secret – Techdirt (original) (raw)
That Time The US Government Sought To Secretly Delete Parts Of A Public Court Transcript About The NSA
from the literally-rewriting-history dept
The EFF has revealed a very disturbing attempt by the US government to flat out secretly delete portions of a public court transcript over the belief that its lawyers may have slipped up and revealed classified information. This came from the recent hearing in the longstanding EFF case Jewel v. NSA, regarding a challenge to NSA surveillance (which began long before the Snowden revelations). After the hearing ended, apparently things took a turn for the bizarre, in which the government quietly notified the judge that it believed one of its attorneys had accidentally revealed classified information during the (very open) hearing, and hoped to remove that information from the transcript, and pretend that it never happened. The EFF fought it, and eventually the government backed down (perhaps realizing it hadn’t really revealed anything):
On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to ?remove? classified information from the transcript, and even indicated that it wanted to do so secretly, so the public could never even know that they had done so.
We rightly considered this an outrageous request and vigorously opposed it. 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.? 28 U.S.C. § 753(b).
The Court allowed the government a first look at the transcript and indicated that it was going to hold the government to a very high standard and would not allow the government to manufacture a misleading transcript by hiding the fact of any redactions. Ultimately, the government said that it had *not* revealed classified information at the hearing and removed its request.But the incident speaks volumes about the dangers of allowing the government free rein to claim secrecy in court proceedings and otherwise.
It’s great that this ended well, but it seems immensely troubling that the government even sought to do this in the first place. Of course, I would imagine this might lead some to scour the full transcript (embedded below) to see if there’s any tidbit of information that the government didn’t really mean to claim.
Filed Under: court transcript, doj, jewel v nsa, nsa, rewriting history, secret, surveillance
Companies: eff
Without Any Legal Basis, The NYPD Has Been Classifying Its Own Documents For More Than A Decade
from the aw,-how-cute!-it-thinks-it's-above-the-law! dept
Under the guidance of Chief Ray Kelly and Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the NYPD has transformed into an autonomous militarized force. Technically, it answers to Bloomberg and Kelly, but they’ve both shown extreme amounts of resistance to reining in any of the PD’s excesses.
Any attempts at bringing oversight and accountability to the force are met with anger and condescension, despite the fact that the NYPD’s casual abuse of New Yorker’s civil liberties are the subject of major lawsuits and city council legislation, as well as a sizable contributor to the city’s annual outlay of $700-800 million in settlements.
We’ve previously discussed the department’s secretiveness that has seen it described by investigative journalists as worse than the NSA and FBI when it comes to responding to FOI requests. (Not for nothing does the New York law governing these requests do business under the acronym “FOIL.”) But the NYPD is doing something no other city law enforcement agency has done: classifying its own documents.
Since at least 2003, the New York Police Department has been labeling some of its internal documents “Secret,” a designation that has baffled government secrecy experts, journalists and civil liberties lawyers.
By labeling documents “secret,” the Intelligence Division appears to be operating its own in-house classification system, similar to those used at federal agencies like the CIA, where Intel’s chief, David Cohen, previously worked for 35 years.
Some of the documents also include the caveat, in all-caps, that “No portion of this document can be copied or distributed without the exclusive permission of the policy commissioner or deputy commissioner of intelligence.”
Why is this “baffling?” Because the NYPD’s in-house classification system has nothing legal to back it up.
“You know what that [label] means? It means diddly,” said Robert Freeman, executive director of New York’s Committee on Open Government. “I think the police department is following the lead of the federal government. The difficulty is, in my opinion, it does not have a legal basis for doing that.”
Christopher Dunn, associate legal director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, told HuffPost he has only seen the label on documents created after 2001. He agreed with Freeman that “as far as I know, this marking has no legal significance.”
The NYPD remains a law unto itself. Bloomberg has referred to it as the “seventh biggest army in the world” (and his own “personal army”) and has, over the course of his three terms, indulged every excess. It should be noted that former CIA officer David Cohen got the ball rolling on the civil liberties-violating “Demographics Group” (the one that labeled entire mosques as terrorist entities) late in 2002, which would explain the noticeable uptick in “SECRET” documents in 2003. Nothing drives overclassification more than a combination of dubious legality and working hand-in-hand with national intelligence agency liaisons.
And it would appear that the NYPD still has lots of secrets it’s not willing to share with the public. HuffPo points to this story from 2011 in which Chief Kelly makes the claim that the NYPD could “take down an airplane” thanks to its anti-aircraft weaponry. That itself should be troubling enough and a strong indicator that Bloomberg and Kelly are better qualified to run a banana republic than an American city, but when asked to comment on the PD’s anti-aircraft guns, Bloomberg responded with this smirk of a statement:
“New York City Police Department has lots of capabilities you don’t know about and you won’t know about them.”
That’s comforting. Nothing like having the commander-in-chief of the “seventh biggest army in the world” tell you his force might have even bigger tricks up its sleeve than anti-aircraft weapons.
On the bright side, Mayor for life Bloomberg will be leaving soon and the front runner for his position, Bill De Blasio, gave the police force a failing grade for its responsiveness to FOI requests and will be likely looking to force the PD to shoot for a low-C at minimum. If Chief Kelly sticks around, though, De Blasio will have an uphill battle to fight against the ingrained arrogance and contempt that pervades the NYPD’s upper management.
Filed Under: classification, michael bloomberg, nypd, ray kelly, secret
If You Had The 'Secret' To Winning The Lottery, Would You Patent It?
from the economically-challenging-questions dept
Okay, so this story is bizarre enough by itself, but there’s an odd twist at the end. A husband and wife who held four separate winning lottery tickets claims to have figured out a secret formula for winning the lottery. That seems highly unlikely, of course. There is no formula that can predict totally independent numbers. The four winning tickets all used the same numbers, so there’s no proof that the couple did anything other than get lucky by having the same number they played four different times hit.
However, their lawyer is claiming that the couple is “exploring patent protection.” Want to see a sign of how ridiculous the patent situation has become? If you had figured out the (non-existent) secret to winning the lottery, would you use it to (a) keep winning the lottery or (b) patent it? It’s only in these bizarre times that a couple would even think that (b) would be the more profitable option. Of course, if there really were some secret to predicting independent numbers that the couple had figured out, wouldn’t you think that any lottery commission would immediately change how their lottery worked the second that patent was published?