By Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 11:06am
(Update below)
A Justice Department document obtained by the ACLU of Northern California shows that federal investigators were routinely using a sophisticated cell phone tracking tool known as a "stingray," but hiding that fact from federal magistrate judges when asking for permission to do so.
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 5:23pm
The government is increasingly relying on a national security pretext to bolster its secrecy claims, an Associated Press report released yesterday reveals. Analysis conducted by the news agency shows that the Obama administration cited legal exemptions to deflect requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act more often in 2012 than in any previous year.
By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:25pm
On Friday, The New York Times published an excellent report about the FBI's failure to investigate two 2007 hate crimes that was based on FBI documents the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian uncovered through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the FBI's Racial Mapping program.
By Zachary Katznelson, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 12:07pm
Yesterday, the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) issued a comprehensive report laying out the scope of the CIA's extraordinary rendition, secret prison and torture program. The report, following up on the ACLU's 2012 Torture Report, traces the evolution of the program, through which the CIA kidnapped terrorism suspects from around the world, flew them secretly to "black sites" – where they were held incommunicado without charge or trial – and tortured them. The OSJI report reveals that 54 nations, more than a quarter of the world, directly participated in the torture program, including through housing CIA prisoners on their soil, where they were often tortured; helping kidnap terrorism suspects and ship them overseas without any legal process; and allowing CIA planes to use their airspace and airports for those kidnapping missions. (Check out the report to learn which countries participated, and what types of assistance they offered). And it compiles the largest, most detailed list yet of the men and women thrown into these horrific black holes, naming 136 victims, many of whose whereabouts remain unknown today.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:46pm
Secret law exists inside the United States.
As we wrote a few weeks ago, one of the main issues discussed on the Senate floor during the FISA debate was secret law. Under the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court makes secret interpretations and secret rulings about something that should never be secret: our constitutional rights. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) fought for an amendment that would have required the administration to release the court’s opinions, to provide unclassified summaries of them, or to certify how many there are and why they can’t be released.
By Avinash Samarth, ACLU National Security Project at 5:00pm
On November 28, the ACLU filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking the U.S. military’s autopsy reports of the three men who died most recently while detained at Guantánamo Bay. The men—Adnan Latif, Awal Gul, and Hajji Nassim (also known as “Inayatullah”)—had been held at the prison camp indefinitely and without charge. They died on September 8, 2012, February 2, 2012, and May 18, 2011, respectively. You can read our request here.
By Mitra Ebadolahi, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 10:55am
In April 2011, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking a narrow yet critically important set of government documents: internal CIA reports detailing the use of unauthorized interrogation techniques at its secret overseas prisons, also known as “black sites” (you can read the request here). Investigative news coverage and earlier FOIA requests had alerted us to the potential existence of many such reports. Most notably, in August 2009 – in connection with a separate ACLU FOIA request – the government had released a partially-redacted version of one report, the Special Review: Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001–October 2003).
By Zachary Katznelson, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 4:36pm
Today, just weeks after the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the information, the government released the names of 55 of the prisoners approved for transfer from the prison at Guantánamo Bay. The prisoners were unanimously designated for transfer by President Obama’s inter-agency Guantánamo Bay Review Task Force, which announced a summary of its findings in January 2010. But before today, the government had said the list could not be released because doing so would hamper efforts to repatriate and resettle prisoners in other countries.
By Brett Kaufman, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 7:41am
This morning the ACLU will appear before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records about the CIA’s use of drone aircraft to carry out targeted killings around the world. We will argue that the court should put an end to the government’s double game of selectively disclosing information about the program in public while obstinately refusing to confirm or deny the very existence of the program in federal court.
By Linda Lye, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Northern California at 10:23am
Just shy of the one-year anniversary of the inaugural Occupy Wall Street protests, the ACLU of Northern California obtained initial documents from the FBI about surveillance of Occupy demonstrations in the region (see the FBI’s response here).
The documents came after an ACLU-NC lawsuit filed after the FBI refused to release any documents in a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents are significant for two reasons:
