American Civil Liberties Union v. United States Department of Defense

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that documents must have been made public through an “official and documented disclosure by the government”
• holding that “[d]ocuments concerning surveillance activities later deemed illegal may still produce 9 information that may be properly withheld under exemption 1”
• explaining that a leaked report, not released pursuant to a government declassification process, could not be considered officially acknowledged
• explaining that an agency’s reasoning to support a FOIA exemption is sufficient if it is logical or plausible
• affirming withholding of classified information where the agency “identified five reasons” why disclosure may harm national security
• declining to require the production of classified information that, the government asserted, was \of a qualitatively different nature\ from publicly available information

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).