Mass surveillance

Don’t let surveillance evade judicial scrutiny

What do Americans do when they think the government is violating their rights? They go to court, of course!  But on the issue of mass surveillance, it’s very hard to get through the courthouse door.  Before you can argue your claim, you must show your problem is not hypothetical -- that you’ve likely suffered some harm.   Surveillance, however, is usually surreptitious, and the government isn’t saying whose emails, phone calls and messages it is collecting.  

The U.S. government asked the district court in Alexandria on Friday morning to throw out achallenge to mass surveillance by Human Rights Watch, Wikimedia and other plaintiffs.  It said it isn’t “plausible” that the NSA specifically spied on us—even though it captured nearly all Americans’ international electronic communications in the warrantless mass “Upstream” surveillance program performed under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.