By Andrew Kreig / Project Director

A federal prosecutor and federal trial judge face a new scandal for allowing court clerks in Alabama to disclose confidential records about dozens of sensitive law enforcement surveillance operations. The security breach occurred in the same courthouse where the Bush Justice Department obtained corruption convictions in 2006 against former Gov. Don Siegelman in a now-infamous political prosecution against the state's leading Democrat.

Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller is a Republican who conducted the Siegelman trial while secretly being enriched on the side through his closely held company's receipt of Air Force contracts. Currently, he presides as chief judge over record-keeping at the middle district federal courthouse in Montgomery, at right.

U.S. Attorney Leura Canary, left, is in charge of federal criminal and civil litigation in the district. On Thursday, Canary and her DOJ colleagues obtained a guilty plea from Country Crossing developer Ronnie Gilley, a gambling entrepreneur who was indicted last fall with nine-other defendants in an alleged plot to bribe legislators. The plea was welcome news for authorities. A different federal magistrate-judge had harshly criticized them earlier this month for illegally suppressing evidence in the gambling case, which is separate from Siegelman's decade-long prosecution.

But the good news for prosecutors was soon superceded. The Smoking Gun investigative website reported on April 22:

In a shocking failure to protect sensitive details about dozens of ongoing criminal investigations, federal officials somehow allowed confidential information about sealed cases to be publicly accessible via the court system’s online lookup service, The Smoking Gun has learned. Over the past nine months, details of 40 separate sealed court applications filed by federal prosecutors in Alabama were uploaded to PACER, the web-based records system that counts nearly one million users, including defense lawyers, prosecutors, journalists, researchers, private investigators, and government officials.

Today, we highlight recent news reports concerning United States war-making, torture-like prison conditions for a suspected WikiLeaks accomplice, and electronic surveillance of vast numbers of ordinary citizens. Each action arguably violates historic interpretation of governing law.

Longtime readers surely notice that our columns on such topics are extending beyond our initial focus on due process rights in federal litigation. We started this project, for example, with in-depth reviews of the long-running prosecutions of Democratic former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and Republican former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik on corruption charges.

We're still exploring those enforcement tactics. But we cannot ignore the kind of overlapping due process and constitutional questions constantly arising also from the country's so-called war on terror.

The consequences directly affect domestic law because of ever-growing precedents expanding Executive Branch power.