Deeplinks Blog posts about Transparency
The government recently declassified a secret letter, written in 2002 laying out the executive branch’s initial legal justifications for the vast expansion of electronic surveillance after September 11, 2001. Like many others, it was written by former DOJ Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, and it was directed to the then-presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.
The letter wasn’t a filing with the FISC: instead, in Yoo’s view, it was more of a “heads up”—in the words of the letter, a gesture of goodwill in the interest of “comity” between co-equal branches of government.
The heads up he was giving? The fact that, for over a year prior to this letter, the executive branch had been flagrantly violating federal surveillance laws.
The Senate’s passage Tuesday of a bill to amend the Freedom of Information Act is a good step toward improving government transparency. Congress, however, can and should do more to fix the 50-year-old federal sunshine law.
Coinciding with Sunshine Week, an annual celebration by journalists and transparency advocates seeking greater government openness, the Senate unanimously passed an amended version of The FOIA Improvement Act of 2015 (S. 337), which was sponsored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT.) and John Cornyn (R-TX.).
EFF supports the Senate bill, particularly because it does not enable greater secrecy for national security agencies, unlike a House bill passed in January. However, the Senate bill does not address several of FOIA’s fundamental problems.
With a presidential election looming this fall, mass media and social media will be more focused on policy issues over the next several months than likely at any other point until 2020. We’ve put together a questionnaire for the candidates to invite them to explain their own policy platforms. We’ll let you know what they say, and in the meantime encourage others to ask these questions themselves at campaign events, fundraisers, town halls, or informal appearances.
As a tax-exempt non-profit organization, we are forbidden from endorsing or opposing any candidate for office, so to be clear: we think voters can and should make their own choices. But we also think it's important for voters to know where the candidates stand on a variety of issues implicating digital rights, from the TPP to mass surveillance. These might not be the only issues that matter in choosing a candidate, but they are important to consider.
Here are a few questions that EFF is asking:
The California Department of Justice (CADOJ) is ending its practice of holding meetings in ways that impede the public's ability to meaningfully participate in oversight of the state's sprawling network of police databases. The new reforms, announced in response to EFF advocacy, will allow greater opportunity for Californians to review and comment on policy changes that impact their privacy and civil liberties.
As Congress considers big changes to the Freedom of Information Act, a court’s decision on Monday underscores how some of the best ways to fix the ailing transparency statute are really small—like adding a comma.
Last fall in Naji Hamdan v. U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit read the lack of a comma in FOIA’s law enforcement exemption to limit public access to investigatory techniques and procedures.
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