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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."
we need even more people doing this. .
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
Again. Go to their site - eff.org - and donate.
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?
They are all of equal importance.
However to answer your question, you rank their importance by which one appears to be most violated and easy to attack the culprit with.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
I imagine the court will say that the government is not stopping anyone from exercising their rights to free speech simply because they are recording their conversations and building graphs of associations. It would seem more effective to claim these rights under the Fourth Amendment since this deals more with privacy than the First Amendment. In any event, this will likely end the way it did the last time the EFF tried to sue the federal government - the court will seek documents from the security agencies, the security agencies will claim that they can not reveal that information for reasons of "national security", and the court will say that the EFF doesn't have a case since they don't have any evidence due to the fact that the defendant refuses to provide the documents the court requested. This is how fascism begins in a democracy.
here's the basic premise in the founding of the enlightenment model US (boiled down):
rights were given to you by your creator, not by your government.
your government didn't give them to so, they can't take them away.
if any right is allowed to be redefined as a privilege, or if it is re-cast as something "given" to you by a government then all rights can be redefined or recast. and if they are redefined, they can be taken away arbitrarilly. so they are all equally important. if you want to keep any of your rights then you must be pro-gun, skateboarding isn't a crime, don't spy on us, free speach even if i don't like it, punk rock anarchist. anything less is just a slow slide into slavery.
god knows we have too many people who only care about the rights they feel like using. conservative and liberal.
THL phish sticks
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.
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."
And then there's this argument: Rights aren't real if they can be taken away from you arbitrarily for no crime whatsoever.
George Carlin rightfully references Japanese-American internment as proof that rights in America are a fiction.
I am officially gone from
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
That "legal" interpretation is the one that exists only in the minds of certain government lawyers. The 4th amendment is unequivocal. No warrants shall issue without specifically describing the places to be searched or the things to be seized. Generalized surveillance can never comply with this restriction.
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.
That's also blatantly unconstitutional. If you don't have probable cause to believe the person you want is in my house, you don't get to search my house.
The "legal" arguments you are putting forth here are incompatible with the actual text of the Constitution. This needs to stop.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The fourth amendment's applicability is only certain in the minds of privacy advocates.
The fourth amendment's applicability hinges on the word "unreasonable" in the first sentence. The question is whether the NSA's activities constitute a reasonable search. This can be debated but I have heard no argument yet that convinces me that the NSA has not crossed the line into conducting an unreasonable search. And since they have managed to keep everything a secret I can't even prove I have standing in a court of law to sue for a violation of my rights.
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.
When the police are looking for a suspect they are looking for a specific person and they do not continue to infringe upon your person or property indefinitely and in secret. The NSA's program would be like the police showing up daily and rooting through your mailbox and phone bills looking for information that might incriminate you without any warrant or even probable cause.
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.
So it would be legal to search our homes with tiny insect drones as long as they search all our homes?
It doesn't disrupt our lives, and its not targeting someone specifically.
The argument really shouldn't be "is that legal?", it should be "that's not what we as a society want, so make it illegal and amend the constitution to do it if we have to."
This is -why- the constitution is a "living document"; we're supposed to be able to fix it when a hole like this shows up. We shouldn't have to make difficult reaching arguments about how a surveillance state is a 1st or 4th amendment violation.
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
But the 9th tackles it in a very simple way: Show me where in the Constitution it is enumerated that the government is allowed to do this. You can't? Then the government is not allowed to engage in this activity.
It goes from attempting to prove that the government is violating something to the government proving that it is allowed to do something. A whole different ball of wax. And a whole lot easier for the people.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You know what else used to be a nutball theory? That the NSA had vast spying capabilities being used to monitor large swaths of the Internet all of the time.
There's plenty of historical examples that show lists of citizens meeting some criteria turning into a list of people to inflict government action upon. We don't even have leave the US to find one. It was the US Census database that was used to round up Japanese citizens for internment to fulfill Executive Order 9066. If I have an unusual political belief--let's use the example from the TFA of advocating marijuana--I have every reason to believe that when the government collects data about my communication, it might one day use that to prosecute me for drug related offenses, and launch investigations of those I deal with too. That sort of chilling effect on political speech is why monitoring makes free political speech impossible. Any student of history knows the bad situations that leads to.