OBAMA Justice Dept. Defends Secret Rulings in New Spy Court Filing
The filing, which comes in response to a June lawsuit from the ACLU, coincides with a critical profile by the New York Times that claims the FISA court has “become almost a parallel Supreme Court” with its own “secret body of law” that bolsters the powers of the NSA.
In the filing, embedded below, the Justice Department quotes with approval the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s own view of its power, expressed in 2007, that “[t]he FISC is a unique court … [o]ther courts operate primarily in public, with secrecy the exception; the FISC operates primarily in secret, with public access the exception.”
The filing, which comes in response to a June lawsuit from the ACLU, coincides with a critical profile by the New York Times that claims the FISA court has “become almost a parallel Supreme Court” with its own “secret body of law” that bolsters the powers of the NSA.
In its June lawsuit, the ACLU challenged the secret nature of the decisions with support from 16 members of Congress; the suit claims the FISA court has a First Amendment and public policy duty to disclose the constitutional grounds for the surveillance powers it is granting to America’s spy agenices. The ACLU, which made a similar request in 2007, says that it’s possible to reveal such information without compromising classified intelligence operations.
The request attempts to shed light on the workings of the FISA court which, in the past 30 years, has disclosed only a handful of its decisions (most recently in 2009.) In the last month, though, the court has attracted unprecedented attention over its role in authorizing the federal government to collect vast amounts of meta-data from phone companies and from tech firms like Google and Facebook.
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