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When Attorney General Eric Holder invoked the “state secrets” privilege to quash a lawsuit alleging illegal National Security Agency spying last Friday night, his department’s lawyers sounded a lot like those who worked for President George W. Bush. In fact, they justified the action by filing an affidavit from President Obama’s director of national intelligence that is nearly identical to one filed by President Bush’s intelligence director two years ago. The strikingly similar affidavit—making the same arguments in the almost exactly the same language—is among the strongest examples yet of how Obama administration officials are adopting Bush-era secrecy positions in major national-security cases. Holder’s move came in the case of Shubert v. Obama, a lawsuit filed in 2006 by four residents of Brooklyn, New York. They allege that their overseas phone calls were illegally intercepted by the NSA as part of a massive “dragnet” of warrantless surveillance ordered by Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks. “It is my judgment that sensitive state secrets are so central to the subject matter of the litigation that any attempt to proceed in the case will ...risk exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States,” Blair wrote in an affidavit submitted by Justice Department lawyers on Oct. 30. If that language sounded familiar to the court, it’s because it was: “It is my judgment that sensitive state secrets are so central to the subject matter of the litigation that any attempt to proceed in the case will ... risk exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States,” wrote J. Michael McConnell, Bush’s intel chief, in an affidavit filed on May 25, 2007, in the same case.

In an exercise that left some officials in the field scratching their heads, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair earlier this month summoned a small group of senior CIA station chiefs to a conference at his headquarters in Virginia