U.S. Accused of Destroying Spy Records Sought as Evidence
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Years of phone and Internet records collected under anti-terror surveillance programs and sought as evidence in a lawsuit were destroyed by the U.S., the Electronic Frontier Foundation said.
The government wiped out the records without getting approval from the federal judge overseeing the case, who ordered the evidence preserved, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the San Francisco-based cyber rights advocacy group, said in a court filing today. The court should now assume the missing records would have shown the government spied on the EFF’s clients, who are challenging the programs, Cohn said.