Supreme Court Hears Privacy Case Between NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory Scientists

Abstract

After NASA put into practice the 2004 Homeland Security Presidential Directive‐12, known as HSPD‐12, Dennis Byrnes talked to then—NASA administrator Michael Griffin. Byrnes recalls that Griffin told him in 2007 that if he didn't like the agency's implementation of HSPD‐12, he should go to court. That's exactly what Byrnes, an employee of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) working as a senior engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., did.Concerned about prying and open‐ended background investigations of federal contractors through NASA's implementation of HSPD‐12, he, along with lead plaintiff Robert Nelson and 26 other Caltech employees working at JPL, sued NASA. Following several lower court decisions, including an injunction issued by a U.S. federal appeals court in response to a plaintiff motion, the case made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on 5 October.