A federal district judge backtracked on his order to require the National Security Agency (NSA) to preserve its cache of information from its surveillance of phone records in the U.S. The judge Jeffrey White ruled that to protect national security, NSA did not have to preserve all evidence of its domestic spying in so far as the judge’s previous preservation of evidence order related to section 702 of the FISA Amendment Acts. (Courthouse News Service, June 6, 2014, by Chris Marshall and Jack Bouboushian)
The American Civil Liberties Union assailed government secrecy as “a cancer in our democracy,” particularly noting that the federal government is abusing its powers by invoking national security in withholding information from the public. “Secrecy powers are inherently dangerous in a democracy, and need to be very tightly confined to those specific circumstances where the national interest genuinely requires that they be granted. Unfortunately, in the absence of strong checks and balances, government secrecy is metastasizing throughout our democracy,” wrote Jay Stanley for the ACLU, June 6, 2014.