First Public Court Challenge to NSA Data Collection From Internet Backbone

Activist Post

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue on Friday before a federal court that the National Security Agency (NSA) is violating the Fourth Amendment by copying and searching data that it collects by tapping into the Internet backbone.

The hearing on a motion for partial summary judgment in Jewel v. NSA will be at 9 am on Dec. 19 before Judge Jeffrey White at the federal courthouse in Oakland.

Jewel was filed in 2008 on behalf of San Francisco Bay Area resident Carolyn Jewel and other AT&T customers. EFF has amassed a mountain of evidence to support the case, including documents provided by former AT&T technician Mark Klein, which show that the company has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA. Other whistleblowers—including Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Edward Snowden—have revealed more detail about how this technique feeds data into the NSA’s massive databases of communications.

Since June 2013, the government has confirmed that it searches much of the content it collects as part of its “upstream” collection without a warrant. The government claims the content searches are justified under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act and do not violate the Fourth Amendment.

Under the government’s legal theory, it can copy virtually all Internet communications and then search them from top to bottom for specific “identifiers”—all without a warrant or individualized suspicion—as long as it does so quickly using only automated processes.

EFF Special Counsel Richard Wiebe will argue before the court that the Fourth Amendment definitively bars this type of dragnet. As EFF presented in its motion, enough information now exists on the record for the court to rule that the government’s technique represents an unconstitutional search and seizure.

What: Motion for Partial Summary Judgment

Who: Richard Wiebe, EFF Special Counsel

Date: Friday, Dec. 19, 2014

Time: 9:00 am

Where:
Oakland Federal Courthouse
Courtroom 5, 2nd Floor
1301 Clay St.
Oakland, CA

Wiebe and EFF staff attorneys will be available for comment immediately following the hearing.

For more on Jewel v. NSA: https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel