EFF Defeats Motion to Dismiss
EFF scored a crucial early victory today in its litigation against AT&T over the company’s alleged participation in NSA surveillance. The district judge issued this lengthy ruling in which he refused to dismiss the case at this juncture on the basis of the state secrets privilege, and also sounded somewhat skeptical overall about the government’s assertion that the litigation itself endnagers national security. A key quote:
To defer to a blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdicate that duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired. The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security.
More from Wired News here.
Filed under: Court Decisions, NSA, Privacy
[...] On state secrets, the judge here (Anna Diggs Taylor) followed the lead of Judge Vaughn Walker in the EFF litigation against AT&T. As discussed previously by both Derek and yours truly, in that case the government sought dismissal under the state secrets privilege and Judge Walker held that the government had already revealed enough about the program to allow EFF to make its claims without relying on any classified information. Here, Judge Taylor reached the same conclusion (but she did dismiss another claim about the NSA’s parallel data mining program because the Administration has said much less about it so the state secrets privilege applied). There is also a very important ruling that the plaintiffs have demonstrated enough injury from the possibility that they were surveilled in order to have standing to sue (I will need to read that analysis more carefully before commenting on it). [...]