Nineteen organizations, including a church and gun ownership and marijuana legalization groups, have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. National Security Agency for a surveillance program that targets U.S. residents’ phone records.
The groups accuse the NSA, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of violating their members’ First Amendment rights of association by illegally collecting their telephone call records.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Tuesday, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, include the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, the California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, Free Press, the Free Software Foundation, Greenpeace, the National Association for the Reform of Marijuana Laws’ California Chapter, Public Knowledge, and TechFreedom.
The groups object to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records, disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in early June. The collection of all Verizon phone records, including records of calls made, the location of the phone, the time of the call and the duration of the call, violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by giving “the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing the plaintiffs.
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld
