Welcome to the Club. Can we borrow your judicial system for a sec? NYT:

The breaches are particularly mortifying for the State Department because officials there discovered them as far back as last summer, in the case of Mrs. Clinton, but did not inform any of the candidates until Thursday, after The Washington Times reported that Mr. Obama’s privacy had been violated.

State Department officials have blamed managers in the passport office, below the level of political appointees, who did not inform their superiors about the breaches. Privacy lawyers said Friday that the department risked being taken to court over the failure to inform the candidates.

“Immediately on finding out that there was a breach, the victim should have been notified,” said Steven M. Dettelbach, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner in the Washington office of Baker Hostetler L.L.P. “It’s a basic question of victims’ rights. When a crime happens, the victim needs to know what happened.”

Hmm. Basic question of victims' rights. So, presumably, all those tens of thousands of Americans who are suspected of nothing who have had their private communications details spied on by the government with no warrants, all of those thousands the FBI director Mueller has been hauled up to Capitol Hill to testify about the FBI mistakenly targeting with stray exigent letters and blanket requests to banks, telecom companies and libraries for their records, all of them, then, deserve to be immediately notified by the government that they were the victims of a breach - and if not, have a good case to sue, according to the attorney's case laid out above? Seriously, what am I missing? Isn't there some bizarre sort of cognitive dissonance going on in seeing the reactions to the two cases? How much more intrusive is it to have federal law enforcement and intelligence scouring ordinary people's phone records, emails, bank records than a State Department contractor sneak peaking into presidential candidates' passport files, with the sort of information available in any credit check, and which is prompting a rush of Congressional investigations? Why do ordinary people have no recourse, no remedy, no way to demand accountability for the violation of their privacy, no recourse even to demand that they be notified the government has surveilled their communications and bank records, when the presidential candidates, who have volunteered after all for an extraordinary degree of public scrutiny to become the leader of the free world, get recourse, apologies, Congressional investigations and law suits?

Posted by Laura at March 22, 2008 07:04 AM