So much for checks and balances…

From a wired blog post:

The federal government intends to invoke the rarely used “State Secrets Privilege” — the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb — in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class action lawsuit against AT&T that alleges the telecom collaborated with the government’s secret spying on American citizens.

The State Secrets Privilege is a vestige from English common law that lets the executive branch step into a civil lawsuit and have it dismissed if the case might reveal information that puts national security at risk.

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