In a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union charged that the National Security Agency’s now-infamous secret collection of billions of phone records violates the U.S. Constitution.The lawsuit against five members of the Obama Administration, including the head of the NSA and FBI, Attorney General and Secretary of Defense takes issue with the so-called metadata that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court compelled Verizon Wireless to hand over to the National Security Agency under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
The former low-level government contractor Edward Snowden leaked the details and information on the government phone hacking and tapping operation PRISM recently.
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The ACLU sued Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, along with the top political appointees at the FBI, the NSA, the Pentagon and the Department of Justice.
The lawsuit is unusual because instead of standing in for a group of Americans who claim the government violated their constitutional rights, the ACLU itself and its New York affiliate are the plaintiffs.
The two organizations allege in their lawsuit that they are current or former Verizon customers, and note that as frequent legal counsel to plaintiffs in other suits, their phone calls are often ‘privileged’ communications between lawyers and clients.
The ACLU contends that the NSA’s mass-phone-tracking program violates its rights under the First and Fourth Amendments.
The First guarantees ‘freedom of speech.’ The Fourth protects ‘[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
‘[A]nd no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.’
The ACLU filed suit in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, asking for a declaration that the NSA’s data collection scheme is unconstitutional. The organization also seeks an order forcing the agency to ‘purge from their possession’ all of the records it collected on the ACLU.
Records reflecting the phone activity of other Americans are not addressed, but the ACLU also seeks a permanent injunction ordering the federal government not to collect any more data under authority of a judge’s order demanding compliance from from Verizon Business Network Services.
The thorny 2001 PATRIOT Act figures prominently in the civil liberties groups’ arguments.
Forcibly collecting so-called telephone ‘metadata’ from Verizon Wireless, the groups said, ‘is akin to snatching every American’s address book – with annotations detailing whom we spoke to, when we talked, for how long, and from where.’
‘It gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations.
In a June 7 op-ed for Reuters, ACLU lawyers Jay Stanley and Ben Wizner explained that metadata snooping could give government agencies details about a citizen’s ‘repeated calls to Alcoholics Anonymous, hotlines for gay teens, abortion clinics or a gambling bookie.’
‘If a politician were revealed to have repeatedly called a phone sex hotline after 2:00 a.m.,’ they continued, ‘no one would need to know what was said on the call before drawing conclusions.’
But Clapper, the director of national intelligence, insists that telephone metadata doesn’t include the content of calls or the identity of the caller.
He added during the weekend that before the NSA can sift through Verizon’s records, now held by the government, it must have a ‘reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.’
Yet when the NSA obtained records from the massive mobile phone company, it relied on an order from a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act court that covered call records ‘created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United
States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.’
In a 1979 case, the Supreme Court ruled that a smaller collection of phone-call metadata was not protected by the Fourth Amendment. When phone customers choose to reveal such information to phone companies by using their services, the high court decided, they forfeit their privacy rights.
But those phone records were from land lines, and the sheer number of records in the current controversy is far greater.
“The crux of the government’s justification for the program is the chilling logic that it can collect everyone’s data now and ask questions later,” said ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo in a statement Monday.
‘The Constitution does not permit the suspicion-less surveillance of every person in the country.’
ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer went further, saying that the NSA’s collection of phone metadata ‘is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens.’
‘It is the equivalent,’ he said, ‘of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation.’
http://truthquake.com/2013/06/12/acl...cking-scandal/
