A privacy rights group, Electronic Privacy Information Center, plans to file an emergency petition with the Supreme Court on Monday asking it to stop the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/us/privacy-group-to-ask-supreme-court-to-stop-nsas-phone-spying-program.html?ref=us The group is taking its case to the Supreme Court because it could not challenge the legality of the N.S.A. program at the secret court that approved it, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, and because lower federal courts did not have the authority to review the secret court’s orders.
The group said the FISA court had “exceeded its statutory jurisdiction when it ordered production of millions of domestic telephone records that cannot plausibly be relevant to an authorized investigation.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the group’s lawsuit would be the first to directly challenge the legal authority of the FISA court to approve the phone records’ collection under the Patriot Act. A lawyer for the group, said the judge “lacked the authority to require production of all domestic call detail records.” He noted that the Patriot Act provision cited by the FISA court required that the business records produced be “relevant” to an authorized national security investigation. “It is simply implausible that all call detail records are relevant,”
Lawsuits in 2006 were against the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the N.S.A. program, but Congress later gave the companies retroactive legal immunity when it overhauled the nation’s national security wiretapping law in 2008. Those lawsuits also suffered in federal courts because it was difficult for the plaintiffs to prove that they had actually been spied upon by the N.S.A., since the domestic spying operations were secret and the courts refused to force the government to release any documents to reveal the targets of the surveillance.
The new lawsuits, however, benefit from the publication of the secret court order concerning Verizon, providing evidence that the records of Verizon customers have been collected. The American Civil Liberties Union, in its lawsuit, argues that it has legal standing to bring its case because the group is a Verizon customer.
