Obama is defending executive power against his supporters by making shrewd moves that have the appearance of concession without the substance and leave the public believing that he has a "balanced" position on civil liberties when in fact little has changed.

Consider his initial act of closing GitMo. Highly visible and widely celebrated in liberal circles, but the courts had already put the substantive question of executive detention to rest 6 months before Obama became President. The move was entirely symbolic and frankly, a huge waste of money. In my view, leaving GitMo open would have sent a better message - that the physical location of the prison is totally irrelevant - its the policies under which it operates that matter.

Now we have the states secrets announcement. I was wrong about this to begin with - Obama is not going to reverse course on any position Bush took in pending cases unless he is forced to by some external circumstance. I think the linked observations are astute:

By voluntarily checking its own assertion of the privilege, the Administration may have slowed the momentum... to establish greater restrictions on executive use of the privilege... Ironically, then, the very policy shift that limits the privilege today may be the one that prevents courts and Congress from limiting abuse of the privilege in the future.

Also consider the recent announcement on border searches of laptops. The Bush era policy failed to specify any limit for the amount of time randomly selected laptops would be held for forensic analysis. The Obama era policy doesn't specify a limit either, but it does specify some administrative hurdles that have to be crossed if the analysis is going to take longer than 5 days. This creates the appearance of "limiting" without the substance, and some reporters fell for it - giving the administration headlines like "Homeland Security restricts laptop searches at border" and "Tighter oversight on border laptop searches".

Certainly some percentage of readers came away from the mix of headlines with the perception that Obama is taking a "balanced" position on civil liberties - which is precisely what his mainstream supporters want to hear.

These new border search policies continue to make a total mockery of the notion that we live in a free society, where law enforcement agents do not go on detailed fishing expeditions through the most private papers and correspondence of citizens without some prior suspicion. Nevertheless, in order to figure that out you'd have to pay attention to the details and actually understand whats going on. Most people don't, and the Obama administration has now clearly established a pattern of abusing that misunderstanding in order to mislead the public on these issues.

We continue to be governed by slick spinmasters who have little regard for the basic principals that underpin the great institutions they've managed to gain control of. Our downward spiral quickens.

Obama on Civil Liberties