A challenge to NSA spying was thrown out of court Tuesday, after the government appealed that it could not defend the case lest it be forced to reveal “state secret information.”
In his decision, California judge Jeffrey White ruled that “adjudication of the standing issue could not proceed without risking exceptionally grave damage to national security.”
The lawsuit was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose plaintiffs were challenging mass surveillance of the internet. The case, Jewel v. NSA, was first filed in 2008 on the behalf of five AT&T customers objecting to “the illegal unconstitutional and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records.”
EFF promised to continue pursuing the case, saying in a statement, “It would be a travesty of justice if our clients are denied their day in court over the ‘secrecy’ of a program that has been front-page news for nearly a decade.”
“Judge White’s ruling does not end our case,” EFF declared. “The judge’s ruling only concerned Upstream Internet surveillance, not the telephone records collection nor other mass surveillance processes that are also at issue in Jewel.”
“Upstream” refers to the NSA program that collects information from fiber-optic cable networks. EFF’s lawsuit accuses the NSA of indiscriminately gathering the communications of U.S. citizens in this process, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The Obama administration has been using the “state secrets” appeal to battle off Jewel since 2009, but in 2011, a court of appeals ruled that the case could move forward in district court.
