A few weeks ago, we noted that FISC Judge Reggie Walton was quite reasonably pissed off at the DOJ for directly withholding key information about evidence in a series of lawsuits concerning NSA surveillance programs. The full details are a bit down in the weeds, but the short summary is that there‘s been some debate over whether or not the government needs to retain surveillance data because it‘s evidence in these cases, or if it needs to destroy the surveillance data, as required by the rules over its holding of the data. There‘s been a bit of back and forth over all of this, but the DOJ apparently directly withheld from the FISC a request by EFF lawyers to inform the court that a data preservation order should cover two of the key NSA surveillance cases that it has been involved in for years (since well before the Snowden disclosures). The DOJ not only did not inform the court, but it also appears to have tried to dissuade the lawyers from raising the issue. Judge Walton ordered the DOJ to explain itself, and it gives a long apology, repeatedly insisting that it didn‘t believe those cases were related, since they were focused on surveillance data ordered by the President, rather than the FISA Court — a weak excuse at best: