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The court is not secret, nor are its decisions intended to be permanently secret. The idea behind seeking temporarily secret court-orders was that they would e
by wavefunction 13y ago
The court is not secret, nor are its decisions intended to be permanently secret.
The idea behind seeking temporarily secret court-orders was that they would effect ongoing investigations, but that the court-orders would become public when the charges were brought.
An example is obtaining a wire-tap order for an individual. If it were automatically public, the individual might be watching the public record and see that they were being wire-tapped and make the wire-tap meaningless.
Now we have a situation where the decisions remain in secret for perpetuity? It's simple bullshit and an attempt to "route around" the Constitutional protections.
- nikcub 13y agoThe broader metadata requests had a declassification date of 2038 - they must have argued that it isn't tied to any one case, and that it could always threaten an ongoing case if made public. It is interesting that yet again we end up in a preposterous situation, where you can suck in all call data and not tell anyone, due to a long chain of small concessions (patriot act, fisa review, 'business records' condition, etc.)