Latest in Secrecy: State Secrets Privilege
This is a very interesting case. The other day, federal district judge Edgardo Ramos in New York threw out a defamation lawsuit between two private parties on the government's intervening motion asserting the state secrets privilege. The case is Restis v. American Coalition Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI).
The transcript of Judge Edgardo Ramos' Wednesday hearing in Restis v. United Against Nuclear Iran ("UANI") is in---and full of fascinating questions about the government's use of the state secrets privilege.
Last week---and in a somewhat unusual development---the Department of Justice filed a motion to intervene, stay, and dismiss a private lawsuit against a non-profit organization, citing the state secrets privilege.
Andrew Beaujon at Poynter reports that at last week’s Sources and Secrets conference, NYT reporter James Risen, who is fighting a subpoena for information in the Jeffrey Sterling trial, made these remarks:
1) The Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”
Back in 1975, the Attorney General was Edward Levi. Levi was extraordinarily distinguished, and had been appointed to this position in no small part to bring order and restore trust in the aftermath of tumultuous events of the early 1970s. Related to that, he was at the helm as the Church and Pike Committees went about their work investigating various national security activities and related scandals, including investigations touching on NSA programs in
There's been a fair amount of buzz over the past few days centered around the idea of a statutory "drone court"--a tribunal modeled after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that would (presumably) provide at least some m
Judge Colleen McMahon of the District Court of the Southern District of New York has granted summary judgment to the government in the consolidated FOIA cases brought by the New York Times and the ACLU. The plaintiffs were seeking information about the government's targeted killing program in the War on Terror.
Proving once again that the judiciary is the most hardcore of the three branches, the Supreme Court remains open for business this morning. The Justices will hear oral argument in Clapper v. Amnesty International, about whether human rights groups have standing to challenge the constitutionality of counterterrorism-related global surveillance, given that the program is secret and thus they can't be sure that they are actually being surveilled.
Here is the Government’s brief in support of its summary judgment motion in response to requests by the NYT and ACLU for records on targeted killings, especially with regard to U.S. citizens. This is the brief for which the USG has sought and received several deadline extensions -- extensions necessitated by extensive internal deliberations that led some to think the USG might be changing its policy on disclosure in this context.
Back in March, we shared the appellant's brief in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case of American Civil Liberties Union v. CIA.