Wikipedia’s parent organization just joined the fight against dragnet government surveillance.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit today against the National Security Administration for its spying tactics. The lawsuit challenges the NSA’s surveillance program as a violation of Fourth Amendment privacy rights, an infringement on First Amendment rights, and an overstepping of the authority given to the NSA under Congress’ FISA Amendments Act.
“The reason we’re filing this lawsuit is that we feel we’ve been harmed directly by the NSA,” Wikimedia General Counsel Geoff Brigham told me, noting that the NSA explicitly targeted Wikipedia in a top secret document revealed by Edward Snowden. Plaintiffs stretch across political boundaries and include both conservative and liberal organizations.
This is far from the only recent lawsuit against the NSA. In February, a judge announced that he can’t rule inJewel vs. NSA, a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the NSA’s spying tactics. The EFF has also filed a suit regarding government spying in July 2013 (First Unitarian vs. NSA) and helped the ACLU on the legal team for Smith vs. Obama, which also argued that bulk government data collection violates a citizen’s Fourth Amendment rights.
So far, none of these cases have worked out. Smith v. Obama was dismissed. And the ACLU cited Clapper vs. Amnesty as a precedent to this case. While that lawsuit wound up dismissed by the Supreme Court after it determined that plaintiffs couldn’t prove they were getting spied on, there’s still a lot of optimism this time around.
“I expect the district court will rule in our favor and that the NSA will accept that ruling,” Bingham told me.
First Unitarian is still pending, and also boasts a long and weird list of organizations united together primarily by their reluctance to be okay with sweeping government surveillance. Just to give you a glimpse at the scope of furious groups, here’s a list of all the companies and organizations currently participating in pending suits related to the NSA’s surveillance program:
Wikimedia Foundation
Rutherford Institute
The Nation magazine
Amnesty International USA
PEN American Center
Human Rights Watch
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Global Fund for Women
Washington Office on Latin America
First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
The National Lawyers Guild
Greenpeace, Inc.
Council on American-Islamic Relations
People for the American Way
California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees
Franklin Armory
The Calguns Foundation
Free Software Foundation
Public Knowledge
Free Press
Acorn Active Media Foundation
Patient Privacy Rights
The Shalom Center
Charity and Security Network
TechFreedom
Students for Sensible Drug Policy Foundation
NORML, California Chapter
Media Alliance
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
I have a feeling this list will just keep growing if the pending cases aren’t heard soon. So far, Obama’s weak stabs at NSA reform haven’t exactly soothed reasonable concerns that government surveillance is an uncontrolled privacy piss-storm.
