Court Rejects State Secrets Defense in Dragnet Surveillance Case
A federal judge today rejected the assertion from President Barack Obama’s administration that the state secrets defense barred a lawsuit alleging the government is illegally siphoning Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, however, did not give the Electronic Frontier Foundation the green light to sue the government in a long-running case that dates to 2008, with trips to the appellate courts in between.
The EFF’s lawsuit accuses the federal government of working with the nation’s largest telecommunication companies to illegally funnel Americans’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — a surveillance program the EFF said commenced under the President George W. Bush administration following 9/11. The allegations were based on a former AT&T technician’s documents that outline a secret room in an AT&T San Francisco office that routes internet traffic to the NSA.
