"unprecedented surveillance strikes at the core of our right to free speech"-ACLU sues...
This unprecedented surveillance strikes at the core of our right to free speech, association, and privacy. On June 10, 2013, the ACLU filed a motion with the FISA Court seeking the release of its secret opinions that enable the mass acquisition of phone records. The next day, we filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the phone tracking program. Read on to learn more about the program and what we’re doing to stop it.
http://www.aclu.org/nsa-surveillance
Congress may have signed this into law, but ACLU is going to challenge it..
"The ACLU's complaint filed today explains that the dragnet surveillance the government is carrying out under Section 215 infringes upon the ACLU's First Amendment rights, including the twin liberties of free expression and free association. The nature of the ACLU's work—in areas like access to reproductive services, racial discrimination, the rights of immigrants, national security, and more—means that many of the people who call the ACLU wish to keep their contact with the organization confidential. Yet if the government is collecting a vast trove of ACLU phone records—and it has reportedly been doing so for as long as seven years—many people may reasonably think twice before communicating with us.
The kind of personal-data aggregation accomplished through Section 215 also constitutes an unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Last year, in a case on GPS tracking by police, five members of the Supreme Court indicated support for the common-sense notion that government collection of individual bits of seemingly innocuous personal information over a long period of time could amount to such a complete invasion of privacy that it would be unconstitutional. The surveillance program that came to light with the release of the FISC order constitutes precisely that kind of unreasonable incursion into Americans' private lives.
Finally, the ACLU's complaint charges that the executive branch's use of Section 215 violates the plain language of the statute itself. The statute requires that records seized under its authority be "relevant" to an authorized foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. But while that language imposes a real limitation on when the government can use Section 215, the FISC order covering all VBNS customers demonstrates that this "relevance" restraint is shockingly inadequate. Similarly, the FISC order shows that the government—with the FISC's secret approval—is acquiring future records of telephone subscribers based on the same "relevance" requirement, even though the statute uses words that clearly show it was only meant to cover "tangible things" already in existence.
With today's lawsuit, the ACLU is now attacking Section 215 on three legal fronts: in our ongoing FOIA litigation seeking the government's secret interpretation of the law; in the FISA Court through yesterday's public-access motion; and now, in a constitutional lawsuit in federal court. When the government is claiming such chillingly expansive surveillance powers, it's all hands on deck. Stay tuned."
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/aclu-files-lawsuit-
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