Sensitive documents surface in AT&T-NSA spy lawsuit
It looks like the Electronic Frontier Foundation may have unearthed some highly sensitive documents about the National Security Agency's supersecret spy program.
The San Francisco-based advocacy group said on Friday that the Bush administration had objected to it including some internal AT&T documents with a scheduled court filing because the information may be classified. (In January, EFF sued AT&T over its alleged participation in the possibly-illegal scheme.)
Here's what Kurt Opsahl, an EFF staff attorney, told me late Friday:
"We're having some discussions with the Department of Justice about what can be placed in the public record, what can be redacted. While those discussions are ongoing I can't really discuss it fully."
"Their position is that they need time to review the documents to make a determination about them (regarding classification)."
"It's fairly obvious that we believe (the internal AT&T documents) support the allegations in our complaint."
In a legal brief also filed Friday, fellow EFF attorney Lee Tien described his conversations with Justice Department attorney Anthony Coppolino. Tien wrote: "Mr. Coppolino also stated that in such case it believed that lodging the AT&T documents according to this court's sealing procedures would be inadequate." (The Justice Department is not a party to the case but seems unusually interested anyway.)
EFF gave copies of the AT&T documents to the Feds on Thursday and is also asking for a preliminary injunction to halt the allegedly illegal surveillance activity.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan.
