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EFF Sues NSA, Justice Department, FBI
New submitter Jawnn writes "The Washington Post reports that the EFF has filed suit against the NSA in Federal Court in San Francisco, on behalf of multiple groups (court filing). Those groups include, 'Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates.' EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said, '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. Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation. Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years.' Apparently, not everyone out there is believing the 'If you have nothing to hide' excuses being offered up from various government quarters."
Lets see how far we can get. We all need to donate. This is a test of our very democracy. I fear its long gone.
Today, most US media seem to be obsessed with pointing fingers at Snowden. What few people realize is how this total surveillance of NSA and GCHQ tilt the balance of powers. Using graph theory, it is possible to compute (just from knowing who's talking to whom) who the agitators are in any given movement. If the Brits would have had the same technology back in 1770, there would have been no American Revolution. They'd simply have pinpointed and jailed the members of the Committees of Correspondence, leaving the revolution headless. A malevolent government could use this technology to suppress its own people. This is too much power.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Thought they had nothing to hide too...
You may have nothing to hide now but how do you know that after the next election the government wont start targeting the group you are affiliated with. Don't think it can happen... During the last election the IRS targeted conservative non profit organizations...
Maybe next time the government will target liberal organizations... Remember McCarthy?
The fourth amendment's applicability is only certain in the minds of privacy advocates. Legally, the fourth amendment is generally held to mean that the government can't disrupt your life with its searches or target someone specifically without a good enough reason to convince a judge. The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect - it infringes privacy, but the impact on any particular person's life isn't unreasonable.
On the other hand, the first amendment is a much easier fight. The leaked information shows fairly well that the snooping (or at least its analysis) was targeted before any crime was committed. That means that the NSA's prejudiced against particular groups, and that's within spitting distance of a first-amendment violation.
After showing that some instances violate the first amendment, it's also an easier fight to argue that any wide-spread persistent snooping program is too easily also a violation. It's a similar tactic to the argument that no separate racially-segregated schools can be equal. Then once the first amendment has been invoked to protect people's metadata as free speech, then the fourth can be brought in to argue that any snooping of metadata must be approved by a warrant beforehand.
That also puts privacy in a much stronger place in the long run. By going after the first amendment protection, it can be argued that any aspect of a person's social life is a protected expression (within the limits usually invoked, like prohibiting murder as a form of protest), so that prohibits the government from seeking something the public knows (like a vehicle's whereabouts).
If successful, it could reconcile the public's love of sharing information with the hatred of the government learning that information.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
A more interesting question is when will Mastercard/Visa start blocking EFF? I seem to recall that they did that once against Wikileaks after a few passionate speeches by senators.
Probably never. While WikiLeaks was quite happy to ignore US law in its "protests", the EFF has danced happily within the realm of legality for its muckraking. Sure, they annoy politicians, but they do so while staying within the law. They're a champion of freedom that everybody can publicly support... and if one politician ever attacks them, his opponent will enjoy the boost in public support.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Legally, the fourth amendment is generally held to mean that the government can't disrupt your life with its searches or target someone specifically without a good enough reason to convince a judge. The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect - it infringes privacy, but the impact on any particular person's life isn't unreasonable.
The reason they take that stance is simply so they can violate people's rights with impunity as long as the violations are not deemed to be 'unreasonable.' Not new, but still pathetic nonetheless. The fourth amendment says no such thing, and no intelligent person would say that collecting data on nearly all Americans in an effort to stop the terrorist bogeyman is even close to reasonable; they would say it's a disgusting practice created by a freedom-hating government. The impact is unreasonable.
We need not only people doing this, but we need to draw national and international attention to this. If they start pulling this "national security" excuse the way they have been for years and years (decades has it been? yeah... since Bush's first term and before!) the world will be watching. Stock in US companies will decline until the government begins to answer for its crimes. Money is the only way to see any sort of resolution to the problem. And no doubt the first resolutions will be "yes, of course we will stop doing this... the things you know about... but we won't stop doing the things you didn't know about and we will quietly change the things you knew about so they are now different enough that they are no longer the same thing." They won't "stop" and they won't reform. They'll wriggle and dodge. Then they will get exposed again. It won't be over the first time.
The cries of the people will not bring results. It will be the cries of business and speculators/investors/bankers which will be heard. I don't like the way the system currently works, but if it can be somehow used to make some change, it's good. It's not ideal and we should have something better. But things have to change and the sooner, the better. But more than that, we need some constitutional amendments and/or laws which add specific consequences to government players who violate the constitution. That stuff just can't keep going on.
The NSA's sniffing is legally comparable to a police dragnet checking door-to-door for a suspect
Nope. It's billions of counts of illegal wiretapping against people who are not suspects. That's why it's a crime.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Of course you can't withstand an unlimited number of angry toddlers. Eventually after the first few 10's of thousand waves you'll get tired. After 7 days of waking toddler slaughter you'll have a momentary lapse where you slip and fall in some sort of viscera allowing them to topple you and overwhelm you with 3-400 toddlers simultaneously. Even after the initial shock of so many toddler bites, you'll regain your footing but now have to deal with the onslaught of fatigue plus the new strains of bacteria that you've suddenly come into contact with through their extremely dirty mouths.
This of course assumes the exercise allows for some sort of disposal mechanism for toddler bodies. One assumes that you can't simply stack the corpses into a wall surrounding a secure area and take a nap there, and/or that you're not allowed to eat them for energy.
So no, you can't beat an unlimited amount of toddlers, and yes, I'll take that bet.
I'd very much like that to be the law, but it isn't. What the NSA did is probably illegal, certainly ought to be, but it isn't wiretapping. Wiretapping, as legally defined, requires that someone listen to a conversation. That's well-established enough that the NSA went out of their way to "only" capture metadata about the conversation.
What the EFF (and others) are arguing -- I think correctly -- is that even though it's not wiretapping, it's still a violation of our rights. Given the recent history of court rulings on 4th Amendment grounds, they probably feel they have a better shot at making this 1st Amendment argument than hoping for the court to agree that capturing phone call and internet message "envelopes" constitutes a search.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower