See? I can agree with liberals

I can't believe I'm going to link to Mother Jones magazine, but that seems to be the case. Keep your eyes peeled for boiling seas, rivers running with blood, etc., etc.

Anyway, Mother Jones is reporting that

the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

It would appear that Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee [truth alert -- they oversee the intelligence committee. It does not mean that the members of the committee are intelligent, although I wholeheartedly support Sen. Wyden, generally a screaming liberal, on this.]  has been bitching since 2011 about the feds spying on the American public. Wyden thought Americans were being spied on by their own government in an unlawful fashion, and he fought the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to get declassified a couple statements he wanted to release. The statements were:

* On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

* I believe that the government's implementation of Section 702 of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion. 

So the situation is this: the government is collecting boatloads of data about the communications of ordinary citizens. A court found at least some of that activity to be unconstitutional. The government is fighting to keep that opinion classified so that the public will not know that some of what the government is doing to the public is unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the president says:

If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

 No shit, Sherlock. We already don't trust you! These scandals with the IRS, the DOJ, and the White House itself over its lies about the Benghazi incident have undermined this administration's credibility to the point of nonexistence, and now Barry's position is "trust us"? Really? Because you need this information from millions of innocent American citizens to catch the occasional terrorist? Kind of like you need to frisk paraplegic grandmothers to keep would be terrorists off domestic flights? Why not, as Mark Steyn suggests, just pay attention to what's right in front of you? The Army and the FBI ignored Maj. Nidal Hasan, despite multiple warnings, right up until he was shooting up Fort Hood. Taking the phone records of American citizens didn't help there, did it?

As for Major Hasan, who needs surveillance? He put “Soldier of Allah” on his business card and gave a PowerPoint presentation to his military colleagues on what he’d like to do to infidels — and nobody said a word, lest they got tied up in sensitivity-training hell for six months.

If Barry still thinks America trusts its government, maybe he should look to Facebook. Hat tip to Instapundit for both of these: