State Secrets Privilege - Calls For Reform

Calls For Reform

See also: State Secrets Protection Act

In recent years, a number of commentators have called for legislative reforms to the state secrets privilege. These reforms center around several ideas:

  1. Requiring judges to review each piece of evidence that the executive claims is subject to the privilege.
  2. Requiring the executive to craft alternative evidence that is not subject to the privilege, for the opposing party to use in place of the original, privileged evidence. Such substitute evidence should only be required when it is possible to do so without harming national security.
  3. Prohibiting courts from dismissing claims on the basis of the state secrets privilege until after they have reviewed all available evidence.
  4. Permitting the court to appoint an outside expert to scrutinize the evidence for national security content.
  5. Excluding illegal government action from the definition of "state secrets," or otherwise allowing the court to address the legality (instead of just the secrecy) of government conduct. This would prevent the government from using the state secrets privilege to conceal its illegal conduct.

On January 22, 2008, Senators Edward Kennedy and Arlen Specter introduced S. 2533, the State Secrets Protection Act.

Read more about this topic:  State Secrets Privilege

Famous quotes containing the words calls for, calls and/or reform:

    “Any man today who returns from work, sinks into a chair, and calls for his pipe is a man with an appetite for danger.”
    —Bill Cosby (20th century)

    “In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth, and not by their mediocrity, nor by their being commended. For several men praise several customs, and, contrarily, what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them.”
    —Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)

    “Undoubtedly if we were to reform this outward life truly and thoroughly, we should find no duty of the inner omitted. It would be employment for our whole nature.... But a moral reform must take place first, and then the necessity of the other will be superseded, and we shall sail and plow by its force alone.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)