK for the information necessary to CHECK whether that is what happened, NO RIGHT TO CHECK whether the information was collected legally, and NO RIGHT TO GET IT THROWN OUT if it wasn't.
Says the government: We get to use this against you and you can't challenge it.
Seems to me that anyone being prosecuted with such information NECESSARILY has standing to challenge it. Nobody else could POSSIBLY have more standing.
To claim that the defendant doesn't have standing is to claim that NOBODY has standing. It's to claim that the government can make up ANYTHING IT WANTS, enter it into evidence, and NOBODY can check it.
The government needs to put up or shut up.
= = = =
There used to be a solid division between the intelligence services and law enforcement. That let the intelligence services collect information for fighting wars under looser rules which, though they might not be constitutional, at least didn't vaporize the constitutional rights of defendants in criminal trials.
Then the congress passed laws for, first the "drug war", then the "war on terror", that tore down this boundary. So now we have the end game, where the NSA and the federal prosecutors light their cigars with burning copies of the Fourth Amendment.