Suits pile up against NSA after Snowden’s revelations

Following the Edward Snowden revelations of a massive global internet and phone surveillance programme by US agencies, a group of 19 very diverse organisations have banded together to file a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA), claiming that its secretive internet and telephone surveillance programme violates the Constitution.

Fronted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), these organisations include Unitarian church groups, a gun ownership lobby, marijuana legalisation advocates, an Islamic advocacy group, and a spectrum of other organisations.

The suit, filed in a Northern California federal court, targets the NSA's 'Associational Tracking Program', which collects phone information from all major American telecommunication companies, including time and duration of calls.

This is one of several lawsuits filed against the NSA after Edward Snowden, a former CIA contractor, leaked to the media details of the secret American programme on tapping into the phone details of American nationals and intrusion into private emails of foreign nationals.

In the lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the plaintiffs have accused the US government of violating their right of association by illegally collecting their call records.

''The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA's mass, untargeted collection of Americans' phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,'' said EFF legal director Cindy Cohn.

She said that illegally obtaining such information - especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time - violates the Constitution.

According to an EFF press release, the thrust area of the suit is the bulk telephone records collection program that was confirmed by publication of an order by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

The order demands wholesale collection of every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other ''identifying information'' for every phone and call for all customers of Verizon for a period of three months.

The group of plaintiffs subscribe to Verizon and other phone carriers, the lawsuit said.

Their representative, the EFF, is a data privacy advocate which has already been litigating for years against warrantless wiretapping under former President George W Bush.

In fact, at least five cases have been filed in federal courts since the Snowden revelations last month.  The lawsuits primarily target the tracking program that scoops up the telephone records of millions of Americans from US telecom companies.

The Washington Post points out says that such cases face formidable obstacles. The government tends to fiercely resist them on national security grounds, and the surveillance is so secret that it's hard to prove who was targeted. Nearly all of the roughly 70 suits filed after the George W Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping was disclosed in 2005 have been dismissed.

But the legal landscape may be shifting, lawyers say, because the revelations by Snowden forced the government to acknowledge the programs and discuss them. That, they say, could help plaintiffs overcome government arguments that they lack the legal standing to sue or that cases should be thrown out because the programs are state secrets.

According to the EFF's Cohn, ''People who hold controversial views - whether it's about gun ownership policies, drug legalisation, or immigration - often must express views as a group in order to act and advocate effectively.

''But fear of individual exposure when participating in political debates over high-stakes issues can dissuade people from taking part. That's why the Supreme Court ruled in 1958 that membership lists of groups have strong First Amendment protection.

''Telephone records, especially complete records collected over many years, are even more invasive than membership lists, since they show casual or repeated inquiries as well as full membership,'' she said.