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David Allen Legal Tuesday: Wall Piercing Radar Raises Fourth Amendment Protection Issues - Video
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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 in Jewel 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:
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.
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Wikipedia Just Joined the List of Pissed-Off Organizations Suing the NSA
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution articulates the right of Americans sources of private informational documents to be secure "against unreasonable searches and seizures." We need this principle to address threats to cloud computing.
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SALT LAKE CITY As a medium of expression that blossomed in popular consciousness in the late 1990s, the Internet is beginning to reach its adolescent years.
We've evolved from static Web pages to social networking to "cloud computing," which means that personal documents aren't stored on our computers and smartphones but on servers throughout the world.
And yet citizens' security in their digital possessions has never been more threatened. Fortunately, there are two bills one co-sponsored by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the other co-sponsored by Utah Sen. Mike Lee that go a long way to restoring constitutional protections for Internet information.
It's important at the outset to dispense the shibboleth that the Internet changes everything. What the Internet needs is a strong dose of 18th century legal wisdom, not words about "freedom of expression in the 21st century," to quote the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during last Thursday's vote by the agency on network neutrality.
The Constitution says that we have the right to be secure in our "persons, houses, papers and effects." We have the right to speak free from regulation by the government. There are some who say that the Internet has rewritten the laws of supply and demand, or changed common decency and morality, or altered the possibility of being free from police surveillance. They are mistaken.
The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution articulates the right of Americans sources of private informational documents to be secure "against unreasonable searches and seizures." This doesn't prevent the government or the police from obtaining information upon probable cause or reasonable suspicion; it simply bars the issuance of general warrants.
On Feb. 4, a bipartisan group of senators and representatives introduced the Electronic Communications Privacy Amendments Act of 2015. The bill we are introducing today protects Americans digital privacy in their emails, and all the other files and photographs they store in the cloud," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, who has long been seeking to update this law that first passed in 1986.
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Drew Clark: Threats to cloud computing require a solution from the 18th century