Last week, AT&T released the rough numbers reflecting the frequency with which the U.S. government (USG) has secretly demanded the phone records of AT&T consumers, Wired reports. Furthermore, according to the Wall Street Journal, such requests amount to at least 35,000 records between January and June of 2013.
The New York Times reports that the U.S. District Court in Newark ruled the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit “did not discriminate against Muslims in carrying out far-reaching surveillance meant to identify ‘budding terrorist conspiracies’ at mosques in Newark and other locations in New Jersey[.]” According to Judge William J. Martini, the plaintiffs—eight Muslims who challenged the constitutionality of the surveillance programs in a civil rights lawsuit—“have not alleged facts form which it can be plausibly inferred that they were targeted solely because of their religion[.] . . . The more likely explanation for the surveillance was to locate budding terrorist conspiracies.”
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Beast, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper reportedly stated that the controversy over the intelligence community’s surveillance programs could have been avoided. According to the Daily Beast, Clapper said:
I probably shouldn’t say this, but, I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11—which is the genesis of the 215 program—and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again; so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards…we wouldn’t have had the problem we had.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is considering an appeal filed by prosecutors challenging Judge Sharon Coleman’s ruling that the defense team for Adel Daoud will be permitted to review the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders used to build a case against Mr. Daoud, Politico reports. “However, on Wednesday, the Seventh Circuit issued a one-page order expressing doubt about whether the government has the authority to appeal such a pre-trial ruling.”
Last year, the non-profit organization National Security Counselors won a lawsuit against the CIA for the agency’s failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Courthouse News Service reports. The group’s founder, CEO, and sole attorney, Kelly McClanahan, filed the lawsuit. However, McClanahan was recently denied legal fees “on behalf of his one-man non-profit,” a judge ruled.
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