Court fight heats up over 52 pages of still-secret surveillance info

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's long quest to make key rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) public is nearing its end. EFF lawyer Mark Rumold faced off with Department of Justice attorney Steven Bressler in the same courtroom they had sparred in 14 months ago.

They were overseen by the same judge, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers.

Things weren't the same, though. The lawsuit has changed dramatically, due in part to the Snowden leaks about government surveillance, which began to appear in newspapers in June 2013. And the scope of the case has narrowed. That's partly because the EFF has focused its demands on what it believes are the most important documents: several still-secret FISC opinions, as well as one memo from the White House's Office of Legal Counsel, comprising some 52 pages.

It's also narrowed because the Department of Justice has released some of the documents that were asked for. The most striking revelation from those documents was that some FISC judges sharply criticized the National Security Agency's record of compliance with rules the court had set out for handling its giant database of phone calls and other data.