14 DAY TRIAL // The EFF is trying to push back against an attempt coming from the US government to alter the historical records in a case against the NSA.
“On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to ‘remove’ classified information from the transcript, and even indicated that it wanted to do so secretly, so the public could never even know that they had done so,” the EFF accuses.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is outraged against effort to silently get rid of important information from the historical records. It is everyone’s right to know what happened during the hearing and to have access to an accurate transcript and it is the law to record each session as exactly as possible.
The Court actually allowed the government to look over the transcript and said that it wouldn’t allow for the officials to manufacture a misleading transcript by hiding the fact of any redactions.
Faced with this type of reaction, the government backed down and said that it had not revealed classified information during the hearing so nothing had to be changed. The request was withdrawn, but the incident still happened and it raises a lot of questions. As the EFF puts it, “this speaks volumes about the dangers of allowing the government free rein to claim secrecy in court proceedings and otherwise.”
The issue dates back to June 6, but the EFF’s hands were tied and it could not share the information with the public until now when the transcript, the order signed by Judge White and the arguments over the government’s revision request were made public.
“The transcript of a court proceeding is the historical record of that event, what will exist and inform the public long after the persons involved are gone. The government's attempt to change this history was unprecedented. We could find no example of where a court had granted such a remedy or even where such a request had been made. This was another example of the government's attempt to shroud in secrecy both its own actions, as well as the challenges to those actions,” the EFF writes.