Los Angeles Times - Tuesday, June 11, 2013

ACLU sues Obama administration over NSA surveillance

By Morgan Little

The American Civil Liberties Union announced Tuesday that it has filed a federal lawsuit against key members of President Obama’s national security team over the National Security Agency’s telephone surveillance, the first legal challenge to the newly disclosed intelligence gathering system.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, argues that the NSA’s ongoing, daily collection of virtually all Verizon telephone records is unconstitutional and should be stopped.

"This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said in a statement. "It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation.”

As a Verizon customer, the ACLU claims that the NSA’s seizure of telephone records “compromises sensitive information about its work” and harms its ability to freely communicate.

The Guardian newspaper last week published an order, marked “Top Secret,” from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that requires Verizon to turn over all “telephony metadata,” or records of each call, over a three-month period. Lawmakers later said the program has been in operation nonstop for seven years under similar court orders.

The White House has come under harsh criticism for the NSA’s deal with Verizon, as well as the so-called PRISM program, which was designed to secretly obtain emails, photos, documents and other online material from foreign nationals. A former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, has claimed responsibility for leaking both programs.

The administration has strongly defended the surveillance systems, saying they are approved by Congress and the courts, and thus within the law.

Obama "believes as commander-in-chief that the oversight structures that are in place to ensure that there is the proper review of the kinds of programs that we have in place, authorized by Congress through the Patriot Act, and FISA do strike that balance,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.

they'll lose. we have had a supreme presidency for decades.

It'll be interesting to see what the Congressional Hypocrits have to say.

Here's a nice little timeline of the Patriot Act and what ACLU has attempted to do. Notice that there are no lawsuits against an entire administration until now. Most things they attempted seemed more for "show" than anything. Not much substance there imo.

http://www.aclu.org/timelines/post-911-surveillance

It's going to be fun watching the ACLU haters twist themselves into knots trying to rationalize this one.

Oh Chaos, don't ya know? They hate the ACLU unless it's fighting for something they believe in. They'd soon change their minds if the ACLU took up a 2nd amendment cause.

I personally think the ACLU has outlived it's original purpose in many ways or at the very least, needs to be revamped. It seems as if it's pet projects are picked for the media exposure as a sort of "telethon" to get supporters/$$$. The large "Donate" button and the "gift" amount selection on their membership form (which btw is mandatory lol) are telling.