The legality of the censorship system is “unsettled” in part because “the practice of prior restraint by the government has grown enormously” since that case was decided, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Bush administration Justice Department official who has co-written several articles critical of the process.

At the C.I.A. alone, the agency went from reviewing about 1,000 pages a year in the early 1970s to about 150,000 in 2014, the lawsuit said, citing documents the A.C.L.U. and Knight Institute obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

“This is a huge problem,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “The government’s system of prior restraint is wildly overbroad, undisciplined and subject to inconsistent standards. It results in lots of important information that doesn’t threaten national security not being made public. It chills people from writing things that would help people understand how the government works.”

In 2017, as part of the annual intelligence authorization law, Congress instructed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to come up with a new system for the intelligence community that would “yield timely, reasoned, and impartial decisions that are subject to appeal.” Lawmakers set a deadline of 180 days.

But that deadline came and went, and the office still has not completed a new policy, although officials are working on it, an office spokeswoman said on Monday.

The plaintiffs asked a judge to rule that agencies cannot enforce any obligation to submit their future writings to review boards. They took no position on whether the solution is to fix the system or make it voluntary — which would leave former intelligence and military officials and contractors free to publish without prior review if they assume the risk of being prosecuted if they divulge any dangerous secrets.

The plaintiffs include Timothy H. Edgar and Richard H. Immerman, former employees of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Melvin A. Goodman, a former C.I.A. employee; Anuradha Bhagwati, a former Marine; and Mark Fallon, a former counterterrorism agent at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.