WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has signaled that it won’t try to block a lawsuit arising from the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques, leaving the door open for a court challenge over tactics that have since been discontinued and widely discredited.

Lawyers call the government’s stance unprecedented, but also a recognition that a once-secret program is now largely out in the open. They say it’s the first time the Justice Department has not sought, as its first step, to dismiss a lawsuit over the interrogation program by arguing that its mere existence is too secret to discuss in court. Judges have previously accepted that assertion, turning aside cases about a program that was designed to extract intelligence from suspected militants captured overseas.

The lawsuit at issue, pending in federal court in Washington state, accuses the two Air Force psychologists who designed the interrogation program of endorsing and teaching torture tactics under the guise of science. Although the Justice Department isn’t part of the case, it submitted a filing ahead of a Friday hearing saying that it wanted to protect against the disclosure of certain classified information – such as identities of interrogators and locations of detention sites –as the suit moves forward. But the lawyers who brought the case were heartened that the government did not immediately invoke the state secrets privilege, which protects the government’s right to shield sensitive information in lawsuits. Instead, the Justice Department suggested that it was willing to let the suit proceed through the information-sharing stage known as discovery.

“The government is actually going to show up at the hearing instead of trying to shut it down,” said Dror Ladin, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the case. “It’s going to be suggesting procedures that might allow the case to go forward.”

That’s a departure for the Justice Department, which has successfully fended off multiple lawsuits by invoking the state secrets privilege.

A notable example was the case of Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who unsuccessfully sued after he said he had been beaten and sodomized in a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan known as the “Salt Pit.” Courts sided with the government in holding that the danger that state secrets could be revealed far outweighed the injuries he suffered.

The veil of secrecy surrounding CIA interrogations was pierced by the 2014 release of the executive summary of a scathing Senate report on the program.

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