Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, is filing a lawsuit against the National Security Agency to challenge the agency's mass surveillance program.
The lawsuit suggests that the NSA's surveillance of Internet traffic in the U.S. violates the First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects free speech, as well as the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search.
"We're filing suit today on behalf of our readers and editors everywhere," said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in a blog post. "Surveillance erodes the original promise of the internet: an open space for collaboration and experimentation, and a place free from fear."
This type of "upstream" surveillance involves having access to the actual cables, switches and routers behind Internet traffic. The NSA is essentially able to copy any traffic and international communications such as email, instant messages and even web searches. The agency then searches these communications for terms that might be related to particular investigations.
"The NSA copies and reviews the communications of millions of innocent people to determine whether they are discussing or reading anything containing the NSA's search terms," said lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union in a complaint. "Its purpose is to identify not just communications that are to or from the NSA's targets but also those that are merely 'about' its targets."
The post by Wikimedia went into the fact that thousands of volunteers work on information on Wikipedia, and prefer to remain anonymous in doing so. The fear here is that the NSA could be relaying information about individuals to other governments, putting those individuals in danger.
Upstream collection of data is allowed to occur under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was a law passed in the 1970s that was an attempt to regulate foreign spying. It was amended in 2008 to allow for much more collection of Americans' international communications.
The news comes after the revelations exposed by Edward Snowden, an ex-NSA employee who leaked multiple programs in use by the NSA related to spying on both U.S. citizens and citizens and officials from other countries.
The Supreme Court dismissed a similar case in 2013 after finding that it lacked the legal standing needed in order to sue. Since then, however, a large amount of information has been revealed by both Edward Snowden and other individuals, suggesting that this new case might have more of a legal standing.
"Also relevant is the fact that the plaintiffs in this case engage in hundreds of billions of international communications each year," said ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey.
