14 DAY TRIAL // It’s been obvious for months that US politicians are split into two categories – those who support the NSA’s actions and those who will go the extra mile to make sure the mass surveillance programs get shut down.
A group of Democrats has filed a brief in federal court to support a lawsuit seeking to end the NSA bulk collection of US phone records. The brief is signed by Martin Heinrich, Mark Udall, and Ron Wyden, all members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“The senators have reviewed the surveillance extensively and have seen no evidence that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records has provided any intelligence of value that could not have been gathered through less intrusive means,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote on behalf of the aforementioned senators.
The politicians weren’t the only ones to file such a document. Other four amicus briefs were filed in support of the lawsuit launched by a coalition of groups, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the lead.
Several law projects have also been introduced in the Congress in the hopes of limiting the powers of the NSA, but not all politicians are convinced this is the right way to go.
Whether the complaint will get any positive end result remains to be seen, but the Supreme Court rejected a case filed months ago, challenging the legality of the dragnet telephone surveillance program that the NSA conducts.
One of the main issues is that, as recently declassified documents show, the FISA court believes phonecall metadata is acceptable to be collected since it isn’t protected by the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.
This particular decision is based on a case from the 1970’s where the Supreme Court decided that the details of the calls a thief made, such as the numbers he called, were not protected by the Constitution. Technology has changed considerably over the past decades, but that doesn’t seem to count for the US courts.