--- title: The US Government Is Hiding Secret Court Ruling About... description: It only contains a Conde Nast privacy notice describing state opt-out rights for targeted advertising and sale of personal information, with an email and phone... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-us-government-is-hiding-secret-court-ruling-about-how-it-spies-on-americans-bcfv5msut twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The US Government Is Hiding Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans | daily.dev og:description: It only contains a Conde Nast privacy notice describing state opt-out rights for targeted advertising and sale of personal information, with an email and phone... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-us-government-is-hiding-secret-court-ruling-about-how-it-spies-on-americans-bcfv5msut og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/bCFv5mSUt.png og:image:alt: The US Government Is Hiding Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The US Government Is Hiding Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary It only contains a Conde Nast privacy notice describing state opt-out rights for targeted advertising and sale of personal information, with an email and phone number for privacy requests. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 103 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-27). **TL;DR:** The discussion quickly pivots from the secret surveillance ruling itself into a long, heated argument over which political party is more responsible for mass surveillance, with broad agreement that secret courts and domestic spying are illegitimate regardless of who's in power. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 25% mixed · 70% skeptical **The pushback** - Secret courts undermine due process and constitutional protections like the 5th and 6th Amendments. - Both major parties are seen as complicit in expanding or tolerating surveillance powers despite rhetorical differences. - Classification and secrecy are used to shield government abuses and evade accountability. - Surveillance capabilities have historically been used against domestic activist and political groups, not just foreign threats. - Section 702 reauthorization debates are viewed by some as theater since surveillance would continue regardless of its legal status. **By community** - hackernews (heated): Commenters largely agree secret surveillance courts are illegitimate, but spend most of the thread in a contentious back-and-forth over partisan blame for enabling or tolerating spying. **Hottest debate:** Whether mass surveillance is a genuinely bipartisan failure or disproportionately driven by one party, with voting records and historical examples cited on both sides. **Open questions** - Will the classified interpretation of Section 702 that multiple administrations have relied on ever actually be declassified? - How much of the surveillance apparatus (backdoors, data sharing with allies) actually gets dismantled versus merely rebranded or routed through partner intelligence agencies? **Highlights** > "Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”" Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement. > — [edot on hackernews · 6 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50260136) > How much comes from this being the minority party in the 119th Congress? Note that when FISA section 702 was extended in April 2024, the House was 147 Democrats in favor, 126 Republicans in favor, 59 Democrats opposed, and 88 Republicans opposed. When the other guys have control of the government, it is to your party's advantage to deny additional powers to the government. When your guys are in power, vote away to add more power to that. That's just human nature, and has been a staple of political history since the founding of American democracy. > — [nostrademons on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261565) > The 6th Amendment was written to prevent secret courts. The English Star Chamber was frequently secret and you could be put on trial without knowing what evidence/testimony was brought against you. The Star Chamber was also why the 5th Amendment exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights > — [Tangurena2 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261051) > Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens". The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not. Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example. For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups. Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other. Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning. That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle. > — [scarecrowbob on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50262052) > what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do. fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open. the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable. > — [motohagiography on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50261657) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50259604) · 319 points · 103 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [US courts will start publishing how often the government uses spyware](https://daily.dev/posts/us-courts-will-start-publishing-how-often-the-government-uses-spyware-zzq8jslbc) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - 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