From Courthouse News Service: WASHINGTON (CN) – The once-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has mishandled demands to reveal the government's attempted justifications of its program of collecting the call and email data of Americans, a media coalition said.
Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press filed the amicus brief with the FISC, just before Thanksgiving last week, alongside Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Courthouse News Service and 21 other media organizations.
The brief takes aim at a Sept. 13 ruling in which the FISC found that the ACLU and its D.C.-based Nation's Capital chapter alone had standing to seek the release of precedential FISC opinions that underlie the National Security Agency's surveillance programs.
This decision denied standing to the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic (MFIAC) at Yale Law School based on the finding that only those entities that had previously discussed the scope of Section 215 of the Patriot Act can witness the court's proceedings.
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Joining the RCFP as amici are the Bay Area News Group; Belo Corp; Bloomberg; Courthouse News Service; E.W. Scripps Co.; First Amendment Coalition; Gannett Co.; Hearst Corp.; Investigative Reporters and Editors; Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University; The McClatchy Co.; Media Consortium; The National Press Club; National Press Photographers Association; National Public Radio; The New York Times Co.; The New Yorker; North Jersey Media Group Inc.; Online News Association; Politico LLC; Radio Television Digital News Association; The Seattle Times Co.; and The Washington Post.
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