The ACLU wages a long-shot legal battle against NSA surveillance

The American Civil Liberties (ACLU) moved forward with a lawsuit filed in June, asking a New York court to stop the National Security Agency from gathering any information from its phone lines while it attempts to end the agency’s mass metadata collection.

"Calling patterns can reveal when we are awake and asleep," wrote Princeton professor Edward Felten in a briefing. "Our religion, if a person regularly makes no calls on the Sabbath, or makes a large number of calls on Christmas Day; our work habits and our social aptitude; the number of friends we have; and even our civil and political affiliations." Felten and the ACLU are trying to revive a case that Amnesty International lost earlier this year, hoping that the evidence is stronger this time around. But while we now know much more about the government’s surveillance efforts, the odds of convincing a court that anything’s changed are still slim indeed. Civil liberties groups have been locked in a legal battle over the surveillance for years, but the ACLU is arguing that the leaked and declassified documents shed new light on a program that goes far beyond the letter of the law and the limits of the Constitution. The ACLU has an uphill battle to fight, but if it fails, future cases could do better.