State secrets privilege
The state secrets privilege is an evidentiary rule created by United States legal precedent. Application of the privilege results in exclusion of evidence from a legal case based solely on affidavits submitted by the government stating that court proceedings might disclose sensitive information which might endanger national security. United States v. Reynolds, which involved alleged military secrets, was the first case that saw formal recognition of the privilege.
Following a claim of "state secrets privilege", the court rarely conducts an in camera examination of the evidence to evaluate whether there is sufficient cause to support the use of this doctrine. This results in court rulings in which even the judge has not verified the veracity of the assertion. The privileged material is completely removed from the litigation, and the court must determine how the unavailability of the privileged information affects the case.
Function
The purpose of the state secrets privilege is to prevent courts from revealing state secrets in the course of civil litigation. The government may intervene in any civil suit, including when it is not a party to the litigation, to ask the court to exclude state secrets evidence. While the courts may examine such evidence closely, in practice they generally defer to the Executive Branch. Once the court has agreed that evidence is subject to the state secrets privilege, it is excluded from the litigation. Often, as a practical matter, the plaintiff cannot continue the suit without the privileged information, and drops the case.Distinguished from other legal doctrines
The state secrets privilege is related to, but distinct from, several other legal doctrines: the principle of non-justiciability in certain cases involving state secrets ; certain prohibitions on the publication of classified information ; and the use of classified information in criminal cases.History
Origins
The doctrine was effectively imported from English common law which has the similar public-interest immunity. It is debatable whether the state secrets privilege is based upon the President's powers as commander-in-chief and leader of foreign policy or derived from the idea of separation of powers. It seems that the US privilege "has its initial roots in Aaron Burr's trial for treason". In this case, it was alleged that a letter from General James Wilkinson to President Thomas Jefferson might contain state secrets and could therefore not be divulged without risk to national security.Supreme Court recognition in ''United States v. Reynolds''
The privilege was first officially recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in United States v. Reynolds,. A military airplane crashed. The widows of three civilian crew members sought accident reports on the crash but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission. The court held that only the government can claim or waive the privilege, but that it “is not to be lightly invoked” and that there “must be a formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has control over the matter, after actual personal consideration by that officer.” The court stressed that the decision to withhold evidence is to be made by the presiding judge and not the executive.In 2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and it was found that the assertion that they contained secret information was untrue.
Recent use
According to former White House Counsel, John Dean:While precise numbers are hard to come by, a recent study reports that the "Bush administration has invoked the state secrets privilege in 23 cases since 2001." By way of comparison, "between 1953 and 1976, the government invoked the privilege in only four cases."
These figures were later retracted, as they were based on erroneous information:
Correction: In this article, we incorrectly reported that the government invoked the state secrets privilege in 23 cases since 2001. The figure came from the 2005 Secrecy Report Card published by OpenTheGovernment.org. The privilege was actually invoked seven times from 2001 to 2005, according to the corrected 2005 report card, which is not an increase from previous decades.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the privilege is increasingly used to dismiss entire court cases, instead of only withholding the sensitive information from a case. Also in 2001, George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13233 extending the accessibility of the state secrets privilege to also allow former presidents, their designated representatives, or representatives designated by their families, to invoke it to bar records from their tenure. An article in the New York Times in August 2007, regarding a lawsuit involving Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, concluded that judges were more willing to ask the government to validate its claims.
US Justice Department officials told a federal judge on 24 March 2025 that the Trump administration was invoking the state secrets privilege to avoid giving him information about deportation flights from earlier this month that are at the center of a legal dispute over whether the government flouted his judicial commands.
Criticism
Since 2001, there has been mounting criticism of the state secrets privilege. Such criticism generally falls into four categories:Weak external validation of executive assertion of privilege
Many commentators have expressed concern that the courts never effectively scrutinize executive claims of privilege. Lacking independent national security expertise, judges frequently defer to the judgment of the executive and never subject executive claims to meaningful scrutiny.Executive abuse of the privilege to conceal embarrassing facts
Commentators have suggested that the state secrets privilege might be used to prevent disclosure of embarrassing facts as often as it is invoked to protect legitimate secrets. In the words of Professors William G. Weaver and Robert M. Pallitto in a Political Science Quarterly article:he incentive on the part of administrators is to use the privilege to avoid embarrassment, handicap political enemies, and to prevent criminal investigation of administrative action.
In several prominent cases, the evidence that the government successfully excluded was later revealed to contain no state secrets: United States v. Reynolds, Sterling v. Tenet, Edmonds v. Department of Justice, and the Pentagon Papers.
Expansion into a justiciability doctrine
Some academics and practitioners have criticized the expansion of the state secrets privilege from an evidentiary privilege to a justiciability doctrine. Under its original formulation, the state secrets privilege was meant only to exclude a very narrow class of evidence whose revelation would harm national security. However, in a large percentage of recent cases, courts have gone a step further, dismissing entire cases in which the government asserts the privilege, in essence converting an evidentiary rule into a justiciability rule. The government response has been that in certain cases, the subject of the case is itself privileged. In these cases, the government argues, there is no plausible way to respond to a complaint without revealing state secrets.Elimination of judicial check on executive power
alleges that the Bush administration attempted to expand executive power, as evidenced by the unitary executive theory propagated by John Yoo. The theory suggests that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, cannot be bound by Congress or any law, national or international. By invoking the state secrets privilege in cases involving actions taken in the war on terror, Greenwald opines the administration tried to evade judicial review of these claims of exceptional war powers. In effect, this is preventing a judicial ruling determining whether there is a legal basis for such expansive executive power.Calls for reform
In recent years, a number of commentators have called for legislative reforms to the state secrets privilege. These reforms center around several ideas:- Requiring judges to review each piece of evidence that the executive claims is subject to the privilege.
- Requiring the executive to craft alternative evidence that is not subject to the privilege, for the opposing party to use in place of the original, privileged evidence. Such substitute evidence should only be required when it is possible to do so without harming national security.
- Prohibiting courts from dismissing claims on the basis of the state secrets privilege until after they have reviewed all available evidence.
- Permitting the court to appoint an outside expert to scrutinize the evidence for national security content.
- Excluding illegal government action from the definition of "state secrets," or otherwise allowing the court to address the legality of government conduct. This would prevent the government from using the state secrets privilege to conceal its illegal conduct.