"Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of ‘collaboration’ with government."

You wouldn't think federal judges, especially those working on secret things, would go public with their emotions, especially their emotions about how they themselves are portrayed, but that's the headline at WaPo. From the article:

“In my view, that draft report contains major omissions, and some inaccuracies, regarding the actions I took as Presiding Judge of the FISC and my interactions with Executive Branch officials,” [U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,] said in a statement to The Post...

Draft report = this 2009 document by the NSA inspector general, which was leaked recently by Edward Snowden.  (Note that the judge isn't really talking about her emotional "upset." News articles about judges tend to present them as a bundle of emotions, I guess because newspaper editors imagine us readers to click where our emotions lead us.)

Kollar-Kotelly disputed the NSA report’s suggestion of a fairly high level of coordination between the court and the NSA and Justice in 2004 to re-create certain authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that created the court in response to abuses of domestic surveillance in the 1960s and 1970s.

“That is incorrect,” she said. “I participated in a process of adjudication, not ‘coordination’ with the executive branch. The discussions I had with executive branch officials were in most respects typical of how I and other district court judges entertain applications for criminal wiretaps under Title III, where issues are discussed ex parte.”

Ex parte = no one participating as an opposing, adversarial party.