Supreme Court Case Threatens to Expand "Personal" Rights for Corporations

The Supreme Court will hear arguments today in FCC v. AT&T Inc. The case hinges on whether a corporation has the same personal right of privacy that an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides to individuals.

FOIA requires government agencies to disclose most records requested in writing by any person, unless the record falls within one of nine exemptions. One of the categories protected from disclosure under FOIA is records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes when releasing the information would cause an unwarranted invasion of “personal privacy.”

Pointing to this exemption, AT&T claims that the FCC cannot disclose information about an investigation into claims of overcharges in a program through which AT&T provided equipment and services to schools. AT&T argues that releasing the records would be an invasion of its “personal privacy” under the statute. The Supreme Court must decide in this case if the personal privacy exception applies to corporations, or just people. If the Court sides with AT&T, it will continue to erase legal distinctions between the rights of human beings and the rights of corporations, and shield a company from alleged wrongdoing.

Last year at this time, a divided Court held in Citizens United that corporations had the same rights as people to spend money on political campaigns. The effect was to unleash a tsunami of corporate spending on the 2010 election, much of it from undisclosed sources.

An editorial in today's Washington Post points to the Citizens United decision as evidence of the Supreme Court's moves to protect corporate interests at the expense of individuals, and urges the Court not to make that same mistake in this case.

UPDATE: Slate - FCC v. AT&T reveals the limits of corporate personhood at the Supreme Court

FOIA Request Filed For the OPR Report

Today, members of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee (including Marjorie Cohn, a law Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law featured in our film, Tortured Law) filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act requesting the report from the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) on the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who authored the “torture memos.” Release of the report has been repeatedly delayed for over a year, and most recently Attorney General Holder promised in November to release it “by the end of the month.” The end of November has come and gone and the report has still not been released.

In addition to requesting the release of the OPR Report, the FOIA request submitted today asks for the following sets of documents:

1.The long-overdue ethics report of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) regarding the performance of Bush administration lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 2002-2007. The Attorney General last promised to release this report by the end of November, 2009, and it still has not been released.
2. The first OPR ethics report on the performance of Bush administration lawyers in the OLC, completed in December, 2008.
3. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey's 10-page rebuttal of the December, 2008 report, referenced in The New York Times of May 6, 2009.
4. A copy of OPR regulations regarding settled procedure on conducting a misconduct investigation and producing a report.
5. A copy of any OPR regulations that allow the subjects of the investigation to a) read the final report, b) make changes to the report, and c) allow the Attorney General to rebut the report.
6. Copies of all written warnings from 2001 on from veteran members of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program to the Department of Justice, including the OLC, stating that SERE methods of interrogation on detainees were ineffective in eliciting the truth and designed more to elicit false confessions.
7. Copies of all communications from military and national security lawyers and professionals to the Department of Justice, including the Office of Legal Counsel, objecting to the form of interrogation methods proposed by the CIA and adopted by the Bush White House and the OLC lawyers in 2002.
8. Given John Yoo's statement on p 15 of the New York Times Magazine of January 3, 2010, that "if there's a conflict between the president and the Congress, then you have to pick one or the other," we also request any documents shedding light on whom an OLC lawyer is supposed to 'represent' in rendering a legal opinion: the President, Congress, the Constitution, or the entire framework of domestic and international law?

This FOIA request is a good step. We hope it brings us closer to the accountability for torture that America needs.