Gun Rights Advocates and Church Join in Suit Against NSA as Companies Petition White House

Earlier today, 63 companies and organizations — including the ACLU, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo! — asked the Obama Administration, members of Congress and the head of the National Security Agency in a letter to allow companies that receive foreign-intelligence surveillance requests to publicly discuss those requests in basic terms.

“As an initial step,” the signers wrote, “we request that the Department of Justice, on behalf of the relevant executive branch
agencies, agree that Internet, telephone, and web-based service providers may publish specific numbers regarding government requests authorized under specific national security authorities, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the NSL statutes. We further urge Congress to pass legislation requiring comprehensive transparency reporting by the federal government and clearly allowing for transparency reporting by companies without requiring companiesto first seek permission from the government or the FISA Court.”

Other signers include the American Society of News Editors, the American Library Association, the Constitution Project and Human Rights Watch.

“There is an urgent need for the US to reevaluate and rewrite surveillance laws and put in place better safeguards against security agency overreach,” Human Rights Watch’s Andrew Stroehlein said Thursday.

“The ACLU signed the letter ,” ACLU Staff Attorney Alex Abdo wrote, “because the debate that the administration claims to have welcomed on NSA surveillance cannot take place in a vacuum. We need to know more about how those programs operate so that the public can decide for itself whether they are appropriate and necessary.”

The letter is also accompanied by a petition to the White House, which you can sign here.

The letter and the petition ask the government to allow companies like Google and Microsoft to publish the number of government requests for information about their users made under specific legal authorities such as Section 215 of the Patriot Act, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, the various National Security Letter statutes, and others; the number of individuals, accounts, or devices for which information was requested under each authority; and the number of requests under each authority that sought communications content, basic subscriber information, and/or other information.

Two days earlier, 19 organizations, including Unitarian church groups, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy organizations filed suit against the National Security Agency for violating their First Amendment right of association by illegally collecting their call records. The coalition is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group with years of experience fighting illegal government surveillance in the courts.

“The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA’s mass, untargeted collection of Americans’ phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” said Foundation Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation. Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years.”

At the heart of First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA (see the suit below) is the bulk telephone records collection program that was confirmed by last month’s publication of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) further confirmed that this formerly secret document was legitimate, and part of a broader program to collect all major telecommunications customers’ call histories. The order demands wholesale collection of every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for every phone and call for all customers of Verizon for a period of three months. Government officials further confirmed that this was just one of series of orders issued on a rolling basis since at least 2006.

“People who hold controversial views – whether it’s about gun ownership policies, drug legalization, or immigration – often must express views as a group in order to act and advocate effectively,” said Cohn. “But fear of individual exposure when participating in political debates over high-stakes issues can dissuade people from taking part. That’s why the Supreme Court ruled in 1958 that membership lists of groups have strong First Amendment protection. Telephone records, especially complete records collected over many years, are even more invasive than membership lists, since they show casual or repeated inquiries as well as full membership.”

“The First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles has a proud history of working for justice and protecting people in jeopardy for expressing their political views,” said Rev. Rick Hoyt. “In the 1950s, we resisted the McCarthy hysteria and supported blacklisted Hollywood writers and actors, and we fought California’s ‘loyalty oaths’ all the way to the Supreme Court. And in the 1980s, we gave sanctuary to refugees from civil wars in Central America. The principles of our faith often require our church to take bold stands on controversial issues. We joined this lawsuit to stop the illegal surveillance of our members and the people we serve. Our church members and our neighbors who come to us for help should not fear that their participation in the church might have consequences for themselves or their families. This spying makes people afraid to belong to our church community.”

In addition to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, the full list of plaintiffs in this case includes the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Calguns Foundation, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, People for the American Way, and TechFreedom.

EFF also represents the plaintiffs in Jewel v. NSA, a class action case filed on behalf of individuals in 2008 aimed at ending the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans. Last week, a federal court judge rejected the U.S. government’s latest attempt to dismiss the case, allowing the allegations at the heart of the suit to move forward under the supervision of a public federal court.

Transparency-Need to Know Letter