Wikimedia, ACLU, "The Nation" & others sue the NSA

[KingOrfeo]

The lead-name plaintiff is Wikimedia. Editorial by Wikimedia's Jimmy Wales & Lila Tretikov: "Stop Spying on Wikipedia Users."

Most people search and read Wikipedia anonymously, since you don’t need an account to view its tens of millions of articles in hundreds of languages. Every month, at least 75,000 volunteers in the United States and around the world contribute their time and passion to writing those articles and keeping the site going — and growing.

On our servers, run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, those volunteers discuss their work on everything from Tiananmen Square to gay rights in Uganda. Many of them prefer to work anonymously, especially those who work on controversial issues or who live in countries with repressive governments.

These volunteers should be able to do their work without having to worry that the United States government is monitoring what they read and write. Unfortunately, their anonymity is far from certain because, using upstream surveillance, the N.S.A. intercepts and searches virtually all of the international text-based traffic that flows across the Internet “backbone” inside the United States. This is the network of fiber-optic cables and junctions that connect Wikipedia with its global community of readers and editors.

From the ACLU website:

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international communications. At issue is the NSA's “upstream” surveillance, through which the U.S. government monitors almost all international – and many domestic – text-based communications. The ACLU’s lawsuit, filed in March 2015 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, is brought on behalf of nearly a dozen educational, legal, human rights, and media organizations that collectively engage in hundreds of billions of sensitive Internet communications and have been harmed by NSA surveillance.

The Nation magazine joins in the suit.

Issues for debate:

1) The wisdom, fairness, justice, etc., of the NSA's practices here. How much of a surveillance state do we actually need?

2) The actual harm threatened. What is the NSA doing with this information, anyway? Perhaps nothing? Perhaps something scary?

3) The constitutionality and legality. Wikimedia alleges the practice a) violates the 4th Amendment and b) exceeds the authority granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

4) The likely outcome of the lawsuit.

You can read the complaint in pdf here.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Big Brother is watching!

 

[KingOrfeo]

Big Brother is watching!

Apparently. But, is he jerking off, or what?