There has never been a more urgent need to preserve fundamental privacy protections and our system of checks and balances than the need we face today, as illegal government spying, provisions of the Patriot Act and government-sponsored torture programs transcend the bounds of law and our most treasured values in the name of national security.
Following news reports in December 2005 that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the documents pertaining to this illegal spying program. The National Security Archive and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed similar FOIA requests. These requests were ignored until the ACLU filed a lawsuit in February 2006 to enforce its rights under the FOIA.
The government's response to these FOIA requests and lawsuits has been astonishing. Their initial steps were to provide documents already in the public domain and insist that the rest was secret: so secret, in fact, that the government would not even describe the individual documents (which it is required to do), explain how many documents or records were at issue, or how long each of those documents was.
After the recent and startling testimony by former Deputy Attorney General James Comey in May 2007 detailing the internal conflicts within the Department of Justice over the legality of President Bush's illegal NSA spying program, the ACLU has renewed its call for the release of the documents and records pertaining to the program. The case is currently pending before the Honorable Judge Henry H. Kennedy of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
In the case filings, the ACLU has asked the Court to review the documents itself, in closed chambers, and decide for itself whether the government should be able to conceal information the public needs to understand and evaluate the Administration's program. The government is obligated to provide these documents and records under the FOIA unless it can show that we are not entitled to them under a limited number of narrow exceptions to the FOIA.
It is time for the Bush administration to come clean. The ACLU believes that if we could look at the documents and records underlying the surveillance program, we could add some needed clarity to the dialogue. The issues are staggering in scope and importance. The President had authorized spying on Americans without judicial oversight and in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that explicitly requires judicial oversight. The ACLU, along with the rest of America, wants answers.
