Court Ruling Protects NSA Spying From Judicial Review

A U.S. federal court rejected a motion challenging the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance program, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on Friday.

“The court has wrongly insulated the NSA’s spying from meaningful judicial scrutiny,” said ACLU National Security Project Staff Attorney Patrick Toomey, who argued the case.

“The decision turns a blind eye to the fact that the government is tapping into the Internet’s backbone to spy on millions of Americans. The dismissal of the lawsuit’s claims as ‘speculative’ is at odds with an overwhelming public record of warrantless surveillance,” Toomey added.

The court ruled that the plaintiffs in the case did not have the legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of the NSA mass surveillance programs on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove that they had been spied on.

RELATED:  ACLU Demands End to NSA Mass Surveillance

Big data, which is the collection and analysis of enormous amounts of information by supercomputers, has come under tremendous scrutiny since the former NSA contractor Snowden leaked the details of the spy agency’s electronic eavesdropping program.

The whistleblower Snowden revealed that the NSA was using a program called PRISM to amass data on people across the globe, including the content of their emails.

“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,” said Ashley Gorski, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

A 2015 poll carried out by the Pew Research Foundation, found that the majority of U.S. citizens (54 percent) disapproved of the U.S. government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts; and two-thirds believe there aren’t adequate limits on what types of data can be collected.