We paid for those damn documents, assholes!
"Court won't release wiretap documents"
"The nation's spy court said yesterday that it will not release its documents regarding the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in a rare on-the-record opinion, said the public has no right to view the documents because they deal with the clandestine workings of national security agencies. The American Civil Liberties Union asked the court to release the records in August (AP December 12, 2007)."
"Surveillance Court Declines to Release Secret Opinions" by JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON — In a rare publicly issued opinion, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said Tuesday that it would not release documents related to the National Security Agency’s program of wiretapping without warrants.
The American Civil Liberties Union had asked that secret court to release the opinions detailing two rulings it issued this year on the legality of the agency’s eavesdropping program, which President Bush authorized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Though the court’s conclusions in those two rulings are known, the details of how the judges reached them are not.
In January, one judge on the court ruled that the Bush administration could operate the program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the 1978 law that created the court to oversee requests for warrants to spy on suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States. Before that ruling, the administration had secretly conducted the N.S.A. program without any court approval.
In May, a second judge issued a more restrictive ruling, which prompted the administration to ask Congress to change the law. Congress adopted a temporary change to FISA in August and is now working on a permanent overhaul.
When Congress began debating changes in August, the civil liberties union asked the court to release the two opinions, arguing that the public had a right to know the court’s legal reasoning in the midst of a Congressional debate on the issue. The court’s presiding judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, said then that it would consider the request, which she called “unprecedented.” In its own brief filed with the court, the administration opposed disclosure of the documents.
In the ruling Tuesday, Judge John D. Bates, who sits on the surveillance court as well as the Federal District Court in Washington, agreed with the civil liberties union that “enhanced public scrutiny could provide an additional safeguard against mistakes, overreaching and abuse.”
But, Judge Bates said, such benefits do not outweigh the government’s need or right to keep the material classified. Disclosure, he said, could allow the nation’s enemies to avoid detection and might compromise American intelligence activities. The potential damage is “real and significant, and, quite frankly, beyond debate,” the judge wrote.
Jameel Jaffer, director of the National Security Project at the A.C.L.U., said in an interview that he was disappointed:
“A federal court’s interpretation of federal law should not be kept secret.”
Normally, the surveillance court operates in utter secrecy, reviewing wiretap requests by government agencies for use in terrorism and other foreign intelligence cases. The opinion Tuesday was only the third made public in the court’s history, now nearly three decades long."
