The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Tuesday against the Obama administration over the National Security Agency’s “dragnet” surveillance program, which “vacuums up information about every phone call placed within, from, or to the United States.”
The ACLU is a Verizon customer–the telecommunication company that received a secret court order for its domestic phone records–and says this relationship allows it to directly bring forth the case.
“This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. “It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation. The program goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy.”
Read the suit here.
