"The Obama administration will not be allowed to terminate a lawsuit by asserting that a civil argument would risk exposing national secrets, a federal judge ruled Monday in what has already been called an important advance for civil liberties advocates. US District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, California refused to allow the Obama administration to end the lawsuit by citing the ‘state secrets’ privilege. By invoking that privilege, the EFF argued, the federal government hoped to prove widespread warrantless surveillance is not subject to judicial review. “The government has unlawfully solicited and obtained from telecommunications companies such as AT&T the complete and ongoing disclosure of the private telephone and Internet transactional records of those companies’ millions of customers, communications records indicating who the customers communicated with, when and for long, among other sensitive information,” the technology and civil rights group wrote on its website. “This transactional information is analyzed by computers in conjunction with the vast quantity of communications content acquired by government’s network of surveillance devices, in what has been described as a vast data-mining operation.”
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 17:47:54 +0000
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