Court allows NSA and Google to keep their ties secret (
http://rt.com/usa/news/court-nsa-google-agency-053/ )


A federal appeals court has refused to force the US National Security
Agency to explain any involvement it has had with Web giant Google, citing
that a revelation could threaten the entire United States government.

Friday’s decision out of US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit reinforced a lower court’s earlier ruling that the NSA
does not have to submit to Freedom of Information Act requests for
materials involving any relationship that the federal agency has with the
Google search engine and its related entities, such as Gmail.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, took the matters to the
appeals court after their February 2010 FOIA requests were ignored by the
federal agency. Last July, EPIC brought the NSA to US District Court to
demand for evidence, to which Judge Richard Leon opted to side with the
government’s security team. On their part, EPIC had insisted that the NSA’s
refusal to acknowledge if any ties even existed between the agency and
Google was insufficient, and that the NSA should be forced to at least
acknowledge any relationship between the two before fighting off the FOIA
requests.

In legal fields, the NSA’s claim that they could not confirm nor deny any
existence of ties is called a Glomar response. EPIC argued that that would
not suffice as far as even remotely fulfilling their requests.

*“The Glomar response is appropriate where ‘to confirm or deny the
existence of records … would cause harm cognizable under a FOIA
exception,”* EPIC
argued earlier this year. On the contrary, however, EPIC claims, *“The NSA
has failed to meet this standard and has failed to perform the
segregability analysis required by statute to determine whether non-exempt
records may be released.”*

*“Without first conducting the search, not even the agency can know whether
there is a factual basis for its legal position. The decision of the
District Court should be reversed and the case remanded with an order
requiring the agency to conduct the search for responsive records,”* EPIC’s
attorney said in a statement earlier this year.

Now this week in Washington, an appeals judge has upheld the last courtroom
ruling and the NSA will continue to be spared from responding to any FOIA
requests. Explaining the 3-0 ruling, Judge Janice Rogers Brown writes that
even acknowledging that a relationship exists between the government and
Google *“might reveal whether the NSA investigated the threat,”* or “*deemed
the threat a concern to the security of the U.S. government.”*

EPIC originally became interested in any connection between the two after
the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were hacked in January
2010. At the time, Google responded and it was later reported in both the
Wall Street Journal and Washington Post that Google contacted the NSA.

In this week’s decision, the justices quote a past Post article in which
NSA Director Mike McConnell said a collaboration between his agency and
private companies like Google was *“inevitable.”*

Even still, the NSA will not go on the record to say what role, if any,
they have had with Google. The appeals court agrees, however, that saying
anything about *any *involvement would be bad for the US.

*“[A]ny information pertaining to the relationship between Google and NSA
would reveal protected information about NSA’s implementation of its
Information Assurance mission,”* explains the appeals ruling*. “The
existence of a relationship or communications between the NSA and any
private company certainly constitutes an ‘activity’ of the agency subject
to protection under Section 6. Whether the relationship — or any
communications pertaining to the relationship — were initiated by Google or
NSA is irrelevant to our analysis. Even if EPIC is correct that NSA
possesses records revealing information only about Google, those records,
if maintained by the agency, are evidence of some type of interaction
between the two entities, and thus still constitute an NSA ‘activity’
undertaken as part of its Information Assurance mission, a primary
‘function’ of the NSA.”*

*
*

It's all good people.  If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing
to worry about, right?

J

-

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
- Henry Kissinger

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel,
go out and buy 

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