Justice Department Thought Police

Reported in The Memory Hole:

The Justice Department tipped its hand in its ongoing legal war with the ACLU over the Patriot Act. Because the matter is so sensitive, the Justice Dept is allowed to black out those passages in the ACLU’s court filings that it feels should not be publicly released.
 

Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:
 

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

This isn’t an absurdity. It’s an alarming indication of the mindset of the people who are supposedly protecting not just the American people, but our system of government. They see a “threat to national security” in a statement defending political dissent. They treat the highest judicial authority in our government as a threat. They treat a fundamental principle of our democracy as a threat.

And they have the arrogance to think no one will notice what they’re doing.