The Supreme Court of the United States has refused to hear a challenge to a federal surveillance program.
“Upstream,” the program at the subject of the challenge, allows the National Security Agency to intercept telephone and internet traffic, both from within and outside of the United States.
The program was one of several that were leaked by former CIA and NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who in 2013 blew the whistle on mass surveillance programs orchestrated by the U.S. government.
Prior to that time, the administrations of President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama and the intelligence community at large had falsely claimed that Americans’ data weren’t being collected and saved.
The Upstream program gives the NSA access to massive amounts of data, often through the compliance of telecommunication providers. Providers choose the data most likely to be of foreign origin before handing them over to the NSA, but the program is also used within the United States.
The case, Wikimedia v. NSA, was brought against the NSA by Wikimedia, the nonprofit group which owns Wikipedia. The American Civil Liberties Union assisted Wikimedia with legal counsel.
In a blog post about the case, the ACLU wrote: “Upstream surveillance, which the government claims is authorized by the Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, is designed to ensnare all of Americans’ international communications, including emails, web-browsing content, and search engine queries. With the help of companies like Verizon and AT&T, the NSA has installed surveillance devices on the internet ‘backbone’ — the network of high-capacity cables, switches, and routers across which Internet traffic travels.”
The hearing is a part of a larger cultural dispute over the proper balance between liberty and security, something that was brought by wide-reaching legislation which followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
James Buatti, legal director at the Wikimedia Foundation, called the decision to reject the case “a blow against an individual’s right to privacy and freedom of expression” in a Wikimedia blog post.
“The Supreme Court’s refusal to grant our petition strikes a blow against an individual’s right to privacy and freedom of expression — two cornerstones of our society and the building blocks of Wikipedia,” Buatti wrote.
Buatti also referenced a highly controversial section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, section 702, which initially passed Congress in 1978 as a safeguard for Americans’ civil liberties.
Section 702 of the FISA reads: “The Attorney General (AG) and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) may jointly authorize the targeting of (i) non-U.S. persons (ii) who are reasonably believed to be outside of the United States (iii) to acquire foreign intelligence information.”
“We will continue to champion everyone’s right to free knowledge, and urge Congress to take on the issue of mass surveillance as it evaluates whether to reauthorize Section 702 later this year,” Buatti said.
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