In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications,
the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its
effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the
government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and
engaged in unconstitutional spying.
This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week's
disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the
Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US
government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had
learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens
that he believed was improper. He and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.),
another intelligence committee member, raised only vague warnings about
this data collection, because they could not reveal the details of the
classified program that concerned them. But in July 2012, Wyden was able
to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:
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