Daily Archives: March 13, 2015

Former NSA Jeff Wright (TVOI News)
Jeff is a former Cryptologic Tech-analyst, Systems Engineer for NSG/NSA, Engineering Manager at Air Force Space Command, Senior and Chief Consulting Engineer for Bell Labs, Holmdel, NJ. He...

By: The Voice Of Idaho .. TVOI News

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Former NSA Jeff Wright (TVOI News) - Video

By John P. Mello Jr. 03/13/15 11:02 AM PT

The American Civil Liberties Union earlier this week filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the National Security Agency from indiscriminately snooping on United States Internet traffic.

Using a technique called "upstream" surveillance, the NSA does a spinal tap of the Internet's U.S. backbone, which carries the communications of millions of Americans, the ACLU explained in its complaint filed with a federal district court in Maryland.

"In the course of this surveillance, the NSA is seizing Americans' communications en masse while they are in transit," the complaint alleges, "and it is searching the contents of substantially all international text-based communications -- and many domestic communications as well -- for tens of thousands of search terms."

That kind of surveillance violates federal law, the First and Fourth Amendments and Article III of the Constitution, maintained the ACLU, which is representing in the lawsuit the Wikimedia Foundation, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, the Global Fund for Women, The Nation magazine, The Rutherford Institute and the Washington Office on Latin America.

This lawsuit is similar to one filed in the past involving NSA Director James R. Clapper and Amnesty International. That case was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. Backers of the latest lawsuit, however, believe their case has stronger legs than the previous litigation.

"Thanks to the Snowden disclosures and government acknowledgments over the last 18 months, we now know more about government surveillance than we did in Clapper v. Amnesty," explained Ashley Gorski, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project.

"That, for us, makes all the difference," she told the E-Commerce Times, "and we think that will make a difference in court as well."

In the Amnesty case, the Supreme Court ruled that the parties bringing the lawsuit lacked standing -- that is, they couldn't prove they were harmed by the behavior alleged in their complaint. The reason they couldn't prove harm was that they didn't know enough about what the NSA was doing to make the connection between harm and behavior.

"Prior to the Snowden revelations and the government acknowledgments, the public did not know anything at all about upstream surveillance -- least of all that the NSA was copying entire streams of Internet traffic and searching through them for information about its targets," Gorski said.

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Lawsuit Challenges NSA Internet Dragnets

Chris Davies

The NSA may be used to lurking in the shadows and quietly reading our emails, but the ACLU and Wikimedia Foundation aren't willing to let them stay that way, filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the government agency's actions. The suit, filed today in the US District Court for the District of Maryland, takes issue with NSA "upstream" surveillance which, it's argued, needlessly and intrusively gathers huge quantities of text-based messages sent and received by innocent people. That, the ACLU insists, is an infringement of both First and Fourth Amendment rights, among other things.

The core of the controversy is the National Security Agency's use of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FAA) to justify its activities. That Act, the agency argues, gives it the legal permission to tap into the "backbone" of the internet in the name of gathering communications with "non-U.S. persons."

By collaborating with infrastructure operators like AT&T and Verizon, to get a direct tap into the bulk messaging feed, the NSA can run thousands of keyword searches to hunt for anything vaguely suspicious.

However, the ACLU points out, no court approves each search, or each target, and "the limitations that do exist are weak and riddled with exceptions." There are also suspicions that the NSA is keeping and indexing communications far longer than they're meant to.

Along with the ACLU and the Wikimedia Foundation, the lawsuit includes The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Global Fund for Women, The Nation Magazine, The Rutherford Institute, and The Washington Office on Latin America.

"These plaintiffs sensitive communications have been copied, searched, and likely retained by the NSA," the ACLU said in a statement on the lawsuit. "Upstream surveillance hinders the plaintiffs ability to ensure the basic confidentiality of their communications with crucial contacts abroad among them journalists, colleagues, clients, victims of human rights abuses, and the tens of millions of people who read and edit Wikipedia pages."

It's not the first time the ACLU has attempted to tackle how broadly the NSA interprets the FAA. In fact, the group filed a suit back in 2008 shortly after it was made law, only to be rejected by the Supreme Court in 2013 for not having sufficient proof that spying had, in fact, taken place.

Since then, of course, whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed huge quantities of information on the upstream surveillance being undertaken by his former employers.

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NSA sued over surveillance by Wikimedia & more