[liberationtech] EFF's new lawsuit against the NSA

[coderman]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 4:45 PM, James S. Tyre <jstyre at eff.org> wrote:
> For those interested, we filed a new lawsuit against the NSA today.  We have another still
> in litigation, but this one focuses on a specific aspect of the new revelations.
>
> Intro, FAQ and a link to the Complaint at
> https://www.eff.org/cases/first-unitarian-church-los-angeles-v-nsa


"Our goal is to highlight one of the most important ways that the
government collection of telephone records is unconstitutional: it
violates the First Amendment right of association. When the government
gets access to the phone records of political and activist
organizations and their members, it knows who is talking to whom,
when, and for how long. This so-called “metadata,” especially when
collected in bulk and aggregated, tracks the associations of these
organizations.
...
The new case will also argue the basic First and Fourth Amendment
arguments that we’re also raising on behalf of individual AT&T
customers in Jewel v. NSA. It will also raise a claim under section
215 of the PATRIOT Act since we believe the government is
misinterpreting the statute—it does not allow bulk collection and
searching without individual judicial approval. We also raise a Fifth
Amendment claim for informational privacy and for vagueness, since the
secret court rulings by the court overseeing the spying, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, give neither the public nor law
enforcement clear rules and limits on their ability to surveil
Americans."


EFF++