Search Results for: state secrets privilege

The US Supreme Court Thursday ruled in a unanimous opinion that a member of an elected body does not have a viable First Amendment claim arising from verbal censure. The case Houston Community College System v. Wilson involved David Wilson, a former elected trustee of the Houston Community College System. Shortly after being elected to [...]

The US Supreme Court Friday unanimously ruled in favor of the FBI in Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga, holding that the state secrets privilege used to block the disclosure of information that the government finds harmful to national security is not displaced by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The lawsuit was filed in [...]

The US Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 7-2 decision that information related to torture at CIA “black sites” is protected under the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to bar the release of information when it would endanger national security. Between December 2003 and September 2004, respondent Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (Zubaydah), a [...]

The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga and Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennese & Mauritz. While neither case is particularly high profile, both involve subtle interpretations of surveillance and copyright law, respectively. In Fazaga, the FBI is being sued for allegedly conducting improper surveillance on a set [...]

North Carolina has an important connection to the “state secrets” at the center of an October 6 US Supreme Court argument. In this case, Guantanamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah seeks testimony from two former CIA contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, on torture he suffered at a secret CIA prison in Poland. The contractors’ evidence would [...]

Former US President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Monday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against the US House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The committee, responsible for investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol, is joined in the lawsuit by the [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in US v. Zubaydah on Wednesday, a case involving a plaintiff’s right to discovery of privileged national security information. The US sought a writ after the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit compelled the US to confirm or deny that it had a CIA facility in [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld Wednesday the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Wikimedia Foundation against the National Security Agency (NSA) for intercepting and searching international internet communications. The NSA uses Upstream, a surveillance program authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. NSA’s use of the program was illegally leaked [...]

The US Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a second case involving the scope of the government’s ability to invoke state secret privilege and declined to hear a case challenging the male-only military draft on the basis of gender discrimination. When the court last reviewed the male-only draft rule in the 1981 decision Rostker v. [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday announced it will hear three new cases, on subjects including the scope of the state’s power to place limits on the Second Amendment, the relationship of legislative censure to the First Amendment, and the extent of the government’s state secret protection privileges during the discovery process. The first case, [...]