You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Wikipedia, HRW Join Other Groups in Challenge to NSA Surveillance

HeadlineMar 11, 2015

A coalition of online, media, legal and political advocacy groups has filed suit over the U.S. government’s mass surveillance. Organizations including Wikipedia and Human Rights Watch are challenging the National Security Agency’s Upstream program, which taps into the fiber-optic cables moving Internet traffic around the world. Attorney Patrick Toomey of the American Civil Liberties Union said the spying violates constitutional protections.

Patrick Toomey: “The NSA’s indiscriminate copying and searching through Americans’ international communications imposes a chilling effect on basic freedoms: the freedom of speech, the freedom of expression, the freedom of inquiry. And it also is an invasion of Americans’ right to privacy in those communications. We have long operated in this country on a basic rule that the government does not search your home, your papers, and today your emails, when you’ve done nothing wrong. And the flip side of that rule is that the government must go to a court with individualized suspicion when it wants access to those materials.”

The Supreme Court previously rejected an American Civil Liberties Union challenge to warrantless spying on the grounds the plaintiffs could not prove they were targeted.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top