NSA bulk data collection violates constitutional rights, ACLU argues

Dominic Rushe in New York
theguardian.com, Friday 22 November 2013 17.02 GMT

Civil liberties campaigners told a New York court on Friday that the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of all US phone records violates the constitutional rights to freedom of association and privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union called for the NSA's program, first revealed by the Guardian in June, to be ended, arguing that it breached the first and fourth amendments as well as exceeding the authority Congress gave to the government through the Patriot Act.

“This kind of dragnet surveillance is precisely what the fourth amendment was meant to prohibit,” ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer, said before the hearing. “The constitution does not permit the NSA to place hundreds of millions of innocent people under permanent surveillance because of the possibility that information about some tiny subset of them will become useful to an investigation in the future.”

The case, ACLU v James Clapper, director of national intelligence, Keith Alexander, director of the NSA and others, was filed in June, shortly after the Guardian published a top-secret court order requiring Verizon to pass personal call data from millions of its customers to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis”. The revelation was the first in a series of articles exposing the scale of the NSA’s operations based on documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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