[bestbits] Privacy Group to Ask Supreme Court to Stop N.S.A.’s Phone Spying Program

[Carolina Rossini]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/us/privacy-group-to-ask-supreme-court-to-stop-nsas-phone-spying-program.html?pagewanted=print
July 7, 2013
Privacy Group to Ask Supreme Court to Stop N.S.A.’s Phone Spying
Program By JAMES
RISEN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/james_risen/index.html>

WASHINGTON — A privacy rights group plans to file an emergency petition
with the Supreme
Court<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
on
Monday asking it to stop theNational Security
Agency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?8qa>’s
domestic surveillance program that collects the telephone records of
millions of Americans.

The group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center <http://epic.org/>,
says it is taking the extraordinary legal step of going directly to the
Supreme Court because the sweeping collection of the phone records of
American citizens has created “exceptional circumstances” that only the
nation’s highest court can address.

The group, based in Washington, also said it was 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.

In its petition, 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 suit is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the N.S.A.’s
domestic spying operations that have been filed over the past month after
disclosures by a former N.S.A. contractor, Edward J. Snowden. Based on a
document leaked by Mr. Snowden, The Guardian revealed early last month that
the FISA court had issued an order in April directing Verizon Business
Network Services to turn over all of the telephone records for its
customers to the N.S.A. The secret court
order<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order>
was
also published by The Guardian.

Within days of the disclosure of the court order, the American Civil
Liberties Union filed suit in federal court in New York. Separately, Larry
Klayman, a conservative lawyer who runs a group called Freedom Watch, filed
a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Washington on behalf of Verizon
customers.

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, said his 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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/usa_patriot_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
.

Alan Butler, 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,” Mr. Butler said.

The new challenges come after the failure of a legal campaign against the
N.S.A.’s domestic spying operations during the administration of President
George W. Bush. A series of lawsuits were brought against an N.S.A. program
of wiretapping without warrants soon after the existence of the program was
revealed by The New York Times in December 2005.

Those lawsuits 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.

But the new lawsuits 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.
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