Opposition to the US Government’s massive surveillance programmes has intensified with the country’s foremost civil rights group, the American Civil liberties Union (AClU), filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the programme that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans from telecom companies.
Filed in a New York court, the suit challenges the legality of the National Security Agency’s collection of customer “metadata”, including the phone numbers dialled and the duration of calls. It wants the court to declare the surveillance unconstitutional, forcing the Government to scrap the programme and destroy the records it has collected.
Simultaneously, three of the tech giants — Google, Microsoft and Facebook —have asked the Obama administration for permission to reveal to their foreign users details about the classified requests received under federal court orders to turn over information to US spy agencies under the Internet surveillance programme, called Prism.
The request by the tech firms follows the controversial revelations about the sweeping nature of the Prism programme for collecting data from these companies such as e-mail messages, photos, stored documents, videos and online chats of people across the world.
In letters to Attorney General Eric H Holder and FBI Director Robert S Mueller, Google said it has nothing to hid and that it would want to significantly expand its semiannual “transparency reports” on the information sought by courts and police worldwide.
In the US Congress, several lawmakers raised concerns over the scope of the two surveillance programmes, with some of them seeking a debate on the issue. Some questioned President Obama’s assertion that every Congress member has been briefed in advance on the surveillance programmes.
General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and head of the US Cyber Command, was to appear before a Congressional panel later on Wednesday. Ahead of that, he briefed several Senators and House members on the programmes used to collect extensive records of phone calls and online activity. The full Senate is slated to have a meeting with Alexander on Thursday.
Senate Intelligence Committee chairperson Dianne Feinstein has asked the NSA chief to declassify some information in order to better explain the programmes.
Divisions are seen within the Democratic camp itself on the issue. Signalling disagreement with President Obama, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado said: “We disagree with the statement that the broad Patriot Act collection strikes the ‘right balance’ between protecting American security and protecting Americans’ privacy. In our view it does not.”
A known critic of the surveillance programme, Senator Wyden told reporters he would be pushing for public hearings to discuss concerns, including the use of contractors. “From a policy stand point I’ve long been concerned about the role of contractors in the intelligence field and that is surely an area that will be explored at considerable length in those public hearings,” he said.
But another Democratic lawmaker, Representative CA Dutch Ruppersberger, came out in strong support of the surveillance programme, but said he too was for a Congressional debate to determine what tools are to be given to the intelligence community to protect the US from terror attacks. “Really it’s a debate between public safety, how far we go with public safety and protecting us from terrorist attacks versus how far we go on the other side,” he said.