WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — A US district court has thrown out on Friday a lawsuit challenging the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass interception and surveillance of Americans’ Internet communications, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a press release.
"The court has wrongly insulated the NSA’s spying from meaningful judicial scrutiny," ACLU National Security Project staff attorney Patrick Toomey said in the release on Friday.
The lawsuit was brought by the ACLU on behalf of a group of organizations including Wikimedia Foundation, Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Global Fund for Women.
The court held that the plaintiffs in the case had not plausibly alleged that their communications were being monitored by the NSA, the release noted
"The NSA’s mass surveillance violates our clients’ constitutional rights to privacy, freedom of speech, and freedom of association, and it poses a grave threat to a free Internet and a free society," Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said in the release.
In the course of its "upstream" surveillance, the ACLU noted, the NSA copies and combs through vast amounts of Internet traffic, which it intercepts inside the United States with the help of major telecommunications companies.
The NSA conducts this spying under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which allows the agency to engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans who communicate with targets located abroad, according to the release.
