NY Times
December 22, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration moved late
Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the
constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the
Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National
Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating
the case would jeopardize state secrets.
In a set
of filings in the two long-running cases in the Northern District of
California, the government acknowledged for the first time that the N.S.A.
started systematically collecting data about Americans’ emails and phone calls
in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants.
The government had long argued that disclosure of these and other secrets would
put the country at risk if they came out in court.
But the government said that despite recent leaks by
Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, that made public a fuller scope
of the surveillance and data collection programs put in place after the Sept. 11
attacks, sensitive secrets remained at risk in any courtroom discussion of their
details — like whether the plaintiffs were targets of intelligence collection or
whether particular telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon had
helped the agency.
“Disclosure of this still-classified information
regarding the scope and operational details of N.S.A. intelligence activities
implicated by plaintiffs’ allegations could be expected to cause extremely grave
damage to the national security of the United States,” wrote the director of
national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr.
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