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Obama administration retains secrecy for phone data memo

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The three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled that the Obama administration can retain the secrecy of a Department of Justice memo regarding the protection of consumer data privacy. The government has declared that the memo provides the legal basis for telephone companies voluntarily providing customer calling records to the government without a subpoena or probable-cause warrant. When the telephone companies don’t voluntarily comply, the government uses national security letters.

Legal experts say the court’s ruling is in keeping with a broad interpretation of the US government executive branch’s power to keep its legal interpretations and opinions of legal boundaries secret. In any case, the ruling will make executive branch disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) much less likely.

US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling in EFF v. Department of Justice.

The classified memo was distributed internally by the Office of Legal Counsel in January 2010. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a lawsuit the following year seeking disclosure of the memo under the FOIA. A District Court judge ruled that the memo was covered by a FOIA exception allowing the government to keep secret internal deliberations about which law to apply. Because the Office of Legal Counsel provides legally binding advice to the executive branch — shielding any actions taken on that advice from prosecution — the office’s ability to adopt legal theories in secret has come under fire. It was the Office of Legal Counsel that advised the George W. Bush administration that its warrantless wiretapping and torture policies were legal.

David Sobel, an EFF lawyer, argued that the Office of Legal Counsel’s memos form a body of secret law that should be accessible to the citizenry.

Charlie Savage writing for the New York Times reports that the memo was also requested by McClatchy Newspapers and that the Department of Justice’s response was “that parts of the memo contained classified information, ‘highly specific in nature and known to very few individuals,’ about a secret intelligence-gathering technique that the FBI [US Federal Bureau of Investigation] is using against ‘hostile entities.'”

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Obama administration retains secrecy for phone data memo was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 8:52 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)

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