Tech

NSA Tried To Delete Court Transcript In Lawsuit Over Deleting Evidence

Giuseppe Macri Tech Editor
Font Size:

The National Security Agency secretly tried to delete part of a public court transcript after believing one of its lawyers may have accidentally revealed classified information in a court case over alleged illegal surveillance.

Following a recent hearing in the ongoing Jewel v. NSA case, in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation is challenging NSA’s ability to surveil foreign citizen’s U.S.-based email and social media accounts, the government informed U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White it believed one of its attorneys mistakenly revealed classified information.

The government then requested that the select portion of the hearing’s public transcript be secretly deleted without alerting the public to the alteration. According to the EFF, the open courtroom case — which has been steadily picking up media coverage following NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s bulk surveillance revelations — was “widely covered by the press” and “even on the local TV news on two stations.”

“We rightly considered this an outrageous request and vigorously opposed it,” senior staff attorney for the EFF David Greene said in a statement. “The public has a First Amendment right not only to attend the hearing but to have an accurate transcript of it. Moreover, the federal law governing court reporting requires that ‘each session of the court’ be ‘recorded verbatim’ and that the transcript be certified by the court reporter as ‘a correct statement of the testimony taken and the proceedings had.'”

The government made no attempt to close the courtroom prior to the hearing, and one week after, sent a letter to Judge White asking to review the transcript, and at the request of NSA, delete any part of the transcript revealing information the signals intelligence agency deemed classified without alerting the public, plaintiffs, or their lawyers.

Judge White disregarded the government’s request for secrecy and sent a letter to the plaintiffs’ attorneys the next day notifying them of the government’s attempt, and offered them a chance to respond.

“We asked Judge White to reject the government’s request in full arguing that the government could not meet the strong First Amendment test to prove that its revisions to the transcript were ‘essential to preserve higher values and narrowly tailored to serve that interest,’ Greene wrote. “We also argued that under no circumstances should the government be able to ‘remove’ anything from the transcript without indicating that something has in fact been removed, a process commonly called ‘redaction,’ not ‘removal,’ the term used in the government’s request. We also asked the court to unseal all of the papers that had been filed about this dispute.”

White allowed the government to look at the transcript, but warned he would “hold [it] to a very high standard and would not allow [it] to manufacture a misleading transcript by hiding the fact of any redactions.”

After reviewing the transcript, the government concluded it had not accidentally revealed such information, and withdrew its request. As a result, the EFF, which was previously barred from publicly revealing the dispute, filed a motion to unseal the documents, which the court granted earlier this week.

According to the EFF, “the incident speaks volumes about the dangers of allowing the government free rein to claim secrecy in court proceedings and otherwise.”

Previously in the same case White was forced to order NSA to stop deleting evidence relevant to the case on three separate occasions, after an accidental DOJ email revealed to the EFF that the government had never complied. (RELATED: Judge Orders NSA To Stop Destroying Evidence — For The Third Time)

After the third court order the NSA argued against the judge’s order, and said that not only were its systems too complicated to stop the deletion, forcing the agency to do so would have a detrimental effect on national security. (RELATED: NSA: Our Systems Are Too Complex To Stop Deleting Evidence)

“The government’s attempt to change this history was unprecedented,” Greene wrote about this week’s decision. “We could find no example of where a court had granted such a remedy or even where such a request had been made. This was another example of the government’s attempt to shroud in secrecy both its own actions, as well as the challenges to those actions.”

Follow Giuseppe on Twitter and Facebook

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel