Nota Bene

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Citing concerns about terrorism, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that airline passengers lose their right to object to a search after they go through initial security screenings.

The San Francisco-based court, ruling in a case involving a Hawaii man, said airline passengers couldn’t refuse searches once they place their belongings on an X-ray tray or walk through a metal detector.

It was the appeals court’s second decision in the case of Daniel Kuualoha Aukai because it wanted to clarify an earlier decision on the issue of consent. Last year, the court ruled Aukai couldn’t back out of additional searches even after he no longer wanted to board a flight.

You can read the opinion in United States v. Aukai here.

CNN reports:

A federal appeals court Friday ordered the dismissal of an ACLU lawsuit challenging President Bush’s domestic surveillance program.

President Bush secretly instituted the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program after 9/11.

The plaintiffs — a group of journalists, scholars and legal advocates — had no legal standing to pursue their claims because they could not show they were targeted by the National Security Agency’s warrantless spying program, the court decided in a 2-1 vote.

TalkLeft advises that the legal fight over this surveillance is not over yet:

At least one other suit is pending, and standing to bring the lawsuit isn’t at issue and and thus is unlikely to be the basis for dismissal.

Readers may remember that Albany, NY defense lawyer Terry Kindlon, raised a similar challenge to the wiretapping in United States v. Aref (the so-called “terrorism” case from the Northern District of New York).

In December, 2005, while Aref’s case was pending, Terry learned from a New York Times article that his client had been tapped by the NSA. He immediately made some demands, followed up with some motions and, basically, got nowhere (although he did enjoy receiving a Government pleading containing a caption at the top of the first page, a signature at the bottom of the third page, and nothing but blank space (marked CLASSIFIED) in between).

From The Wired Blog Network:

Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone’s privacy without a court order (NSLs don’t require a judge’s approval). That’s when things turned ugly.

The four librarians under the gag order weren’t allowed to talk to each other by phone. So they e-mailed. Later, they weren’t allowed to e-mail.