Fergie's Tech Blog

EFF Plans Lawsuit To Unveil the CIA's Pentagon Papers

Ryan Singel writes on Threat Level:

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.”

posted by Fergie @ 7/21/2009 07:29:00 PM