In a summary judgment, a federal judge ruled (PDF) on Monday that the United States government can continue to classify and redact 23 embassy cables that have already been released in their entirety by WikiLeaks.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had previously filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that would compel the government to reveal embassy cables on topics as diverse as torture, detention, detainee rendition, Guantanamo, and drones. The State Department still maintains that the redacted sections of those cables are classified. When the State Department responded last year with some cables that had redacted sections and some cables that were withheld outright, the ACLU sued in federal court.

Not only have these 23 cables in question been available on WikiLeaks for quite some time, the ACLU had previously created an online tool allowing anyone to compare the redacted versions of five excerpts with the full versions as published on WikiLeaks.

The Monday decision finds that because the State Department (and therefore, the executive branch) classifies these sections as secret, and that those sections in question have not been “officially acknowledged,” (as defined in a 1990 appeals court decision), they remain secret.

“No matter how extensive, the WikiLeaks disclosure is no substitute for an official acknowledgement and the ACLU has not shown that the Executive has officially acknowledged that the specific information at issue was a part of the WikiLeaks disclosure,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “Although the ACLU points to various public statements made by Executive officials regarding the WikiLeaks disclosure, it has failed to tether those generalized and sweeping comments to the specific information at issue in this case—the twenty-three embassy cables identified in its request.”

The ACLU argued that because the government responded to its FOIA last year, this constitutes public acknowledgement. By law, the government must release information in court that has already been officially acknowledged in public.

But the court disagreed. Judge Kollar-Kotelly found that because the ACLU specifically referred to the 23 cables by their name and date, and did not refer to the WikiLeaks disclosure, “the State Department made no admission by producing responsive records”—in other words, the disclosure of some information does not constitute an official acknowledgment of the withheld information that the State Department wishes to keep secret.

And why should the court believe the executive’s requests to keep it secret? The legal justification for allowing such secrecy essentially boils down to the court’s total willingness to comply with executive orders concerning secrecy.

“In recognition that courts are generally ill-equipped to second-guess the Executive’s opinion in the national security context, ‘the government’s burden [here] is a light one,’” she wrote, citing a previous case involving the ACLU.