Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications, and the government has used that authority to seize and search the personal communications of Americans and others on an immense scale. In September 2016, the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to several government agencies seeking basic information about how the government conducts surveillance under Section 702. In November 2016, we filed a lawsuit to enforce the request in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In a Freedom of Information Act request filed on January 13, 2010, the ACLU asked the government to disclose the legal and factual basis for its use of predator drones to conduct "targeted killings" overseas. In particular, the ACLU sought to find out when, where, and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the United States ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killings.

In October 2011, the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking information about the killings of three U.S. citizens in Yemen: Anwar al-Aulaqi; his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi; and Samir Kahn. Over five years of litigation, this case was appealed to the Second Circuit three times. The government acknowledged it had killed the three Americans, and was forced to describe targeted-killing program documents in its possession. The ACLU won an important victory in securing the release of a memorandum in which the government set out its legal justification for killing Anwar al-Aulaqi in June 2014. In December 2016, the Second Circuit ruled that no other documents must be disclosed, concluding this litigation. The ACLU continues to seek additional details about the targeted killing program’s rules and consequences through other FOIA requests and cases.

The ACLU has joined a lawsuit brought by an Idaho nurse challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans' phone records.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the federal Bureau of Prisons for refusing to fulfill a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to its officials’ visit in 2002 to a CIA detention site in Afghanistan, their positive assessment of the conditions, and the training they provided to the site’s administrators. Code-named COBALT and also called “the Salt Pit,” the site held people suspected of terrorism, and they were tortured there, according to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report that was declassified in 2014.