The San Francisco Chronicle quotes Center for Internet and Society Director of Civil Liberties Jennifer Granick on the inefficiency of confidential legal precedings in determining precedent.

It took a federal appeals court 97 pages to explain why the post-9/11 Congress, in allowing the National Security Agency to seize business records “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, hadn’t authorized the agency to scoop up records of every telephone call made in the United States.

Nearly nine years earlier, a federal judge had reached the opposite conclusion in two sentences of a cursory 10-page ruling.

…

“It shows how ineffective secret proceedings are for interpreting law,” said Jennifer Granick, a Stanford law lecturer and civil liberties director at the law school’s Center for Internet and Society. “As a matter of principle, a democracy can’t have secret law.”

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