SCOTUS Won't Hear Surveillance Court Access Case

The Supreme Court declined to hear the American Civil Liberties Union’s case seeking access to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) documents, on docket 20-1499. The ACLU argued the First Amendment provides a “qualified right of public access” to the court’s “significant opinions” on statutory and constitutional law. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. The FISC and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR) denied the ACLU access to secret opinions authorizing surveillance on U.S. citizens in 2016. The ACLU asked the high court to review a series of rulings denying access. The case presents questions about the “right of public access to Article III judicial proceedings of grave national importance,” Gorsuch wrote in the dissenting opinion Monday with Sotomayor. “Maybe even more fundamentally, this case involves a governmental challenge to the power of this Court to review the work of Article III judges in a subordinate court. If these matters are not worthy of our time, what is?” The high court failed to “bring badly needed transparency to the surveillance court and to rulings that impact millions of Americans,” ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Patrick Toomey said . “Our privacy rights rise or fall with the court’s decisions, which increasingly apply outdated laws to the new technologies we rely on.” Because SCOTUS “refuses to let the American people see how their own constitutional rights are being interpreted, Congress’s responsibility to conduct aggressive oversight and end secret law is even more important,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.