Intellectual Property Law

Group Plans Lawsuit To Unveil the CIA?s Pentagon Papers

By Ryan Singel

The CIA and other agencies are sitting on a trove of documentary evidence of actual and suspected wrongdoing under the Bush administration, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to file a lawsuit Wednesday to force the intelligence community to come clean, the group says.

At issue are the misconduct reports the spy agencies are required to file with the Intelligence Oversight Board, a board of private citizens with security clearances who oversee the spy agencies and report to the president. The board is tasked with evaluating the self-reported malfeasances of intelligence agencies, looking at the agencies’ responses, and forwarding on the worst to the attorney general when it believes criminal prosecution is called for.

The CIA is among the agencies that failed to respond to the EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for copies of the reports. Given the unfolding controversy over the CIA’s apparent failure to notify Congress of a secret agency assassination program, the withholding of these documents takes on even greater importance, according to EFF lawyer Nate Cardozo.

“If the CIA hasn’t been reporting these types of activity to Congress, which apparently they haven’t, then who are they reporting it to?” Cardozo asked. “If this is only body for the intelligence oversight, whether they are actually filing these reports is a good question.”

In February 2008, the EFF filed FOIA requests with a wide range of intelligence agencies, from the Coast Guard to the NSA, asking for all the reports to the board from 2001 to 2008. The EFF then followed up earlier this month with a second round of requests, which have not been filled in the required time frame.

Now the EFF is suing more agencies in a single suit than it ever has, naming the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Homeland Security, the State department, and the Department of Energy. The Attorney General’s office is also named: the EFF wants to know if any cases have been referred for prosecution, and what, if anything, the Justice Department did with such referrals.

Some agencies, such as the Department of Energy, have filed reports that are illuminating, such as reports of lost laptops. The NSA, on the other hand, returned several years worth of reports, but the pages were so heavily blacked out as to make them useless, according to Cardozo.

The Intelligence Oversight Board was created by President Gerald Ford as a reaction to the intelligence abuses uncovered in the late 60s and early 70s. It is a part of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which currently has no members.

The board lost significant authority in February 2008, which then-President George Bush signed an executive order removing criminal referrals as a key job of the board.

The EFF is filing suit in federal court in San Francisco.

See Also:

• Gonzales Knew About FBI Lawbreaking
• Senators Ask FBI to Explain Flawed ‘National Security Letter’ to …
• Gonzales Knew About FBI Lawbreaking
• FBI Caused Delay in Terror Case Ahead of Senate Testimony
• Dear Pentagon: Please Give Me All Your Secrets
• Bittersweet Sunshine: Four Decades of FOIA Wins and Losses

Full post as published by Threat Level on July 21, 2009 (boomark / email).