ACLU Sues NSA to Stop Mass Internet Spying

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a major new lawsuit on behalf of a broad group of organizations challenging the National Security Agency’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international Internet communications, including e-mails, web-browsing content, and search-engine queries.

The plaintiffs are the Wikimedia Foundation, the conservative Rutherford Institute, The Nation magazine, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women, and Washington Office on Latin America. At issue is the NSA’s “upstream” surveillance, which involves the NSA’s tapping into the internet backbone inside the United States -- the physical infrastructure that carries Americans’ online communications with each other and with the rest of the world. The NSA conducts this spying under a law called the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which allows the agency to target the communications of foreigners abroad.