ACLU FIles Lawsuit over NSA Phone Surveillance

[whell]

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-se...riot-act-phone

"In the wake of the past week's revelations about the NSA's unprecedented mass surveillance of phone calls, today the ACLU filed a lawsuit charging that the program violates Americans' constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy."

"Collecting those details—"metadata" that reveals who people talk to, for how long, how often, and possibly from where—allows the government to paint an alarmingly detailed picture of Americans' private lives. The FISC order cited Section 215 as its legal basis, yet the breadth of the authority it granted to the government is simply incompatible with the text of the statute."

"As an organization that advocates for and litigates to defend the civil liberties of society's most vulnerable, the staff at the ACLU naturally use the phone—a lot—to talk about sensitive and confidential topics with clients, legislators, whistleblowers, and ACLU members. And since the ACLU is a VBNS customer, we were immediately confronted with the harmful impact that such broad surveillance would have on our legal and advocacy work. So we're acting quickly to get into court to challenge the government's abuse of Section 215."

"The nature of the ACLU's work—in areas like access to reproductive services, racial discrimination, the rights of immigrants, national security, and more—means that many of the people who call the ACLU wish to keep their contact with the organization confidential. Yet if the government is collecting a vast trove of ACLU phone records—and it has reportedly been doing so for as long as seven years—many people may reasonably think twice before communicating with us."

[Dondilion]

The ACLU is just going through the formalties.

Anyone with basic sense knows that this as been going on for years and there is no practical way this can be prevented. Intelligence has to be gathered one way or another, and intelligence systems transcend governments.

[Rajoo]

Rand Paul was talking about filing a class action lawsuit in the Supreme Court against Obama Administration last week.
Isn't the House & Senate that pass the laws and the administration executes them?

[finnbow]

Good for the ACLU. Someone needs to step forward and challenge the ever-increasing surveillance state and they have standing to do so (they're a Verizon customer). There's a reasonable chance they'll lose the case, but at least we'll know where these NSA programs stand from a legal POV.

[Oerets]

Just shown a poll on CNN this morning where 65% are OK with the monitoring as long as it keeps us safe!

Little by little our personal behaviors and every move have been tracked. Marketers and venders do it, we accept it because told it lowers costs! The internet providers say they only want to tailor our experience and ease of operation. Your TV provider does it too for another good reason I'm sure.

We accept that it seems gladly, without a thought of how it is really used. Does anyone think for a minute the Government built spy center in Utah is going away?





Barney

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by Oerets

Just shown a poll on CNN this morning where 65% are OK with the monitoring as long as it keeps us safe!

With all the fear that our political class tries to instill in us, there's no surprise with the results of this poll.

An idea put forward yesterday makes sense to me. The government should allow them to share with their customers within their terms of service the nature of the information that they routinely share with government. Clapper's lies to Ron Wyden during testimony in March shows pretty clearly that Congressional oversight doesn't work. How can Congress perform oversight without information?

[Oerets]

The thing is even if we knew the phone companies were complying in the terms. What real choice do we have, have a phone, internet or not! No opt out button ......

I'm afraid the current three branches, no four of government are all for it and will allow it to continue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_..._of_government

Barney

[finnbow]

Originally Posted by Oerets

The thing is even if we knew the phone companies were complying in the terms. What real choice do we have, have a phone, internet or not! No opt out button ......

Barney

If the full and exact nature of NSA domestic data collection were known, at least it could be debated in public whether or not it goes too far. Also, if one Internet or phone company simply refused to comply with the government's requests and thereby greatly increased market share due to public demand, things would change.

[Oerets]

But is it not the law for them to comply?




Barney

[finnbow]

The law says that they must provide information in accordance with FISA court requests. It does not compel them to cooperate by opening up a back door to all data. They trouble seems to be that the FISA courts are extremely compliant and agree with data requests 99.97% of the time. I'm not sure if that constitutes judicial oversight (more like a rubber stamp, it seems).

...(T)he FISC has declined just 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance requests made by the government in 33 years, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. That's a rate of .03 percent, which raises questions about just how much judicial oversight is actually being provided.

"The FISA system is broken," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told the Journal. "At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of US citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review."

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013...reject-request