By Brett Max Kaufman, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 3:30pm
In the wake of the past week's revelations about the NSA's unprecedented mass surveillance of phone calls, today the ACLU filed a lawsuit charging that the program violates Americans' constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy.
This lawsuit comes a day after we submitted a motion to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) seeking the release of secret court opinions on the Patriot Act's Section 215, which has been interpreted to authorize this warrantless and suspicionless collection of phone records.
By Alex Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 5:58pm
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order released yesterday by The Guardian reveals that the U.S. government is regularly tracking the phone calls of potentially millions of Americans.
ACLU attorneys have been monitoring the U.S. government’s use of the Patriot Act for years, and this document confirms our biggest fears. Have a look at the notes we’ve made on the court order to see how we understand what it says about the powers the government claims. (Just click on the document below and hover on the red dots to see our comments. This embed will serve content from thinglink.com.)
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:16pm
The following remarks were given by Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office, at Sen. Rand Paul's press conference yesterday announcing his intention to sue the government to stop NSA surveillance of Americans' communications.
Last week, the Guardian reported something extraordinary. The National Security Agency is routinely collecting all of your phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. They know who calls whom, when, for how long and from where. There's no more debate about whether the government is spying on Americans; the only question is how we can stop it.
By Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:14pm
When Google published its first government transparency report in 2010, critics of the company showered praise upon the company, and rightly so. At a time when other internet companies were fearful of "stick[ing] their head up" by publishing surveillance statistics, Google boldly led the way. In recent years, Twitter, Microsoft, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.Net, SpiderOak and Silent Circle all followed, and received well deserved praise for doing so from public interest advocates.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 9:32am
I’d like to make one major point about the NSA surveillance scandal that many people have made indirectly, or implicitly, or seem to have assumed, but have not stated baldly and explicitly. That point is how this incident has laid bare the arrogance of our national security officials.
Because there are really two separate issues behind last week’s revelations. The first is, how much surveillance of the American people should the government conduct? The second is, who should decide how much surveillance of the American people the government should conduct?
And on that second question, the government has arrogated to itself the power to make that decision, unilaterally, in secret, on behalf of the American people.
In his only comments on this scandal, President Obama said,
By Alex Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 12:59pm
The government has just officially confirmed what we've long suspected: there are secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act's Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over "any tangible things." Just exactly what the government thinks that phrase means remains to be seen, but there are indications that their take on it is very broad.
