American Civil Liberties Union

This post originally appeared on Politico.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled that the Central Intelligence Agency may no longer refuse to acknowledge something that everyone knows to be true: the agency has "an interest" in the use of drones to carry out targeted killings. The CIA is unaccustomed to courts rejecting its secrecy claims, but in asking the courts to pretend that the agency might have no connection whatsoever to the targeted killing program, the agency dramatically overreached. Unsurprisingly, the appeals court was unwilling to give its "imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible."

It's almost certain that we'll have a hard-fought battle over domestic surveillance this year, both in the courts and in Congress.

This was originally posted on The Huffington Post.

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Trained in the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military interrogators and guards who tortured and dehumanized prisoners in U.S. custody after 9/11 were hardly without ethical bearings. But as Alberto Mora, former chief counsel of the Navy, predicted when he discovered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had authorized previously banned interrogation techniques,

Christopher Hitchens had many rare qualities – he was contrarian, original, devastatingly brilliant, skeptical of almost everything – and I take pride in the fact that he was once an ACLU client.  He was a plaintiff in our 2006 challenge to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, a challenge that was sustained by the lower court but later dismissed on procedural grounds by a divided court of appeals.