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EFF Sues DOJ For Access To Secret Court Orders On Decryption (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: TechCrunch reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice to reveal documents that "show whether DOJ has ever forced a company like Google or Apple to provide technical surveillance assistance in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a federal court that issues secret surveillance warrants in national security cases and has been criticized for rubber-stamping NSA overreach." The EFF has been rejected in its attempt to gain access to the documents under the Freedom of Information Act. "Even setting aside the existence of technical assistance orders, there's no question that other, significant FISC opinions remain hidden from the public," EFF senior staff attorney Mark Rumold said in a statement regarding the lawsuit. "The government's narrow interpretation of its transparency obligations under USA FREEDOM is inconsistent with the language of the statute and Congress' intent. Congress wanted to bring an end to secret surveillance law, so it required that all significant FISC opinions be declassified and released. Our lawsuit seeks to hold DOJ accountable to the law." The full lawsuit can be read here.
For one thing the DOJ is claiming there weren't any FISC opinions or orders pertaining to EFF's rather broad FOIA request, and secondly they came across two items that potentially could fall under the EFF's scope of their request, but can't be released because there were classified by Executive Order which is exempt from the FOIA. So either the EFF secretly has a copy or copies some FISC documents that meet the criteria of their FOIA request and are trying to go through this route in order to release them publicly without getting into trouble, or they're just fishing. So far, the FBI has gone through federal courts to compel companies to technically assist them with decryption issues. I'm not sure how the EFF knows that the FISC has significantly constructed or made an interpretation of the law with regard to FBI technical assistance and tech companies unless they may already possess such a ruling from the FISC. Anyway, its unlikely they're to get any docs that were classified by Executive Order.
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