Opinion ID: 1188885
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Plaintiffs' Contentions

Text: The plaintiffs argue that the government unconstitutionally denied their counsel access to the secure media he needed to draft the opposition to the government's assertion of the state-secrets privilege. In particular, counsel was refused permission to review the un-redacted classified version of the complaint which he himself had drafted, and to use the secure facilities necessary to prepare and submit at least some of the purportedly privileged and classified information to the district court. In addition, counsel was denied access to secure means of communicating with Jane Doe in order to prepare an opposition to the government's invocation, and Doe was unable to visit the United States for that purpose. The plaintiffs' principal contention on appeal is that the denial of these requests violated their constitutional right of access to the courts. [7] Following the government's invocation of the state-secrets privilege, the proceedings to determine the validity of that invocation were held by the district court ex parte and in camera. The court was authorized to do so. The Reynolds majority said as much: The court itself must determine whether the circumstances are appropriate for the claim of privilege, and yet do so without forcing a disclosure of the very thing the privilege is designed to protect. Reynolds, 345 U.S. at 8, 73 S.Ct. 528 (citation omitted). Indeed, the procedure followed here was one with which every Justice on the Reynolds Court apparently would have agreed. Judge Maris's opinion for the Third Circuit, which the dissenting Justices substantially adopted, noted that [the state-secrets] examination must obviously be ex parte and in camera if the privilege is not to be lost in its assertion. Reynolds Cir. Op., 192 F.2d at 997. Unarguably, then, the plaintiffs have no right of access to material that the government contends contains state secrets prior to the district court's adjudication of that contention. The plaintiffs do not create such a right by asserting that they seek access to enable them to argue that the alleged state secrets are not really state secrets. The plaintiffs seek to avoid this bar by asserting that by denying their various requests, the CIA has unlawfully interfered with their ability to prosecute this lawsuit. They do not ask the CIA for access to classified information that is new to them. They seek instead to make use of information they already have but which the government nonetheless asserts requires protection against disclosure: inter alia, the identity and history of a covert CIA employee, Jane Doe's husband; the reasons for his termination by the CIA; the termination's effect on the plaintiffs; the identity of Foreign Country `A'; the plaintiffs' circumstances there; and related information. The plaintiffs argue that the CIA has made it impossible for them to resist the government's invocation and motion to dismiss by denying their counsel permission to use secure media to view and create documents containingand to communicate with them aboutthe purportedly privileged information that they already know. The plaintiffs misconstrue the limits on their participation in Reynolds proceedings. They do not have the right to use the information that the government has asserted contains state secrets to oppose that assertion in the district court. Even if they already know some of it, permitting the plaintiffs, through counsel, to use the information to oppose the assertion of privilege may present a danger of [i]nadvertent disclosurethrough a leak, for example, or through a failure or mis-use of the secure media that plaintiffs' counsel seeks to use, or even through over-disclosure to the district court in camera all of which is precisely the sort of risk that Reynolds attempts to avoid. Sterling, 416 F.3d at 348. The district court had no obligation to increase the risk of disclosure by permitting the plaintiffs to discuss, transmit, record, or file information asserted to be a state secret by the government. [8] The Ninth Circuit faced a somewhat similar situation in Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush, 507 F.3d 1190 (9th Cir.2007). There, the plaintiffs also knewin that case as a result of accidental disclosuresome of the information that the government asserted was a state secret. See id. at 1202-03. The district court and the court of appeals concluded that the inadvertent disclosure to the plaintiffs did not make the state secret public information. See id. Despite th[e] wrinkle of accidental disclosure to the plaintiffs, the court of appeals said, we read Reynolds as requiring an in camera [and ex parte ] review of the [document containing the information in question] in these circumstances. Id. at 1203. The plaintiffs here contend separately that the government's refusal to facilitate their secure attorney-client communications violated their First Amendment interest in communicating with an attorney. Pls.' Br. 21. But the plaintiffs have effectively conceded that there