Assange visitors' lawsuit against CIA dismissed by US judge

By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit against the CIA by journalists and lawyers who said the intelligence agency illegally spied on them when they visited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange while he was holed up at Ecuador's embassy in London.

In a decision made public on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan said the Central Intelligence Agency could invoke the state secrets privilege in refusing even to acknowledge whether a private security contractor copied and provided data from the plaintiffs' mobile phones.

The journalists, Charles Glass and John Goetz, and the lawyers, Deborah Hrbek and Margaret Kunstler, both of whom represented Assange, said the data collection by Undercover Global in 2017 violated their privacy rights under the U.S. Constitution. They sought an injunction requiring the CIA to destroy the data.

But the judge said forcing the CIA to reveal whether it gathered intelligence in a foreign embassy "could have serious national security repercussions for the United States, even though Assange no longer lives at the embassy and UC Global no longer provides security there."

Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, which represented the CIA, declined to comment.

Koeltl's decision is dated February 15. The judge dismissed other claims in December 2023.

Assange, 53, returned to his native Australia after pleading guilty last June, under an agreement with U.S. officials, to one count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security materials.

The plea ended Assange's five-year stay in a British prison, which followed seven years at the Ecuador embassy as he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations.

Assange denied those allegations, and called them a pretext to extradite him to the United States over WikiLeaks.

State secrets released by WikiLeaks included classified materials from U.S. military activity in Afghanistan and Iraq, highlighting issues such as abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody, human rights violations and civilian deaths.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)