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Reggie Walton, Chief Judge of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), ordered the release of a court decision and accompanying legal briefs from a 2008 case that forced Yahoo to turn over user data to the government as part of the PRISM surveillance program.

Under the Monday court order, the Department of Justice has to conduct a declassification review of documents and report to the court with the redacted documents by July 29.

The National Security Agency鈥檚 data collection and monitoring program, PRISM, was exposed in documents leaked by Edward Snowden in early June and detailed in the Guardian and the Washington Post.

In 2008, a sealed court case challenged an expansive data collection program, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). A redacted version of the case, which omitted the details of the data collection program and the name of the petitioner, was one of the few public FISC documents.

Nearly six years after the court case took place, and several weeks after the Prism program was exposed, the New York Times published an exclusive that named Yahoo as the petitioner in the 2008 sealed case.

This placed Yahoo as the first and only Internet provider that is known to have challenged the court鈥檚 order to turn over its customers鈥� data. The 2008 decision set a precedent that forced other Internet service providers to turn over their consumers鈥� data.

On Sunday, a day after the Times鈥� article was published, Yahoo filed a petition with FISC to declassify the 2008 decision. The Department of Justice filed a response to the motion, granting Yahoo permission to acknowledge itself as the petitioner in the 2008 case.

Monday鈥檚 order will require FISC to reveal details about the 2008 case, though Patrick Toomey, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, is skeptical as to how much new information will be released since the higher court鈥檚 decision that ordered Yahoo to comply with the FISC鈥檚 request is already public.聽

The larger significance of the case is that the public will have more information about how FISC operates, Mr. Toomey says.

鈥淚t could be an extremely positive sign about the court beginning to think harder about openness and to understand its legal rulings,鈥� he says, adding that Watlon鈥檚 order 鈥渟hows that the FISA court is beginning to think on its own about the public鈥檚 need to see [its] opinions.鈥�

鈥淵ahoo is asking for the public to know under what laws we live,鈥� says Jennifer Granick, the Director of the Civil Liberties program at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She understands that the government would have specific information about a particular person that is kept secret, but 鈥渢he idea that the secret court has secret laws that govern our lives is really reprehensible.鈥澛�

Though it is unlikely that the declassification of this 2008 case will create a sea change in the way the FISC is run, making this case public could create a public expectation of greater transparency in the future, says Ms. Granick.

It is rare for any documents from FISC to be made public 鈥� and surveillance discussions are usually kept between the government attorneys, trying to get permission to gather information on someone, and the court. The PRISM surveillance聽program is unique in that it involves a third-party聽information聽provider: the Internet companies. This means that the companies' lawyers are also privy to what is going on inside FISC.聽

These unique聽circumstances聽led Google to publish a motion it filed with FISC requesting permission to release the number of user data requests is received under FISA.聽

After details of the PRISM program were revealed, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft released aggregate聽statistics聽about the number of data information requests they received pertaining to national security, though they were unable to say how many of these requests were made under FISA.聽

In 2012, the US Department of Justice submitted 1,789 electronic search applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Only one application was withdrawn and no requests were denied, according to the most recent FISA report. In addition, the FBI sent 15,229 National Security Letter requests for information concerning 6,223 different US citizens, according to a聽report by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.