was no infringement of any such right: They admit that counsel could have traveled to Jane Doe to confer with her about the case, [9] id. at 4 n. 3, and do not dispute that Jane Doe's husband, the individual whose covert status as a former CIA employee is at the center of the government's invocation of the state-secrets privilege, could travel and meet with plaintiffs' counsel in the United States, see Defs.' Br. 38 (citing Complaint). The parties' frustration with and objection to their exclusion from the Reynolds proceedings in the district court is understandable. The court, pursuant to Reynolds, dispensed with two fundamental protections for litigants, courts, and the public. First, the district court and the parties lost the benefit of an adversarial process, which may have informed and sharpened the judicial inquiry and which would have assured each litigant a fair chance to explain, complain, and otherwise be heard. See, e.g., Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154, 168, 98 S.Ct. 2674, 57 L.Ed.2d 667 (1978) (The usual reliance of our legal system on adversary proceedings itself should be an indication that an ex parte inquiry is likely to be less vigorous.). Second, they lost the value of open proceedings and judgments based on public evidence. See, e.g., Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Virginia, 448 U.S. 555, 580, 100 S.Ct. 2814, 65 L.Ed.2d 973 (1980) (concluding that criminal trials are presumptively public and noting that `[w]ithout publicity, all other checks are insufficient: in comparison of publicity, all other checks are of small account.... [W]hatever other institutions might present themselves in the character of checks, would be found to operate rather as cloaks than checks; as cloaks in reality, as checks only in appearance.' 1 J. Bentham, Rationale of Judicial Evidence 524 (1827) [10] (footnote in original, renumbered)). As we observed in United States v. Aref, 533 F.3d 72 (2d Cir.2008): Transparency is pivotal to public perception of the judiciary's legitimacy and independence. The political branches of government claim legitimacy by election, judges by reason. Any step that withdraws an element of the judicial process from public view makes the ensuing decision look more like fiat and requires rigorous justification. Hicklin Eng'g, L.C. v. Bartell, 439 F.3d 346, 348 (7th Cir.2006). Because the Constitution grants the judiciary neither force nor will, but merely judgment, The Federalist No. 78 (Alexander Hamilton), courts must impede scrutiny of the exercise of that judgment only in the rarest of circumstances. This is especially so when a judicial decision accedes to the requests of a coordinate branch, lest ignorance of the basis for the decision cause the public to doubt that complete independence of the courts of justice [which] is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. Id. Id. at 83. The proceedings at issue here were held ex parte and in camera for good and sufficient reason, however: to ensure that legitimate state secrets were not lost in the process. The plaintiffs' rights of access to the courts were not compromised by the district court's refusal to require that the CIA facilitate their use of information covered by an assertion of the state-secrets privilege to challenge that assertion. Our affirmance of Judge Swain's decision is not affected by the Ninth Circuit's recent rejection of the government's assertion of the state-secrets privilege in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., 563 F.3d 992 (9th Cir.2009). In Mohamed, the plaintiffs opposed the invocation of the state-secrets privilege on the ground that the information they were seeking to offer the court was based in whole or in part on public information. Id. at 997-98 (reversing dismissal of plaintiffs' action which, [c]iting publicly available evidence ... claim[ed] they were each processed through the [CIA's] extraordinary rendition program and also cited publicly available evidence that the aircraft company defendant provided flight planning and logistical support services to the program). But see El-Masri, 479 F.3d at 308, 311 (affirming dismissal of the complaint on the ground that the facts that are central to litigating [plaintiff's] action were state secrets, despite plaintiff's assertion that the facts essential to his Complaint have largely been made public). The plaintiffs here do not contend that their claims rest on information that is already publicly available. Similarly, we have no occasion to address whether and to what extent the government could validly refuse to grant the plaintiffs the access they sought to discuss, view, or record classified information not properly covered by an assertion of the state-secrets privilege. See, e.g., Mohamed, 563 F.3d at 1003 (rejecting government's argument that state secrets form the subject matter of a lawsuit, and therefore require dismissal, any time a complaint contains allegations, the truth or falsity of which has been classified as secret by a government official). We therefore reach, and intimate our views on, neither issue.