What Would Have Been Big News But for Snowden: The Daoud Disclosure Order

Carrie Cordero writes at Lawfare:

As Wells noted last week, there was a significant decision regarding FISA, in the Northern District of Illinois, on January 29th. In the case of United States v. Daoud, Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman ordered the disclosure of FISA application materials to the defendant’s security-cleared attorney.  Thus 36 years of contrary district court precedent—which held that such applications need not be disclosed to the defense, when challenged in a subsequent prosecution—came to a screeching halt.

In a pre-Snowden world, such a ruling would have been big, big news. (Of course, in a pre-Snowden world, this disclosure may not have been ordered in this particular case.)  But so far the order hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. I thus thought would be useful, both to overview the relevant legal rules, and their application by the district court in Daoud. . . .