The Court of Ap­peal has re­served judg­ment in the Strate­gic Ser­vices Agency (SSA) ap­peal over a re­quest by po­lit­i­cal ac­tivist Ravi Bal­go­b­in Ma­haraj for in­for­ma­tion on wire­tap­ping and oth­er ac­tiv­i­ties by the agency.

Ap­pel­late Judges Prakash Moo­sai, Mi­ra Dean-Ar­mor­er, and Vasheist Kokaram heard le­gal ar­gu­ments yes­ter­day from SSA at­tor­ney, for­mer head of the SSA le­gal de­part­ment Ran­dall Hec­tor, and Ma­haraj’s le­gal team led by Anand Ram­lo­gan, SC.

In 2017, Ma­haraj re­quest­ed dis­clo­sure un­der the Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act re­gard­ing the num­ber of in­ter­cep­tions of cit­i­zens’ pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tion were con­duct­ed by the SSA with­out war­rants from a judge.

He al­so asked for the num­ber of in­ter­na­tion­al train­ing cours­es the staff at­tend­ed.

The SSA re­fused to pro­vide the in­for­ma­tion on the grounds that it would breach na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

Ma­haraj brought ju­di­cial re­view pro­ceed­ings chal­leng­ing the SSA’s fail­ure to dis­close the in­for­ma­tion un­der his FOIA re­quest.

The SSA ap­pealed.

In his sub­mis­sions yes­ter­day, Hec­tor ar­gued that the SSA could not dis­close the in­for­ma­tion, as it was bound by a strict code of se­cre­cy and con­fi­den­tial­i­ty. He said the court should al­so re­spect a cer­tifi­cate of ex­emp­tion is­sued by the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, as it was not equipped to eval­u­ate sen­si­tive mat­ters per­tain­ing to na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

Ram­lo­gan coun­tered that the SSA was fund­ed by tax­pay­ers and must be held ac­count­able in the in­ter­est of trans­paren­cy and good gov­er­nance.

He said a blan­ket of se­cre­cy would mean that cit­i­zens would have no way of mon­i­tor­ing the lev­el of ef­fi­cien­cy in the SSA.

Ram­lo­gan al­so stat­ed that an al­leged coup at­tempt in­volv­ing the SSA and re­cent mass fir­ings of the hi­er­ar­chy il­lus­trates why it was so dan­ger­ous to al­low the SSA to be un­ac­count­able to the cit­i­zen­ry.