Push to stop NSA spying moves forward
'Unconstitutional surveillance has damaged fundamental freedoms'
Headquarters of the National Security Agency
Klayman originally had sued the NSA, Barack Obama, then-Attorney General Eric Holder and a long list of other federal officials after the spy program was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who spilled the beans on much of the government’s Big Brother tactics, then fled to Russia.
Plaintiffs in the case include Klayman, Charles and Mary Ann Strange, Michael Ferrari, Matt Garrison and J.J. Little and other defendants include NSA chief Keith Alexander, U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Roger Vinson, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA chief John Brennan, FBI chief James Comey, the Department of Justice, CIA and FBI.
Klayman’s case in late 2013 went before U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who ruled the situation “almost Orwellian” and said the spying likely was unconstitutional.
He stayed his finding, however, to allow the government to appeal, and it took the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals not quite two years to rule. They reversed Leon’s finding and sent it back to his court for discovery.
Then just days ago, when Leon held a hearing on that issue, he warned he would not allow the government’s spying on millions of Americans through their cell phones to continue unfettered, and expressed a desire to move quickly on the case.
He pointed out for Klayman the deficiencies cited by the appeals judges.
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Klayman’s new submission addresses those concerns, explaining of the NSA spy programs, “Such broad and intrusive collections and surveillance tactics, without regard to any showing of probable cause, much less a reasonable suspicion of communications with terrorists or the commission of another crime, directly violate the U.S. Constitution and also federal laws, including, but not limited to, the … breach of privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of association and the due process rights of American citizens.
“Plaintiffs are suing for damages, declaratory, equitable and injunctive relief to stop this illegal conduct and hold defendants, individually and collectively, responsible for their unconstitutional surveillance, which has violated the law and damaged the fundamental freedoms and rights of American citizens.”
At the time of the earlier hearing, in a blog at Politico, Josh Gerstein said that Leon repeatedly urged Klayman to take steps to allow the case to move forward quickly by asking a federal appeals court to formally relinquish control over the appeal.
The NSA program, which collects in bulk data on phone calls, is scheduled to shut down at the end of November because of a change made by Congress. Lawmakers ordered a transition to a new procedure in which telephone companies will collect the data and make it available to the government rather than having the government do the collecting.
“The clock is running and there isn’t much time between now and November 29,” Leon told Klayman, Gerstein reported. “This court believes there are millions and millions of Americans whose constitutional rights have been and are being violated, but the window … for action is very small. … It’s time to move.”
Klayman also told WND the judge instructed Justice Department attorneys to make sure they were available at a moment’s notice when he wants to move on the case.
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Leon pointedly noted the appeals court did not undermine his determination that the program likely is unconstitutional, instead ruling on the plaintiffs’ “standing.”
Snowden blew the whistle on the agency’s vacuum-cleaner approach to data collection, called “bulk telephony metadata.” That was earlier in 2013, and Snowden has been living in exile in Russia as a wanted man by the U.S. government ever since.
Two of America’s influential civil-rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have sided with Klayman.
The data that the NSA collects, they explained in a brief, “reveals political affiliation, religious practices and peoples’ most intimate associations.”
“It reveals who calls a suicide prevention line and who calls their elected official; who calls the local tea-party office and who calls Planned Parenthood.”
The brief said “the relevant fact for whether an expectation of privacy exists is that the comprehensive telephone records the government collects – not just the records of a few calls over a few days but all of a person’s calls over many years – reveals highly personal information about the person and her life.”
Copyright 2015 WND
http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/push-to-stop-nsa-spying-moves-forward/
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