ACLU Asks Court To Strike Down Spying Law

Claiming that the FISA Amendments Act puts innocent Americans' telephone calls and e-mails at risk, a brief filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union is requesting the court to strike down this law. A part of the ACLU's lawsuit to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the law, this is the first legal brief challenging the constitutionality of the new wiretapping law.

 

According to ACLU, as the FISA Amendments Act utterly fails to protect U.S. residents' privacy and free speech rights, it is the most sweeping surveillance bill ever enacted by Congress and should be struck down. According to the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the Bush administration will have virtually unchecked power to intercept the international and in some cases domestic – emails and telephone calls of law-abiding Americans. According to the new law, the government can conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, and where its surveillance targets are located. The government doesn’t even have to disclose why it's conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.

 

The ACLU filed the lawsuit on behalf of victims of human rights abuses located outside the United States and a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal, and media organizations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and email communications with colleagues, clients, journalistic sources, witnesses, experts, foreign government officials.

 

As the government claims that the surveillance is aimed at collecting foreign intelligence information and targeted at people outside the United States, it will have the power to acquire all of the international communications of U.S. citizens and residents. It can also get hold of all telephone and e-mail communications to and from countries of particular foreign policy interest. It can also access all of the communications of European attorneys who work with American attorneys on behalf of prisoners held at Guantánamo.

 

“The FISA Amendments Act allows the mass acquisition of Americans' international e-mails and telephone calls,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The administration has argued that the law is necessary to address the threat of terrorism, but the truth is that the law sweeps much more broadly and implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind. The Fourth Amendment was meant to prohibit exactly the kinds of dragnet surveillance that the new law permits.”