By Anna Estevao, National Security Project at 1:07pm
Last month, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the declassification of 23 leaked State Department cables. These cables have already been fully disclosed online by WikiLeaks and distributed by major national and international newspapers. The U.S. government has maintained that the cables are secret. As we’ve said before, the government’s struggle to ignore WikiLeaks has reached the point of absurdity.
Today, a court unsealed three motions filed by the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) last month on behalf of Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic parliamentarian whose Twitter account records were targeted by the government in connection with its investigation related to WikiLeaks.
A public hearing on the motions is set for February 15 in Alexandria, Virginia. One of the motions seeks to overturn a federal court order requiring Twitter to turn over the private records of some of its users. The second filing seeks to unseal court records concerning the government's attempts to collect these kinds of private records from Twitter and other companies. The third motion was to unseal the original two motions and the hearing, which were initially sealed by the court.
