Washington – A federal judge scolded the Bush administration Wednesday for responding with sometimes blanket secrecy to a request for documents on its warrantless wiretapping program.
Privacy groups and civil rights organizations sued the Justice Department last year, demanding it release documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
The government refused to release most of the records, arguing that such a move could jeopardize national security and undermine terrorism investigations.
But U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday that that’s not good enough.
“While the court is certainly sensitive to the government’s need to protect classified information and its deliberative processes, essentially declaring ‘because we say so’ is an inadequate” defense, Kennedy wrote.
Kennedy agreed with the Justice Department that many records should not be turned over, either because they were classified or because they were drafts of documents not covered by public records laws.
In other instances, Kennedy said the Justice Department must release a list of its documents and explain why each cannot be released. Kennedy had particularly strong words for the FBI, whose response he called “wholly inadequate.”
Also Wednesday, the Homeland Security Department reported it has scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards.
The department has spent $42 million since 2003 developing the software tool known as ADVISE – the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program – at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. It was intended for wide use by DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.
Pilot tests of the program were suspended in March after Congress’ Government Accountability Office warned that “the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism.”
Along with the privacy problems, Homeland Security’s inspector general said that ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use and lacked adequate justifications.
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the project was being dropped.
“ADVISE is not expected to be restarted,” Knocke said. DHS’ Science and Technology directorate “determined that new commercial products now offer similar functionality while costing significantly less to maintain than ADVISE.”
