Gov’t won’t even give page counts of secret PATRIOT Act documents
OAKLAND, California—Lawsuits challenging government secrecy have fared pretty terribly in the post-9/11 era, with the most recent example being the Supreme Court's ruling last month that a group of journalists and activists have no right to sue over the FISA spying law.
Only a few cases of this sort are left, including two Bay Area lawsuits being pushed forward by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One is the San Francisco case over NSA wiretapping, which the government is trying to shut down using the "state secrets" privilege. The other is EFF's case demanding to see documents about how the government is interpreting Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.
It isn't just activists that are concerned, either. In 2009, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said the government's use of "Section 215 is unfortunately cloaked in secrecy. Some day that cloak will be lifted, and future generations will ask whether our actions today meet the test of a democratic society." In 2011, two US Senators, Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), publicly voiced their concerns, too, suggesting the government had a pretty wild interpretation of what it was allowed to do under the PATRIOT Act. "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Wyden told The New York Times.
It isn't known what kind of investigation those records would reveal, but there is some speculation that the Section 215 records are related to cell phone geolocation data. EFF's lawyer in charge of the case says if that is true, such data is probably being gathered on a "massive" scale.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/govt-wont-even-give-page-counts-of-secret-patriot-act-documents/
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