See - New Lawsuit says DEA phone surveillance was illegal.
The Justice Department violated the Constitution by secretly
gathering logs of billions of calls from the United States to as many as 116
countries, Human Rights Watch alleged in a lawsuit filed against the government
on Wednesday.
The lawsuit,
filed in federal court in Los Angeles, asks a judge to declare that the
now-halted surveillance operation was illegal and to permanently block the
government from restarting it.
"It's time to end the program, and bulk surveillance, once
and for all," Nate Cardozo, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, which is representing the group, wrote in a blog
post.
The Justice Department acknowledged in
January that the Drug Enforcement Administration had been secretly
gathering logs of Americans' international phone calls. USA TODAY
reported on Tuesday that the program began nearly a decade before
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and provided a blueprint for the far broader
National Security Agency surveillance program that followed. It included
virtually all calls from the United States to Mexico, Canada and most of the
countries in South and Central America.
The
suit is the latest legal challenge to government data-gathering that EFF and
other privacy advocates argue are unconstitutional. The group is also pressing
a lawsuit challenging the NSA's surveillance program, which includes records of
Americans' domestic phone calls.
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