The courts recently addressed government secrecy in a set of actions that yield mixed results for government efforts to carve out a bigger zone of secrecy in open society in the name of national security. In the most widely anticipated of two court decision, the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia ruled in a 2-1 decision June 17th that the courts should defer to the executive branch when intelligence agencies invoke national security to justify government secrecy. At issue was the government’s refusal to release the names of those detained in government investigations. The government claims that release of the names, which had been requested by the Center for National Security Studies and numerous press groups under the Freedom of Information Act, would have undermined ongoing investigations of planned terrorist attacks. The majority opinion noted that judges are in a poor position to second-guess intelligence agencies and should defer to the government when national security is invoked. The ruling significantly weakens judicial oversight of government claims that national security demands secrecy. The government in this case did not have to explain how the release of the names of those detained would harm national security. In essence, in ruling that the detainees’ names could be kept secret, the judges ignored the question of whether the release of the names would have actually impaired ongoing government investigations. Perhaps judicial deference explains why the court felt compelled to accept the government’s invocation of national security concerns without asking the government to provide specifics to support the claim through confidential court briefs. The additional step to require government explanations for their claim would have given the courts specific information to determine whether the government’s claims had merit. Instead, the court chose to trust the government. Within days of the D.C. Circuit Court decision, a New Jersey judge unsealed a transcript of an unrelated case revealing that a Mohamed Atriss spent 6 months in jail after county prosecutors overstated inaccurate information that the man had ties to terrorists and the prosecutors’ claims were kept from Atriss. In reality, according to a story by Dale Russakoff of the Washington Post, in 1987 Atriss briefly conducted business with a man whose name was linked to a group under investigation by the FBI for terrorism. The transcript also shows that prosecutors claimed that Atriss was under FBI investigation; prosecutors made the claim without confirmation from the FBI. Specifics of prosecutors’ allegations were kept from Atriss, who upon learning the reasons for his confinement said the claims could have been easily refuted. Unlike the judges in the detainee case, a judge reviewing the evidence against Atriss had the temerity to rule in January that prosecutors must justify claims that Atriss posed a risk to national security, and that the prosecutors had failed to do so.