Security News > 2021 > November > No day in court: US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rulings will stay a secret

The US Supreme Court this week refused [PDF] to hear a case that would have forced the country's hush-hush Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to explain its justifications for giving the Feds the right to help themselves to bulk amounts of the public's data.

In a blistering dissent filed on Monday [PDF], Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor asked why the court would decline to review a case with "Profound implications for Americans' privacy and their rights to speak and associate freely."

The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had tried to use the high court to review lower court rulings on the public's First Amendment right to see federal authorities' legal justification for bulk data collection.

Patrick Toomey, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's National Security Project, said in a statement this week: "By turning away this case, the Supreme Court has failed to bring badly needed transparency to the surveillance court and to rulings that impact millions of Americans. Secret court decisions are corrosive in a democracy, especially when they so often hand the government the power to peer into our digital lives."

Since the USA Freedom Act was passed in 2015 - as a response to the backlash from the Snowden revelations - FISC has been forced to publish statistical information annually, but the ACLU has pointed out that any review of FISC behind-closed-doors decisions is solely "Conducted ... by executive branch officials, not a court."

This week's result is less notable for the fact that the court declined to hear the case, than for two justices on either end of the political spectrum agreeing that it was out of order that secret spy courts are answerable to "No court" in America - despite the fact that broad surveillance programs are by their nature applied to the innocent, criminals, those suspected of crimes... indeed, pretty much everyone.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/11/05/fisc_secrecy_ruling/