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Apparently Judge William Martini subscribes to the Congressman Mike Rogers school of privacy harm. In a ruling widely derided by journalists and civil rights organizations, he claimed that the NYPD’s over the top spying campaign against Muslims isn’t to blame for privacy harms to NYC Muslims, who sued the city alleging the opposite. No, the judge ruled, Muslims upset over the NYPD’s extensive spying operations against them should instead take up their complaints with the Associated Press. After all, if those meddling journalists had never published stories about the NYPD’s anti-Muslim spying obsession, the city’s Muslim population never would have known about it!

From Martini's decision, as excerpted by Marcy Wheeler:

Nowhere in the complaint do the plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of documents by The Associated Press. This confirms that plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents….The Associated Press covertly obtained the materials and published them without authorization. Thus the injury, if any existed, is not fairly traceable to the city.

That sounds just like what Congressman Mike Rogers said about the Snowden leaks and the NSA’s dragnet spying programs. During an October 2013 House Intelligence Committee hearing about NSA spying, Rogers infamously said that "You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated." Okaaaay.

I always think it's better to laugh than to cry about such things, so in response to both Judge William Martini and Congressman Mike Rogers, I give you Stephen Colbert: