Cultivated Compendium

President Obama finally weighed in on where the line should be drawn between surveillance and privacy in a speech today. The New York Times reports: the president "will require intelligence agencies to obtain permission from a secret court before tapping into a vast storehouse of telephone data, and will ultimately move that data out of the hands of the government."

The president also said surveillance of foreign leaders will be curtailed.

The president also suggested the creation of a "panel of advocates on privacy and technology issues who would appear before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court." The Times reports that the advocates would only appear in novel cases, but it's unclear who would decide which cases are novel.

The Legal Intelligencer's Gina Passarella (my former cubicle-mate!) reports on a Commonwealth Court ruling today that the Pennsylvania Senate must disclose legal bills as well as client names for the attorneys hired by the legislative chamber to represent former state Senator Robert J. Mellow and other Democratic caucus employees. "After already determining attorney-client privilege doesn’t protect from disclosure of client identities or descriptions of legal services provided, the Commonwealth Court has now found that information can’t be protected under the attorney work-product doctrine, grand jury secrecy rules or a criminal investigation exception," The Legal further reports.

John Bates, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, has "warned against a proposal to include in the court's proceedings an outside privacy and civil liberties advocate, who might take positions counter to the government when it seeks permission to collect huge swaths of Internet traffic, email addresses, and phone communications," Foreign Policy reports.

Bates, in consultation with other FISC judges, wrote that "the participation of a privacy advocate is unnecessary--and could prove counterproductive--in the vast majority of FISA matters, which involve the application of a probable cause or other factual standard to case-specific facts and typically implicate the privacy interest of few persons other than the specificed target. Given the nature of FISA proceedings, the participation of an advocate would neither create a truly adversarial process nor constructively assist the courts in assessing the facts, as the advocate would be unable to communicate with the target or conduct an independent investigation," according to a letter sent to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Instead, the judges suggest that a privacy advocate only be appointed at the discretion of FISC judges and not have independent authority to intervene in cases.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the options that the FCC still has to ensure that Internet content is treated equally and neutrally after the D.C. Circuit ruled yesterday the governmental agency's net neutrality-rules overstepped its authority. One option would be to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers because "'the Communications Act doesn’t clearly address broadband providers, which means their regulatory status is a matter of reasonable agency discretion,'" The Journal reports.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision on whether it is constitutional for the president to make appointments during legislative recesses will not only have a big impact on the separation of powers. A decision rejecting recess appointments will upend hundreds of labor disputes decided by the National Labor Relations Board, The Washington Post reports. '“Regardless of whether you’re in the business community or organized labor, you want to know that the agency is operating with legal authority,' said Steven Bernstein, a labor lawyer who represents employers. 'You want to get it right the first time and make the results stick so you don’t face the possibility of waking up and doing it all over again,'" The Post further reports.

While only 24 percent of people purchasing health insurance through the federal exchange are between the age of 18 and 34 (which is 14 percentage points lower than what the law needs to keep premiums low), The Washington Post's Ezra Kkein reports that younger, healthier people tend to sign up only when the penalty is about to hit. This enrollment behavior happened when Massachusetts rolled out its state insurance exchange. " Obamacare's enrollment pattern looks a whole lot more like Massachusetts than I would've thought given the disastrous launch and the challenging political environment," Klein blogs. Open enrollment ends April 1.

New York Times reporter James Risen, who federal prosecutors are seeking to have identify his confidential sources in a criminal case against an alleged CIA leaker, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether he is entitled to reporters privilege, Politico reports. At issue Risen's counsel argued in the petition is if journalists have a a qualified First Amendment privilege regarding confidential sources in criminal trials and if a common law privilege should be recognized for journalists under Federal Rule of Evidence 501.

Another state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage has been struck down. A federal judge ruled today that Oklahoma's ban on same-sex marriage violates the guarantee of equal protection in the U.S. Constitution, USA Today reports. The ban, the judge reasoned is "'an arbitrary, irrational exclusion of just one class of Oklahoma citizens from a governmental benefit,"' USA Today further reports. The ruling, unlike a similar one in Utah, was stayed for the inevitable appeal.