Deeplinks
We all deserve the right to have a private conversation online. That’s why EFF has taken on government surveillance for the past 30-plus years. One of our longest-running efforts has been to stop the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance that sweeps up tens—if not hundreds—of millions of innocent people in its dragnet. Our work will continue.
But today the U.S. Supreme Court slammed the courthouse door on our flagship NSA surveillance lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, effectively validating the government’s claims that something known and debated across the world—the NSA’s mass surveillance—is somehow too secret to be challenged in open court by ordinary members of the public whose communications were caught in the net.
The Supreme Court this week allowed our case to be dismissed because it’s a “secret” that the mass spying programs that everyone has known about since at least the Snowden documents came to light in 2013 (and disclosed in the national news long before that) involved the nation’s two largest telecommunications carriers. Yes, you read that right: something we all know is a still officially a “secret” and so cannot be the subject to litigation. Specifically, the Court refused to take on and reconsider a Ninth Circuit decision (and an underlying district court ruling) that held that the state secrets privilege blocked our clients’ efforts to prove that their data was intercepted such that they had standing to sue.
The central fact that these courts found to be “secret” is that AT&T and Verizon participated in the mass spying, even though we had submitted ample public evidence to support that finding. The Ninth Circuit decision was so cursory that the court didn’t even review the lower court’s sealed opinion addressing the government’s actual evidence of the spying, despite the fact that the District Court specifica
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