One of the things that was supposed to happen when President Barack Obama signed the USA FREEDOM Act into law in June 2015 was that “significant” decisions from the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR) were to be declassified.
In October 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the US Justice Department for any FISC decisions to compel technical assistance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The Justice Department’s response came two months later, in December 2015: It just couldn’t find anything the EFF had requested. Some correspondence may be responsive to the EFF request, but that was exempt from disclosure under the FOIA guidelines.
The EFF wasn’t buying and appealed. Three months later, in March 2016, and before receiving a response from the Justice Department, the EFF filed new FOIA requests for all FISC documents that were to be declassified under the USA FREEDOM Act.
The Justice Department has not responded to the EFF’s most recent FOIA requests.
On 19 April, the EFF filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California alleging the Justice Department has violated FOIA and demanding immediate access to the documents requested.
“If the government is obtaining FISC orders to force a company to build backdoors or decrypt their users’ communications, the public has a right to know about those secret demands to compromise people’s phones and computers,” Nate Cardozo, an EFF senior staff attorney, said in a media release. “The government should not be able to conscript private companies into weakening the security of these devices, particularly via secret court orders.”