Trying to learn more about reports of military spying at UC Santa Cruz last year, campus group Students Against War scored a victory this week when a federal judge ordered the Department of Defense to expedite a public-records request made by the group.

In January, Students Against War asked the Pentagon to disclose whether it spied on San Francisco Bay Area student organizations, and release any information gathered on the organizations.

U.S. 9th District Court Judge William Alsup ruled Thursday that such information is “of significant importance to public policy and public protest,” impelling the Department of Defense to act more quickly on the student request.

Students said they were pleased with the decision.

“We’re happy because it shows that being spied on has to be taken seriously,” said Students Against War member Kot Hordynski, who sat in on Thursday’s hourlong hearing in San Francisco. Hordynski said lawyers told him the Pentagon records, public under the Freedom of Information Act, could be handed over within three months.

A lawsuit filed in March by the Northern California chapter of the ACLU, on behalf of Students Against War and a UC Berkeley anti-war group, asked the Department of Defense to promptly disclose information from an obscure Pentagon agency that included reports on protests and other peaceful civilian demonstrations in a database meant to detect terrorist activities.

Among the incidents researched and described as a threat to U.S. security was an April 2005 protest against military recruiters at a UCSC job fair. The noisy sit-in temporarily shut down the job fair and resulted in the departure of the recruiters whose presence triggered the protest.

The database, which a Pentagon fact sheet says is meant to capture information “indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity,” came to light in December when NBC News obtained details on its contents.

To support the student request for expediting the information, ACLU attorneys submitted several news stories to the Department of Defense, including an article from the Sentinel, to show the media has “a compelling need for information” to inform the public about alleged spy programs.

The Department of Defense rejected a student request for expedited records on Feb. 13, just two days after it deleted mention of the Students Against War protest from its database at the request of Chancellor Denice Denton. The department’s explanation stated that additional information was not worthy of “breaking news” and therefore there is no legal obligation to rush the process.

“The public has a right to know the extent to which the Defense Department is spying on political protest,” said attorney Amitai Schwartz, who argued the case for ACLU. “The court moved us one step closer to finding out the facts about what really happened.”

A Department of Defense representative would not comment on the decision Friday.