ACLU Drags The State Department To Court For Its Failure To Declassify Publicly Available Documents
from the joseph-heller's-coffin-clocked-at-over-7,200-rpm dept
Of all the spectacle surrounding the Wikileaks/Cablegate situation, nothing has proven to be more bizarre than the U.S. government's actions and policies concerning the continued classification of the leaked cables. One of its first efforts was its patented "escalating response", in which it first blocked off the Wikileaks site, followed by any site with the word Wikileaks in the title and, when this didn't seem to be burying its employees' heads in the sand quickly enough, it reached out to various security firms to see if they could build some sort of Wikileaks filtering system for its computers.Things turned even more surreal when lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were not allowed to view leaked documents that had been published online by various news services. When is public information not truly "public?" Well, when it's "classified," of course. Had the principles not been currently fighting a legal battle in a U.S. court, they could have joined the rest of the U.S. (and the world) in reading and using these leaked documents.
In the business world, if a document is considered secret, it's commonly accepted that if it becomes public by other means, those with a contractual obligation not to discuss are now free from their obligations. This makes sense. Pretending that documents that are publicly available for all and which have been widely discussed in the press are not "public" doesn't make sense.
With a recently filed lawsuit against the State Department, the ACLU hopes to bring this legal catch-22 to its illogical conclusion and make publicly published documents officially public. Andy Greenberg (Forbes) explains the ACLU's rationale:
Given that all those memos have already been covered by the news media, why bother to declassify them anyway? "The point is to expose the legal fiction that the secrecy system rests on," says Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the ACLU. "The government uses this formality of secrecy to avoid having to answer for real violations of the law."This should prove to be an alternately infuriating and entertaining case. There's going to be a whole lot of circular reasoning in play, all of it under the pretense of protecting state secrets that everyone already knows. The sad part is that taxpayers will be footing the bill for the government's last-ditch attempt to close several barn doors, while warily keeping an eye on all the free-roaming horses.
Wizner says that keeping the documents classified makes them much more difficult to use in courts, for instance, and allows the government to avoid confirming their authenticity.
The files that WikiLeaks released on Guantanamo detainees in April, for example, can’t be used by the defense lawyers for those prisoners unless they’re viewed in a secure government facility. “Government employees can’t read the New York Times. When I go to court in a real lawsuit seeking to get compensation for a victim’s ordeal and hold people liable, I can’t use this information,” Wizner says.
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Filed Under: cables, classifications, state department, wikileaks
Companies: aclu, wikileaks
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for... for the children?
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If you are hunting Santa the only thing Norad tells you is where not to look.
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Pentagon Paper Insanity
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I hope the ACLU wins
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So, The US Has Its Own Version Of �Superinjunctions� After All ...
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lawyers access
From a June 10th NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/us/politics/11wiki.html
"In guidance to the lawyers � who have security clearances, and so are required to follow government rules for the handling of classified information � the department�s court security officer said Friday that they were now permitted to view the leaked documents on the Internet."
�While you may access such material from your non-U.S.-government-issued personal and work computers, you are not permitted to download, save, print, disseminate, or otherwise reproduce, maintain, or transport potentially classified information,� the directive said.
The wording in this last paragraph is from the Department of Justice and appears to ignore the technical reality that viewing a document in a browser requires a copy of that document to be downloaded to your computer. I don't think they are that naive. Instead, it is probably their way of saving face and pretending that all the security restrictions needed are still in place for a classified document while avoiding any problems in court for their prosecution of these detainees. The truth, of course, is that once a classified document is public, there is no point in maintaining policies intending to keep that, still classified, document secret.
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unclassified
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Re: lawyers access
That wording means that the restrictions haven't actually been lifted.
I don't think they are that naive.
I don't either.
Instead, it is probably their way of saving face and pretending that all the security restrictions needed are still in place for a classified document while avoiding any problems in court for their prosecution of these detainees.
No, it is their way of keeping the restrictions after all. It would be naive to think otherwise.
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