NSA Web Data Collection Program Has its Day in Court
- By Ginger Hill
- Dec 17, 2014
The National Security Agency (NSA) will be challenged this Friday, December 19th in an Oakland court by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an advocacy group claiming NSA’s web data collection program is unconstitutional because it violates the Fourth Amendment by searching and copying web traffic collected from Internet cables and nodes. 
We first got wind of this in 2008, when a former AT&T employee revealed NSA was routing Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco.
Here’s what EFF attorneys are claiming:
- Government eyes and ears are on the Internet;
- Communications passing through key domestic junctions, the ‘backbone,’ are “indiscriminately” copied and searched by the government.
- Government operating a digital dragnet: a technological surveillance system making it impossible for ordinary Americans not suspected of wrongdoing to engage fully and privately in an online conversation, online reading and access any online service.
NSA’s defense is that its web data collection program is legal based on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This act covers electronic surveillance of “non-US persons located outside of the United States.”
About the Author
Ginger Hill is Group Social Media Manager.