The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that’s been part of a broad coalition of pro-privacy groups worried about an anti-spying law that’s been used in the past to surveil Americans, sued the government Friday for allegedly withholding audit records on the program.
Cato brought the lawsuit in federal court in Washington, accusing the FBI and the Justice Department of not coughing up information the think tank had previously filed for under the Freedom of Information Act. The requested records dealt with audits of the government’s compliance with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Section 702 allows U.S. agencies to keep tabs on communications of foreigners abroad but has also caught communications between Americans and foreign nationals that had nothing to do with anti-terror probes, leading critics to label it “warrantless surveillance.”
“When the FBI stonewalls public records requests about a massive surveillance program that gobbles up billions of communications yearly — including yours and mine — it’s violating the law… A law its agents and managers are sworn to uphold,” said Cato senior fellow Patrick Eddington in an email to HuffPost.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment late on Friday.
Every few years, there are fights over the renewal of FISA. Its advocates concede that the law allowed too broad a net to be cast on U.S. citizens’ communications with foreigners but argue that those issues have mostly been remedied. The latest round of debate happened in April, and split along unusual partisan lines on Capitol Hill.
Pro-privacy advocates in both parties argued for dramatically overhauling or allowing the law to lapse, while security proponents, again in both parties, said that would be dangerous for national security. Ultimately, a two-year renewal was signed into law.
Cato has been seeking information since June 2023 about the results of audits of how well the government had been complying with restrictions on 702 searches.
In August, the FBI claimed that Cato’s FOIA request was “overly broad,” according to Friday’s lawsuit, which appeals that ruling and asks the court to force the government to give up the records.
Eddington said the audit data would have potentially been useful to lawmakers debating whether to renew the law, but they never saw it.
“We filed this ‘follow FOIA’ lawsuit over the FISA Section 702 program to see whether or not the FBI’s stonewalling on related records in our prior suit was deliberate in order to ensure a winning vote for FISA reauthorization this year,” he said.
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