Citing national security, a federal judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T Inc. from giving telephone records to the government for use in the war on terror.

Sigh.

[U.S. District Judge Matthew F.] Kennelly ruled in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other activists who said their constitutional rights were violated because of an NSA program of gathering phone company records.

Justice Department attorneys had argued that it would violate the law against divulging state secrets for AT&T to say whether it had provided telephone records to the supersecret spy agency.

The ACLU argued that the practice was no longer secret, because numerous news reports had made it clear that phone records had been given to the agency.

But the judge said the news reports amounted to speculation and in no way constituted official confirmation that phone records had been turned over.

So what’s the thinking here by the federal government? Are they hoping that terrorist suspects don’t read the news, or that they don’t buy into the speculation? Are they hoping that suspects will think, “Well, you know, nobody’s actually confirmed that AT&T is giving away our phone records. I’m sure it’s perfectly okay to talk on an open line.”?

[Kennelly] also said Terkel and the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which sought class-action status, had not shown that their own records had been provided to the government. As a result, they lacked standing to sue the government, he said.

So…because it’s illegal to divulge whether or not AT&T is turning over its records, you can’t prove they’re turning over your records. It may very well be illegal for the federal government to spy on its citizens without a warrant, as they appear to have been doing here — but, luckily for them, it’s also illegal to reveal that the federal government is spying on its citizens. Nice, huh?

In this case, I think ACLU legal director Harvey Grossman sums things up pretty nicely: “A private company…should not be able to escape accountability for violating a federal statute and the privacy of their customers on the basis that a program widely discussed in the public is secret.”