American law offers strong protections to the country’s national security organizations. But it also aims to shield citizens from being wrongly surveilled. On Monday, the Supreme Court considered a case in which the first of those policy goals seems to threaten the second, weighing whether the government’s interest in protecting “state secrets” should trump a Muslim community’s interest in challenging a surveillance program. The case originated more than a decade ago, when three Muslim men in Southern California filed a lawsuit alleging that the FBI had violated their religious freedom by spying on them solely because of their faith. They cited details provided by a former FBI informant to justify their complaint. The FBI responded to the religious freedom claims by invoking the state secrets defense. Government attorneys said they couldn’t defend the challenged surveillance program without jeopardizing national security in some way. A district court accepted the government’s arguments and dismissed the case in 2012. But then the Muslim men won their appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that a federal law governing the use of surveillance-related evidence in court proceedings should limit the state secrets privilege in this case. Earlier this year, the […]
