The Electronic Frontier Foundation accused the federal government in a court filing of destroying evidence of their surveillance programs while under order to preserve the records. The EFF said the government admitted to the destruction in court filings and is asking the U.S. District Court to assume the records would have shown that the government spied without warrants. (Bloomberg News, May 30, 2014, by Karen Gullo)
The EFF issued this statement by Legal Director Cindy Cohn, “The court has issued a number of preservation orders over the years, but the government decided – without consent from the judge or even informing EFF – that those orders simply don’t apply. Regular civil litigants would face severe sanctions if they so obviously destroyed relevant evidence. But we are asking for a modest remedy: a ruling that we can assume the destroyed records would show that our plaintiffs were in fact surveilled by the government.” (Electronic Frontier Foundation, May 30, 2014, press release)