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DOJ Says Public Has No Right To Know About The Secret Laws The Feds Use To Spy On Us
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| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Jul 10, 2013 05:36am |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Wednesday, July 10, 2013 11:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The Obama administration, in a new court filing, urged the nation’s surveillance court to throw out a request by civil liberties groups to disclose its secret rulings about the scope and legality of the Patriot Act.
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.
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