The secret surveillance court that approved the U.S. government's broad collection of millions of Americans' telephone and email records called Monday for the White House to declassify and release as much as it can of one of the court's early legal decisions sanctioning that collection.
The chief of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the Justice Department to begin a review to see how much it can reasonably declassify from a 2008 opinion — a ruling in which the court allegedly ordered Yahoo to turn over the records of its customers' online communications.
In his order Monday, Judge Reggie Walton also instructed the department to undergo the same declassification process for the arguments that Yahoo and the U.S. government made in the case. He said he would then release the declassified portions of the court's justification — and the legal arguments — to the public.