Strike Three!

I don't want to over-work the "Good News" theme but... in an article entitled "Another major NSA legal defeat for the Bush administration", Glenn Greenwald reports that...

A federal judge in Oregon yesterday became the third consecutive judge (after Judge Walker in the Northern District of California and Judge Taylor in the Eastern District of Michigan) to reject the Bush administration's claim that national security concerns (i.e., the "state secrets" doctrine) bar courts from ruling on the legality of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program. The ruling (.pdf), from Federal Judge Garr King, resoundingly rejected the Bush administration's now-standard tactic for placing the President's conduct beyond the reach of the law, and Judge King used reasoning identical to that used by the two prior federal judges who also rejected the Bush administration's claims

[...]

Before the Bush administration began abusing what was the rarely used "state secrets" doctrine, it was virtually automatic for courts to defer to the President's claim that national security precluded judicial examination of certain issues. But yesterday's ruling follows in the footsteps of the decisions by Judge Walker and Judge Taylor, and constitutes a clear sign that the federal courts no longer have sufficient trust in the Bush administration's use of this doctrine and will, consequently, subject it to scrutiny rather than just blindly accepting it as courts have done in the past.

Sure does sound like good news though, doesn't it?