ACLU fires an anti-snooping volley

THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION has been busy staking out its position in defence of personal privacy.

The group, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, announced that it is suing the US federal government for the release of documents relating to a controversial spying law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA).

The ACLU said that the act was unconstitutional and "gives the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect Americans' international e-mails and telephone calls in dragnet fashion, without a warrant and without suspicion of wrongdoing."

In a statement the group said that the public was uniformed about the act and urged the government to be more open about it.

"Despite being in operation for nearly two years, the American public is largely in the dark about how the controversial FISA Amendments Act has been implemented in practice," said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "The public has a right to know how the government is using, and possibly abusing, an intrusive surveillance power that implicates the privacy and speech rights of all U.S. citizens and residents."

The lawsuit is all about enforcing a request made under the Freedom of Information Act in November of last year for access to records on how and when the FISA Amendments Act was used. The ACLU said that this should include reports and assessments into how the FAA's powers were being used. It added that its lawsuit was asking a federal judge to make the government comply with the request.

"It is unfortunate that once again we have to sue over the secrecy that continues to shroud so much of our government's work," said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn. "While we have seen recent improvements in transparency, much more remains to be done before we have a truly open government."

Once it was done with that target the ACLU turned its sights on a much more powerful target, Time Warner Cable (TWC), when it asked the courts to squash the subpoenas it had hurled at ISPs in the hunt for individual Bittorrent users. Six 'virtually identical lawsuits' against ISPs have been filed by TWC, according to the ACLU, and implicate thousands of individuals.

"In friend-of-the-court briefs we filed last night along with the ACLU of the Nation's Capital, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Citizen in support of Time Warner, we argue that the lawsuits improperly join thousands of unrelated defendants into a single action and were filed in a jurisdiction where few, if any, of the defendants reside," it wrote.

"We also argue that members of the movie industry cannot just demand information about anonymous individuals without showing sufficient reason to believe the individuals did anything wrong, and without giving them a chance to defend themselves." µ