A press freedom organization on Thursday said that it has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, demanding that it reveal information about how and why it spies on reporters.
The legal salvo, launched by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, seeks to compel the publication of guidelines that the FBI uses when determining whether to issue National Security Letters (NSL) used to secretly investigate journalists.
“The DOJ has wrongfully withheld the requested records,” the lawsuit states, citing numerous efforts by the foundation to obtain the records under the Freedom of Information Act.
High-profile incidents in which the FBI collected journalists’ phone records and emails prompted Attorney General Eric Holder last year to modify procedures for when agents can target journalists with subpoenas.
The new guidelines, however, did not apply to FBI agents using NSLs , which force organizations to hand over records to federal agents and often come with gag orders. According to a Justice Department spokesperson who discussed the matter with the New York Times last July, those procedures are governed under a separate, but “extensive oversight regime.”
“What is that ‘extensive oversight regime’? Apparently, the Justice Department considers that secret,” said Trevor Timm, the co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, in a blog post announcing the legal action.
Timm referenced a heavily-redacted 2014 DOJ Inspector General report that criticized the department’s handling of a leak investigation, in which the FBI collected a reporter’s phone records using NSLs. In the department’s response to that probe, it outlined procedures it follows when issuing the letters to obtain information about journalists. Those details, however, were concealed by extensive tracks of black ink.
“We filed a Freedom of Information Act request shortly after the above-referenced Inspector General report was released in late 2014,” Timm notes. “And after no meaningful response from the Justice Department since we filed our FOIA request five months ago, we are suing them in federal court.”
The administration, as the lawsuit alleges, has taken an aggressive posture toward the press, squelching whistleblowers with arcane anti-espionage laws and conducting surveillance against credentialed members of the media at the Associated Press and Fox News as part of a leak investigation.
In the court documents, the foundation also references the government’s use of an NSL to obtain the phone records of Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman—one of the journalists who Edward Snowden reached out to with extensive details about the National Security Agency’s activities. It was among a number of events that “have prompted government watchdogs, news agencies, and First Amendment scholars to express grave concerns about the DOJ’s surveillance of the press,” the complaint reads.
