Last week it emerged that the Department of Justice had adopted the unprecedented tactic of employing a subpoena in order to recover copies of a classified document that had been provided without authorization to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Yesterday, in a swift and somewhat farcical conclusion to the controversy, the government withdrew the subpoena and announced that the document had been declassified (pdf).
The use of a subpoena was not intended as a threat, a government attorney wrote (pdf) to the court, but was issued in response to a “request” from the ACLU, so that the organization would not have to voluntarily surrender the document without “due process”:
“The Government issued the subpoena based on […] what it believed to be the ACLU’s request for a subpoena in lieu of voluntarily returning the then-classified document.”
Further background is available in “Government Backs Down in its Attempt to Seize ‘Secret’ Document,” ACLU, December 18, and “Prosecutors Drop A.C.L.U. Subpoena in Document Fight” by Adam Liptak, New York Times, December 19.
The bootcamp brought more than two dozen next-generation open-source practitioners from across the United States to Washington DC, where they participated in interactive modules, group discussions, and hands-on sleuthing.
Fourteen teams from ten U.S. states have been selected as the Stage 2 awardees in the Civic Innovation Challenge (CIVIC), a national competition that helps communities turn emerging research into ready-to-implement solutions.
The Fix Our Forests Act provides an opportunity to speed up the planning and implementation of wildfire risk reduction projects on federal lands while expanding collaborative tools to bring more partners into this vital work.
Public health insurance programs, especially Medicaid, Medicare, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), are more likely to cover populations at increased risk from extreme heat, including low-income individuals, people with chronic illnesses, older adults, disabled adults, and children.