The Obama administration will not be allowed to terminate a lawsuit by asserting that a civil argument would risk exposing national secrets, a federal judge ruled Monday in what has already been called an important advance for civil liberties advocates.
The suit, known as Jewel vs. National Security Agency, was
originally filed in 2008 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) and a group of AT&T customers who claimed Bush
administration officials had conducted an “illegal and
unconstitutional program of dragnet communications
surveillance” by operating warrantless surveillance on US
citizens.
Attention has re-focused on the case in recent weeks after
fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents
revealing the government’s widespread domestic and foreign
monitoring of telephone and Internet activity.
US District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, California
refused to allow the Obama administration to end the lawsuit by
citing the ‘state secrets’ privilege. By invoking that privilege,
the EFF argued, the federal government hoped to prove widespread
warrantless surveillance is not subject to judicial review.
“The government has unlawfully solicited and obtained from
telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and
ongoing disclosure of the private telephone and Internet
transactional records of those companies’ millions of customers,
communications records indicating who the customers communicated
with, when and for long, among other sensitive information,”
the technology and civil rights group wrote on its website.
“This transactional information is analyzed by computers in
conjunction with the vast quantity of communications content
acquired by government’s network of surveillance devices, in what
has been described as a vast data-mining operation.”
While Judge White did not explicitly discontinue the lawsuit,
Reuters noted, he may have introduced limitations strict enough
to only delay the end of the case or tie it up in court
indefinitely. He ordered the NSA to provide more data on how the
“recent disclosure of the government’s continuing surveillance
activities” could impact national security.
White requested “further briefing” from both sides,
writing that certain information from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which authorizes the NSA requests, “should
be declassified and immediately released to the
public.”
White’s decision is
regarded as the first step in what could be a long process, but
one Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the EFF, said was “a
huge victory and a very courageous decision.”
Republished with permission from: RT