Obama appeals ruling on NSA disclosure

Not satisfied with a Bay Area judge’s ruling that allowed the government to withhold a series of documents about its telephone surveillance program, the Obama administration filed an appeal Monday over the one document that the judge ordered disclosed.

The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco after the surveillance program was revealed last year by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. He disclosed a secret court ruling that showed the NSA was collecting information on all domestic phone calls — the caller, the recipient, and the time and duration — on the grounds that they might show a link to foreign terrorists.

The foundation’s suit has led to disclosure of hundreds of pages of records showing the scope of the program. But in August, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of Oakland refused to require the public release of five rulings issued between 2006 and 2010 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secretive panel that oversees the record-collection. She said disclosure of the rulings would reveal “intelligence sources or methods” and could give the targets of the surveillance a roadmap for evading detection.

Gonzalez Rogers also said the government did not have to disclose the names of telecommunications companies that have cooperated with the surveillance. That was despite an apparent public disclosure in an online article in March by a law professor who had been appointed to President Obama’s NSA review panel.

The professor, Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago, wrote that “companies like Sprint, Verizon and AT&T are required to turn over records to the NSA.” The NSA’s general counsel had also referred in public to “three different providers” in the program. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that the names were no longer secret, but Gonzalez Rogers said Stone’s statement was ambiguous and hadn’t been officially confirmed by the government. She also noted that Stone had left the presidential panel two months before posting his article.

The only setback for the government involved an undisclosed Justice Department legal opinion on whether the Census Bureau should turn over its data to the NSA. Gonzalez Rogers said the administration has adopted that opinion as its legal policy and must make it public.

The Justice Department has now appealed that ruling to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it won’t appeal the rest of the judge’s decision.

 

Categories: Obama, surveillance
Bob Egelko