WASHINGTON - MAY 17 - Today the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) demanding that the government comply with requests to turn over all records of NSA warrantless wiretapping of certain attorneys representing men detained at Guantánamo.

The lawsuit, Wilner v. NSA, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of 16 attorneys. The plaintiffs - including CCR staff attorneys Gitanjali Gutierrez and Wells Dixon as well as law professors and partners at prominent international law firms - represent detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and may have been the subjects of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program that began shortly after September 11, 2001. Click here for case summary of Wilner v. NSA

"Since Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, the FISA Court has only rejected five out of the government's 19,000-plus wiretap requests. We have always believed that the primary reason administration officials decided not to use the FISA statute to get warrants for the NSA program is because they wanted to target conversations even the FISA court wouldn't have approved of, such as attorneys speaking to their clients," said Shayana Kadidal, CCR managing attorney for the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative. "The government asserts - generally without a shred of evidence - that many of our clients are linked to terrorism. They've said the NSA program targets calls between Americans and foreigners linked to terrorism, and they've told Congress that they won't rule out listening to lawyers. All that means there is a grave risk that our privileged conversations were eavesdropped on. We owe it to our clients to find out if that happened."

The NSA's warrantless spying program became public in December 2005. In January 2006, CCR submitted FOIA requests to the NSA and DOJ for records related to the policies, procedures, and guidelines of the NSA program and records of the warrantless surveillance of the individual requesters.

By law, the government is obliged to produce responsive documents within 20 days of the FOIA request. Both the DOJ and the NSA provided inadequate responses to the requests - refusing to provide relevant documents within the required time period and refusing to even acknowledge the existence of documents related to whether the individual lawyers were being subjected to warrantless surveillance. The NSA produced only two documents, both of which had already been made public, and said that another document was being processed. The DOJ provided 85 pages of unredacted documents and two redacted documents, much of which had already been made public, and stated that it was withholding 84 pages and an e-mail.

CCR filed this lawsuit, Wilner v. NSA, to enforce the government's obligations under the Freedom of Information Act to provide information to the public about government conduct. Chicago-based law firm Butler Rubin Saltarelli & Boyd is co-counsel in this case.

Said Wells Dixon, plaintiff in the case and CCR attorney who was at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP at the time of the initial request filing, "I am outraged that the NSA and DOJ have categorically refused to say whether they have eavesdropped - without a warrant - on me or other attorneys simply because we have fought for basic due process rights for men imprisoned without charge or trial at Guantánamo. Now we will learn the truth."

In January 2006, CCR filed one of the first lawsuits challenging the NSA spying program, CCR v. Bush, seeking an injunction that would prohibit the government from conducting warrantless surveillance in the U.S. That case is currently pending in federal district court in San Francisco.

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