Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Government Privacy United States Your Rights Online

Judge Orders DOJ To Turn Over FISA Surveillance Documents 184

itwbennett (1594911) writes "In a victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is suing to make the DOJ release information about surveillance on U.S. citizens, a California judge on Friday ordered the Department of Justice to produce 66 pages of documents for her review. The judge said the agency failed to justify keeping the documents secret and she will decide whether the documents, including one opinion and four orders by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), were improperly withheld from the public."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Judge Orders DOJ To Turn Over FISA Surveillance Documents

Comments Filter:
  • by russotto ( 537200 ) on Sunday June 15, 2014 @09:02PM (#47243273) Journal

    ....3....2...1....GONE!

  • Now what if the judge gets the documents and indeed agrees that they should remain secret?

  • I think we're getting someone's attention. (Hopefully the judge makes them public)
  • Better summary: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MasseKid ( 1294554 ) on Sunday June 15, 2014 @11:16PM (#47243615)
    Stalemate continued, EFF showed some promise, but the DoJ has to 1) actually comply with the order, 2) The judge actually agree on merits, 3) The DoJ not immediately file for an appeal due to matters of national saftey, 4) the DoJ actually give the information to the EFF.

    Don't get me wrong, what happened today was good, however calling it a victory is a bit premature.
    • 5) The DOJ gives half a shit about any court orders. Or the rest of the country for that matter.

    • but the DoJ has to 1) actually comply with the order

      The judge would have wide discretion in issuing sanctions for contempt of the discovery order. I personally doubt this is the sort of thing where a whole bunch of people progressively higher up the food chain would be willing to take up residence in a jail cell. We'll see.

      2) The judge actually agree on merits

      Agreed, though I'm encouraged that one of the reasons in the opinion [eff.org] for ordering the docs to be submitted to the court was the DoJ's prior shady practices in the case: "The evidence in the record shows that some documents, previously w

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday June 15, 2014 @11:21PM (#47243623)

    Why will the papers be unavailable? My 10 bucks are on "technical error and for some mysterious reasons they're nowhere to be found on backups".

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Have we had State secrets yet? Retroactive immunity? Anything distracting under color of law
      State secrets privilege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      Rename the projects and methods, hand the databases over to the GCHQ and Canada.
      Do an exhaustive, in depth search in the US and find nothing?
      Anything distracting around the world?
    • "He slipped on an icy patch."
      "But he was decapitated!"
      "It was a *very* icy patch."

  • by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Monday June 16, 2014 @05:13AM (#47244431)
    ... a court should and will assume that the information you didn't hand over would be speaking against you. That is common practice. So if the judge orders the DOJ to hand over documents, it doesn't really matter that much (in the court case) whether they do or don't. If a plaintiff says "they should hand over these documents because it will clearly show that X is true", and they don't hand them over, then the court will assume that X is indeed true.

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. -- Theophrastus

Working...