EFF Asks 9th Circuit if Fourth Amendment Applies to Internet Communications
The Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals whether the purpose of the Fourth Amendment on searches and seizures is “violated when the government copies and searches in bulk the communications passing through the Internet’s key…
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domestic junctions, without a warrant and without probable cause or any showing of individualized suspicion,” EFF Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker wrote in a blog post Tuesday. Tuesday's clarification request is part of an appeal in EFF’s Jewel v. NSA, which was filed in 2008 on behalf of San Francisco resident Carolyn Jewel and other Bay Area AT&T customers over the telco routing copies of Internet traffic to a secret room [at AT&T’s Folsom Street facility] in San Francisco that was controlled by the NSA, Crocker said. In February, a federal district court judge ruled EFF hadn’t introduced enough evidence to support its clients’ standing that the government’s “reliance on secret evidence” was unconstitutional, Crocker said. “As our brief makes clear, Jewel is based entirely on public evidence, including the government’s extensive admissions contained in the public court files and in a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board,” he said. “For more than a decade, the NSA has been conducting a dragnet invasion of millions of Americans’ privacy by setting up a system that copies and continuously sifts through their online activities,” said EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn. “While this program of mass surveillance may have once been a secret, the government has now fully admitted that it copies communications wholesale from the Internet backbone and searches the full content of them,” Cohn said. “The Founders were clear that the core purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to protect Americans against the kind of indiscriminate rummaging through their private communications that is occurring as part of Upstream,” a government surveillance program, said EFF Special Counsel Richard Wiebe.