The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released an order Friday...
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released an order Friday (http://1.usa.gov/17wEG8M) favoring the American Civil Liberties Union’s push to make the court release more documents. The ACLU has “standing to seek this relief,” which in particular seeks disclosed opinions on Section…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
215 of the Patriot Act, a provision that the National Security Agency has said authorizes bulk collection of telephone data, said the document, signed by FISC Judge Dennis Saylor. The ACLU and the Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic pushed the court to disclose the documents in June. The court specifies that its judgment does not cover any items at issue in a separate ACLU lawsuit from October 2011. But “the Court will order the government to conduct a declassification review of any opinions responsive to the present motion that are not subject to that [Freedom of Information Act] litigation and to report the results of that review to the Court.” The executive branch had denied that the parties had any standing or First Amendment justification for making the FISC documents public, but the ACLU argued the FISC can make classification decisions independent of the executive branch. The FISC cited the ACLU’s “active” engagement with Section 215 legislative and public debates and noted that access to Section 215 opinions would help the ACLU during these debates. To withhold them “constitutes a concrete and particularized injury,” it said. The FISC said it could not make the same arguments for the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic because the public record has not shown it to have engaged in the same level of debate as the ACLU nor had the group shown how the records would benefit its activities. But publication of such opinions would lead to an informed debate, the court said. The government must identify the relevant opinions and establish a timetable for declassification review and any proposed redactions by Oct. 4, it ordered, after which the authors of the opinions can decide whether to make them public. “For too long, the NSA’s sweeping surveillance of Americans has been shrouded in unjustified secrecy,” ACLU staff attorney Alex Ado said in a statement (http://bit.ly/15qt73k). “Today’s ruling is an overdue rebuke of that practice.”