NATO Warships in Black Sea: Canada, Turkey, Germany, Italy and Romania to take part in drills – Video

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NATO Warships in Black Sea: Canada, Turkey, Germany, Italy and Romania to take part in drills
NATO warships involved in Black Sea exercises have arrived in Romania, as Russia prepares to mark one year since the annexation of Ukraine #39;s Crimea peninsula. Check out our website: http://uatod...

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NATO Warships in Black Sea: Canada, Turkey, Germany, Italy and Romania to take part in drills - Video

An 'Upstream' Battle As Wikimedia Challenges NSA Surveillance

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The lawsuit by Wikimedia and other plaintiffs challenges the National Security Agency's use of upstream surveillance, which collects the content of communications, instead of just the metadata. Patrick Semansky/AP hide caption

The lawsuit by Wikimedia and other plaintiffs challenges the National Security Agency's use of upstream surveillance, which collects the content of communications, instead of just the metadata.

Earlier this week, Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency, saying that the NSA's use of "upstream" mass surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments.

Under "upstream" surveillance, an American sending an email or making a video call to someone in another country could have the content of their correspondence collected by the NSA. That might even be true if the message is sent to someone in the U.S., but the data was passed through a foreign server.

Wikimedia was joined by several other plaintiffs in the suit, and will be helped by the American Civil Liberties Union, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times.

Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the American University Washington College of Law and an expert on national security law, explained the lawsuit and its implications to NPR's Arun Rath.

On what the upstream surveillance program does

Under upstream, what the NSA is apparently doing is they're tapping the backbone of the Internet. In effect, if we think of the Internet as a highway, they're on the highway and intercepting traffic as it crosses the highway.

In critical distinction to the programs that we've learned about already, the programs that are already being challenged, part of what the NSA is collecting through upstream is content that is to say, the content of phone calls, the content of emails, and not just the metadata that has been at the heart of, for example, the bulk phone records program.

On privacy concerns

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An 'Upstream' Battle As Wikimedia Challenges NSA Surveillance

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News outlets fight to keep Massachusetts court records open

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BOSTON Judges across Massachusetts are sealing court documents with increasing regularity, forcing news organizations and First Amendment groups into costly and time-consuming legal battles to ensure the basic workings of the judicial system remain public.

In the run up to Aaron Hernandez's ongoing murder trial in Fall River, for example, a judge sealed search warrants and hundreds of pages of related documents following the former New England Patriots star's 2013 arrest.

In Falmouth, similar documents were barred from release related to the Feb. 5 shooting of two Coast Guard officers and a local Bourne police officer by Coast Guardsman Adrian Loya.

In both cases, the defense lawyers argued that the release of information could harm their client's constitutional right to a fair trial. Judges eventually unsealed the records after news organizations challenged the rulings, but journalists say the documents should never have been secret in the first place.

"What we're talking about is some of the most basic public information that has been always presumed to be available and transparent," said Paul Pronovost, editor-in-chief of the Cape Cod Times, which prevailed in its challenge in the Loya case.

Advocates and news editors say it's not clear the extent of the problem or its causes.

Matthew Segal, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, suggests the tendency toward secrecy stems, in part, from post-9/11 concerns about national security and how that thinking now pervades all levels of government across the country.

But he also submits that it is driven by factors unique to Massachusetts: The state has one of the weakest public records laws in the nation, and some government agencies have a tendency not to honor even those low standards.

"There isn't exactly a cheerful willingness to do what the law requires," Segal says. "You have to fight for every inch. The culture here does not favor openness."

News editors and First Amendment advocates say the problem is not exclusive to high-profile cases.

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News outlets fight to keep Massachusetts court records open