Asked about remarks that some critics have called unpatriotic, Rev. Wright noted that men and women from his Chicago congregation had fought in all the country's recent wars, "while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service".
The administration also did everything it could to block unwanted disclosures about its policies, routinely invoking the formerly obscure "state-secrets privilege" to avoid revealing details of its treatment of enemy combatants.
Among the principles at stake in the investigation into the leak of the name of the C.I.A. official, Valerie Plame, is that of a reporter's privilege to avoid having to testify about confidential or unpublished information, unless it goes "to the heart" of a particular case and cannot be otherwise obtained.
The former White House counsel, Bernard Nussbaum, tried to invoke executive privilege to avoid handing over some of Foster's papers; but these were private presidential papers, such as tax returns, and therefore not covered by the privilege.
The rejection of the case by the supreme court marked the latest in a series of refusals by the high court to consider the question of a reporter's privilege to avoid testifying in order to protect source confidentiality.
The second allows processes to be run in a protected mode, where memory and execution are protected against access, even from users or processes with higher levels of privilege, avoiding the need to perform computations in ciphertext.
Judge Fisher agreed that "the government is not invoking the privilege to avoid embarrassment or to escape scrutiny of its recent controversial transfer and interrogation policies, rather than to protect legitimate national security concerns".
Mr Obama has not once claimed executive privilege to avoid turning over information to Congress.
This story is distasteful from a number of obvious standpoints: the student's refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing, the father's blind defense of his daughter's "innocence" and the reflexive effort to abuse power and privilege to avoid fair consequences.
