FOIA fight for NSA documents continues

This past November, ProPublica attempted to open up “the smallest nesting doll” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s legal opinions that justify mass collection of telephone metadata by the National Security Agency.

Many NSA-related court opinions were already public, but many of those opinions cited other redacted ones, making the original judicial rationale impossible to discern. Without access to those opinions, ProPublica says, the American public would never understand the origins of the “unprecedented government secrecy” that they and other news organizations have uncovered. Prior to ProPublica’s filing, the ACLU and the Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic (MFIAC) had also filed several similar motions in the same court. Since then, the government has answered some, but not all, of these requests, and the larger legal battle still continues. The fight has centered around two vital questions: Who has the right to access this information? And who has the right to cover it up?