Nineteen Groups Seek to End NSA Collection of Phone Metadata
Nineteen groups coordinated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco Tuesday seeking to stop the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata on phone calls made by Americans. The case, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA (http://bit.ly/1aqheuE), seeks to halt the collection of data and force the government to return the records now in its possession. “The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA’s mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn.
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"The Associational Tracking Program is vast,” the court pleading said. “It collects telephone communications information for all telephone calls transiting the networks of all major American telecommunications companies, including Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, ostensibly under the authority of section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.” The lawsuit charges tracking has been under way since October 2001, the month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and includes information on calls wholly within the U.S.
Cohn said on a call with reporters the case is a companion to Jewel v. National Security Agency, in which EFF filed suit against the NSA’s “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance” under former President George W. Bush. The case is still being litigated in the same court. A key difference from past challenges is that “the government has now admitted to the telephone records program,” Cohn said, saying the second exhibit attached to the pleading is a news release by the Director of National Intelligence acknowledging the program. “Cases have been stymied because of the government’s claims of state secrecy and national security secrecy and that slows everything down. The government is not going to be able to raise those same secrecy arguments now. ... They've admitted the core of what they're doing.”
"We are very well aware of how organizations can be affected by government surveillance,” said Rev. Rick Hoyt of the Los Angeles Unitarian Church, also on the call with reporters Tuesday, who explained that the church has long involved itself in social issues. “In the 1950s, we resisted the McCarthy hysteria and supported blacklisted Hollywood writers and actors, and we fought California’s ‘loyalty oaths’ all the way to the Supreme Court. And in the 1980s, we gave sanctuary to refugees from civil wars in Central America.”
Plaintiffs also include Free Press, the Media Alliance, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Calguns Foundation, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, People for the American Way and TechFreedom. “There’s no doubt that when the government tracks, logs and analyzes Americans’ phone records there’s a chilling effect on activist organizations, including Free Press and its more than 600,000 members,” said Free Press President Craig Aaron. “The freedom to communicate is absolutely vital to an organization that relies on daily interactions with its activists to challenge government and corporate wrongdoing and advocate for Internet and press freedom. The diverse group of plaintiffs in this case is further evidence of the far-reaching impact of the government’s spying program. This is not about right versus left; it’s about right versus wrong.”