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EFF is fighting these illegal activities in the courts. Currently, EFF is representing victims
of the illegal surveillance program in Jewel v. NSA, a lawsuit filed in September 2008
seeking to stop the warrantless wiretapping and hold the government and government
officials behind the program accountable. In July 2013, a federal judge ruled that the
government could not rely on the controversial "state secrets" privilege to block our
challenge to the constitutionality of the program. On February 10, 2015, however, the
court granted summary judgment to the government on the Plaintiffs allegations of
Fourth Amendment violations based on the NSAs copying of Internet traffic from the
Internet backbone. The court ruled that the publicly available information did not paint a
complete picture of how the NSA collects Internet traffic, so the court could not rule on
the program without looking at information that could constitute state secrets. The
court did not rule that the NSAs activities are legal, nor did it rule on the other claims in
Jewel, and the case will go forward on those claims.This case is being heard in
conjunction with Shubert v. Obama, which raises similar claims.
In July, 2013, EFF filed another lawsuit, First Unitarian v. NSA, based on the recently
published FISA court order demanding Verizon turn over all customer phone records
including who is talking to whom, when and for how longto the NSA. This so-called
metadata, especially when collected in bulk and aggregated, allows the government
to track the associations of various political and religious organizations. The Director of
National Intelligence has since confirmed that the collection of Verizon call records is
part of a broader program.
In addition to making the same arguments we made in Jewel, we argue in First
Unitarian that this type of collection violates the First Amendment right to association.
Previously, in Hepting v. AT&T, EFF filed the first case against a cooperating telecom for
violating its customers' privacy. After Congress expressly intervened and passed the
FISA Amendments Act to allow the Executive to require dismissal of the
case, Hepting was ultimately dismissed by the US Supreme Court.
In September of 2014, EFF, along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the
American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho, joined the legal team for Anna Smith, an Idaho
emergency neonatal nurse, in her challenge of the government's bulk collection of the
telephone records of millions of innocent Americans. In Smith v. Obama, we are arguing
the program violated her Fourth Amendment rights by collecting a wealth of detail
about her familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations. In
particular, we focus on challenging the applicability of the so-called third party
doctrine, the idea that people have no expectation of privacy in information they
entrust to others.
"NSA Spying on Americans." Electronic Frontier Foundation. Electronic Frontier Foundation, n.d.
Web. 13 Apr. 2015.