US government sued over global spying activities

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the administration of President Barack Obama to force it to release more information about its spying activities.

Alongside with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, the ACLU, which works to protect Americans’ constitutional liberty, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit on Monday urging the White House to disclose basic information about Executive Order 12,333, which governs US spying activities outside the country.

“Although EO 12,333 permits the government to target foreigners abroad for surveillance, recent revelations have confirmed that the government interprets that authority to permit sweeping monitoring of Americans’ international communications,” read the complaint filed in federal court in New York.

“How the government conducts this surveillance, and whether it appropriately accommodates the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents whose communications are intercepted in the course of that surveillance, are matters of great public significance and concern,” it added.

Documents after documents disclosed by American whistleblower Edward J. Snowden since June have shown how the National Security Agency collects phone records of all American citizens and tracks the use of US-based Web servers by all people around the world.

Snowden’s leaks have also showed the US government eavesdropped on phone calls of at least 35 world leaders, spied on Russia’s leadership with the help of Sweden, and spied on the 2010 G8 and G20 summits in Toronto as well as the 2009 G20 summit in London with the help of the host countries’ governments.

The ACLU says that despite recent revelations, there is “still a crucial gap in our basic understanding” of such activities.

“For instance, recent news reports indicate that, relying on the executive order, the NSA is collecting: nearly 5 billion records per day on the location of cell phones, including Americans’ cell phones; hundreds of millions of contact lists or address books from personal email and instant messaging accounts; and information from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information travels between those companies’ data centers located abroad,” the lawsuit pointed out.

The ACLU said that spying conducted under the executive order is of particular concern because it is not overseen by US lawmakers and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISA court.