Tucson, Arizona Tuesday, 25 March 2003
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON - An effort by a coalition of civil liberties groups to bring a Supreme Court challenge to the government's use of expanded surveillance authority under a post-Sept. 11 statute failed Monday.
The justices, without comment, refused to permit the groups to file an appeal from a ruling by a special federal appeals court. That court ruled that the USA Patriot Act granted broad new authority to use wiretaps obtained for intelligence operations to prosecute terrorists.
The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and two Arab-American groups needed the court's permission to file their appeal. The reason: Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that set up a special court system for reviewing intelligence wiretap requests, the government is the only party, and only the government can file a Supreme Court appeal.
The decision last November by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, a court consisting of three federal judges who ordinarily sit on other federal appeals courts, was the first ruling that court had issued in its 25 years of existence. The review court permitted the ACLU and the defense lawyers to file briefs as "friends of the court," but the United States was the only party.
The case that produced the November ruling was a government appeal of an earlier ruling by the lower court in this special system, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court. That court had rejected the broad interpretation that Attorney General John Ashcroft claimed for the USA Patriot Act. The 11 judges of that court made their ruling in secret last May, with the decision remaining unknown to the public until Congress released it three months later.
In their petition to the Supreme Court, the Civil Liberties Union and the other groups told the justices that the important issues coming before these special courts "should not be finally adjudicated by courts that sit in secret, do not ordinarily publish their decisions, and allow only the government to appear before them."