eff | The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones. In Jones,
a unanimous court held that federal agents must get a warrant to attach
a GPS device to a car to track a suspect for long periods of time. But
if you want to see the two memos describing how the FBI has reacted to
Jones — and the new surveillance techniques the FBI is using beyond GPS
trackers — you’re out of luck. The FBI says that information is “private
and confidential.”
Yes, now that the Supreme Court ruled the government must get a
warrant to use its previous go-to surveillance technique, it has now
apparently decided that it’s easier to just keep everything secret. The
ACLU requested the memos under the Freedom of Information Act — which you can see FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann waving around in public here — and the FBI redacted them almost entirely.
Though the FBI won’t release the memos, we do have some information
from other sources on the surveillance techniques federal agents are
already using. And for the most part the FBI contends they do not need a
warrant, and one wonders, given the public nature of this information,
why they are officially claiming its "secret." Fist tap Arnach.
