The Bush administration said Friday that it will ask a federal judge to dismiss a privacy rights group's lawsuit against AT&T over the company's reported role in a government surveillance program, because the case might expose state secrets.
In a filing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Justice Department lawyers said the government will assert the "military and state secrets privilege ... to protect against the unauthorized disclosure in litigation of information that may harm national security.''
The information is so sensitive that the entire subject matter of the case is a state secret, government lawyers said. . . .
[J]ustice Department lawyers did not specify how the case would endanger national security. But they but cited rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953 and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1998 affirming the government's authority to keep military secrets out of court, even if that meant dismissing an entire lawsuit.
Details here from the San Francisco Chronicle.